Affects and emotions are an integral part of cinema, manifested both in the cinematic form and in the viewer’s reception of the film work. In this series of guest lectures, film and media scholars share their perspectives on the topic of affects and emotions in film, focusing on both established and lesser-known works of world cinema.
Wednesday, 26 April, 2023 | 18:30 | Ewa Mazierska: “Hapticity of EO by Jerzy Skolimowski”
The Oscar-nominated EO by Jerzy Skolimowski is an unusual film, as its main character is a donkey, the eponymous EO, and it tries to present the world through his eyes. In my lecture, I will draw attention to the means Skolimowski uses to achieve this effect, arguing that these means, such as blurred images, frequent close-ups of EO’s eyes and the use of electronic soundtrack, connects this film with the idea of haptic cinema, as discussed by Laura Marks. I will also argue that Skolimowski uses such means politically, trying to move away from homo-centric cinema. At the same time, fragments of his film brings to mind Edward Muybridge’s experiments in chronophotography from the 1870s and 1880s. In my lecture I will also touch upon some earlier haptic films by Skolimowski and the issue of hapticity in Eastern European cinema.
Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Film Studies, School of Journalism and Media at the University of Central Lancashire. She published over thirty monographs and edited collections about cinema and popular music. They include Polish Popular Music on Screen (Palgrave, 2020), Poland Daily: Economy, Work, Consumption and Social Class in Polish Cinema (Berghahn, 2017), European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist (Berghahn, 2010). Mazierska is also principal editor of a Routledge journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema.
Thursday, 27 April, 2023 | 18:30 | Eugenie Brinkema: “Get Out; Or, How to Read a Sunken Form”
For all that Jordan Peele’s lauded horror film Get Out (2017) appears to traffic in the conventional negative affects of the horror genre – anxiety, suspense, panic, shock – Professor Brinkema will argue in her talk that the film in fact models a formal account of violence, one that grounds its critique of racialized terror and the dynamics of aggressions both micro- and micro- in its juxtaposition of the relationship of black life and survival to the question of how to describe and interpret different formal registers of the image.
Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently a fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Her research in film and media studies focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics. In addition to numerous articles, she has published two books: The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), both with Duke University Press.
Friday, 28 April, 2023 | 18:30 | Piotr Pomostowski: “Film Music and Emotions”
Music in film can both reflect the inner states of the characters and evoke emotions in the audience. This lecture, enriched by examples of close collaboration between film directors and music composers, will serve, among other things, as an attempt to understand the problem of film music reception on an emotional level.
Piotr Pomostowski is a film scholar, philologist, musician, educator, traveler and even… forester. He is the author of two monographs on film music, Muzyka w filmie (“Music in film”) and Reżyser na ścieżce dźwiękowej. Funkcje muzyki w twórczości filmowej Romana Polańskiego (“The director of the soundtrack. The functions of music in Roman Polanski’s films”). For several years he worked as an assistant professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
All lectures will be in English. Attendance is free.
This event is hosted by the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies (tfm) and supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).