Medialab Prado

The presentation willlook at some ways that recent filmmaking technologies, especially those developed in science (and some specifically in the military), should make it difficult to keep using concepts such as still, film, motion, and picture in the ways they are used in film criticism. It is a speculative presentation, proposing that films made outside art can contribute to current theorizing in film studies. I will present several kinds of scientific films, arranged according to the trouble they might cause for conceptualizations of the instant, the frame, temporality, the movement-image, mimetic representation, the gaze, and the spectator’s role. In general I am interested in the existence of an enormous body of filmic and photographic work that has nothing explicitly to do with the human body, with narrative, or with social interactions.