Panel 1: Critical Posthumanism and Italian Cinema and …

Organizers: Enrica Maria Ferrara (Trinity College Dublin) and Russell J. A. Kilbourn (Wilfrid Laurier University)

As Andr Bazin writes in The Ontology of the Photographic Image: For the first time, an image of the outside world takes shape automatically, without creative human intervention All art is founded upon human agency, but in photography alone can we celebrate its absence (2009, 7). Even in the digital era, the photographic basis of the cinematic image continues to signify, as does Bazins singling out of post-war Italian film as the prototype for an audiovisual modality befitting a newworld and new subjectivities. With the above claim in mind, this panel seeks papers that explore the posthumanist dimension of Italian cinema, and/or other audiovisual media, from post-war to contemporary, as a means of escaping a human-centred gaze.What does it really mean to speak of cinema as the absence of the human? Adopting Karen Barads ideas, it means emphasizing the dimension of intra-action between human and technological apparatuses as a way to enact new subjectivities at the intersection of human and non-human entities (Barad 2003); it also means enhancing the notion of human identity as co-ontology (Nancy 2000), a relational identity that recognizes the illusory notion of separateness between body and mind, and between the human and its related others (Ferrara 2020). As highlighted by Elena Past (2019), certain featuressuch as a slow walking pace, intermixing or juxtaposition of fictional and non-fictional elements, the use of non-professional actors, long takes, hand held cameras, and long shotsare particularly suited to illustrating the entanglement of human and non-human ontologies. From this perspective, it is productive to analyse through a posthumanist lens films by traditional auteurs, such as Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, Wertmller, but also contemporary features by directors such as Dario Argento, Marco Bellocchio, Michelangelo Frammartino, Matteo Garrone, Paolo Genovese, Paolo Sorrentino, and Alice Rohrwacher, to name but a few. At the same time, however, it is also arguable that cinemas gaze is irreducibly anthropomorphic; i.e., not merely centering (on) the human body, in the form of actors bodies and faces, for instance, but alsocontra Baradinscribing a humanist agenda in its very materiality.

This panel seeks papers, therefore, that offer critical posthumanist readings of cinema as medium and mode of expression or representation or some other process, including the possibility of representing or revealing what was heretofore unavailable to physical, affective, or intellectual apprehension, which might be thought of in productively posthumanist terms, whereby film is read as a relational medium, allowing for alternative subjectivities to emerge.

Please send a 250-word abstract and a 100-word bio to Enrica Maria Ferrara (ferrarae@tcd.ie) and Russell J. A. Kilbourn (rkilbourn@wlu.ca) by5 December 2021.Notification of acceptance of abstracts will be sent out to authors by30 December 2021.

The languages of the conference are English, Italian and Spanish

Proposals for virtual papers will not be considered.

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Panel 1: Critical Posthumanism and Italian Cinema and ...