In this lecture, Rebecca Sheehan uses the Heideggerian concept of Geworfenheit (“thrownness” or “unreflective, immediate experience”) to better understand what filmmaker Arthur Jafa describes as “black-objects-thrown-into-a-white-world,” a description of the personal experience of being a black artist in a predominantly white art world and a thesis central to much of his work and its “attention to the atmosphere and energy of objects.” For example, thrownness manifests in the central motif of torquing bodies in Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016). Bodies thrown from themselves and their course also call to mind concepts of ecstasy theorized by filmmaker Christopher Harris in whose work “ecstatic explosions of flickering light” invite us to stand outside of ourselves, that is, of our vision framed by what is familiar to us, of our minds as they are geared to the present moment. Like the motion of torquing bodies, Harris’s use of editing and sound displace historical subjects from themselves, resisting the coherent meanings that histories so often artificially produce. Finally, there is the “glitching” of flex dancer Storyboard P to be considered, specifically in Kahlil Joseph’s Until the Quiet Comes (2013). Here, embodied “glitching” can be thought of as a way of “being beside oneself,” in the ecstatic sense, or of embodying a “thrownness” from a course of being or thought, the moment continuous movement and thought is thrown off course.

Rebecca Sheehan is a Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. Her book, American Avant-Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-Between (Oxford University Press, 2020) addresses the intersections between post-WWII American Avant-Garde cinema and the emerging field of Film-Philosophy. She is currently working on her second monograph, Cinema’s Laocoön: Film, Sculpture, and the Virtual, which examines how sculpture and cinema have historically interfaced, paying particular attention to sculpture’s role in Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the virtual in the “time-image,” and looking at the relationship between sculpture and virtual reality. She has also written on topics such as philosophies of embodiment and women’s experimental cinema, 19th century sculpture and early cinema, the influence of Chris Marker on the Brothers Quay, epistolary cinema, the contemporary biopic, and the influence of Kenneth Anger on Nicholas Winding Refn, and border “docugames.” For more information, see her California State University website.

Moderation: Dr. Michael Ufer, ZeM

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Eine Veranstaltung des ZeM – Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften in Kooperation mit CATNEMI – Cinematic Atmospheres: Towards a New Ecology of the Moving Image