The Global Circulations of Film Theory Conference took place 30-31 August 2024 at King’s College London.
The two days of talks and presentations can be viewed here:
Day 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44RbpBZCmVw
Session One: Early Film Discourses
Chair: Masha Salazkina
Time on YouTube recording: 37.20-2.29.32
Louise Jashil R. Sonido (University of the Philippines), An Archaeology of Early Philippine Film Discourses
Boaz Hagin (Tel Aviv University), Constructing a Barren Desert: The Misremembering of Early Hebrew Film Theory
Łukasz Biskupski (University of Łódź), The “Start” Film Society: Cinephile Culture, Film Theory, and Political Activism in 1930s Poland
Sarah R. Niazi (Flame University), A Language for Cinema: Circulating and Translating Film Theory within the Urdu public sphere in India (1930- 50) [ONLINE]
Session Two: Revisiting Theories of Third Cinema
Chair: David Wood
YouTube recording: 2.59.58-4.46.25
Elena Razlogova (Concordia University), Afro-Asian Film Theory in the Age of Bandung [ONLINE]
Hieyoon Kim (Brown University), Translating Third Cinema in Cold War South Korea [ONLINE]
Chang-Min Yu (National Taiwan University), The Postcolonial Crisis of Political Modernism: Ideology, Third Cinema, and the Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien
Aboubakar Sanogo (Carleton University), Third Cinema: African Archaeologies and Manifestations
Session Three: Theorizing through Cinematic Practice
Chair: Vinzenz Hediger
YouTube recording: 5.34.31-7.11.35
John MacKay (Yale University), Živojin Pavlović as Film Theorist [ONLINE]
Manishita Dass (Royal Holloway, University of London), Thinking Through Film: Ritwik Ghatak’s Cinematic Practice
Elizabeth Wijaya (University of Toronto), Speculative Inventions of Southeast Asian Cinemas: Theorizing Through Practice
Izabella Füzi (University of Szeged), Screenlife Movies: Theorizing Moving Images through Intermedial Encounters of (Postcolonial) Bodies
Session Four: Teaching/Theory
Chair: Elizabeth Wijaya
YouTube recording: 7.41.17-9.13.18
Yiman Wang (University of California, Santa Cruz), Media Studies Goes Environmental: What Chinese Socialist Science Education Film Can Teach Us
Junwei Lu (University of Glasgow), Examining Film Theory in a Non- Institutionalized State: Film Theory Curricula in Taiwan Higher Education
Luke Robinson (University of New South Wales) The Scene of Film Theory: An Approach to Decolonizing Film Studies
Session Five: Affect, Perception, Phenomenology
Chair: Hongwei Thorn Chen
YouTube recording: 9.27.43-10.51.45
Augustin Denis (University of Cambridge), On Rasa Theory, Affect, and Indian Film Aesthetics
Xi W Liu (University of Sheffield), Film Perception: When Yijing meets Affect
Naoki Yamamoto (California, Santa Barbara), Politics of Bracketing: Phenomenology and Japanese Film Theory
Day 2
https://www.youtube.com/live/j9tmq37WBso?feature=shared&t=2478
Session Six: Decolonizing Theory and New Genealogies
Chair: Masha Salazkina
YouTube recording: 41.34-2.36.15
Chris Berry (King’s College London), Decolonizing Film Theory Today – Thinking from the Chinese Situation
Lani Akande (University of North Carolina Wilmington), Let the Chips Fall Where They May: An Unapologetic Decolonized Approach to Film Theorizing [ONLINE]
Haotian Lin (University of Cambridge), Ruptured Intertextuality: The “Chinese Community of Film Intellectuals”, the Nationalization of Western Film Theories and the Formation of (Sino-)neorealism in the 1920s
Hongwei Thorn Chen (Tulane University), Nativizing the Electric Shadowplay: A Genealogy of Postwar Media Theory
Session Seven: Sites of Circulation for Film Theory
Chair: David Wood
YouTube recording: 3.03.23-4.53.05
Ainamar Clariana-Rodagut (University of Catalunya), Networks of Women in the Circulation of Soviet Film Theory in Ibero-America [ONLINE]
Mariano Mestman (University of Buenos Aires), Ideas and Theoretical Perspectives on Documentary in the Origins of the International Association of Documentary Filmmakers
Laurence Kent (University of Bristol), Theorizing Incompleteness and Exile: The “non-cinema” of Hussein Shariffe’s Of Dust and Rubies
Vinzenz Hediger (Goethe Universität Frankfurt), Defining African Cinema in 1980s Nigeria: A Reconstruction of the Nigerian Film Corporation’s 1988 Workshop on Film Theory in Jos
Session Eight: Reflecting on the Global: Circulations and Borders
Chair: Manishita Dass
YouTube recording: 5.42.55-7.09.37
Thomas Quist (University of Toronto), Hypothesis of a Stolen Title: On Raul Ruiz’s Poetics of Cinema
Nicolas Helm-Grovas (King’s College London), Postcolonial and Post- socialist Obliques
Pedro Doreste Rodríguez (Michigan State University), Transatlantic Vérité’s Caribbean Layover or, the Other Chronicle of a Summer
Session Nine: What is Cinema?
Chair: Izabella Füzi
YouTube recording: 7.40.55-9.29.10
Jennifer Blaylock (Rowan University), What is Cinema? The Case of Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet (1965)
Seung-hoon Jeong (California State University, Long Beach), “Open Cinema”: The Korean New Wave’s Last National Film Theory [ONLINE]
Alex Denison (Boston University), An Art of Sharing: Digital Poetics and Political Praxis in Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas Films
Byron Davies (University of Murcia) and Marcela Cuevas (SACIMU) [in person] + Bruno Varela (SACIMU) [online], Approaching Nahual Cinema in Oaxaca: Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU) [HYBRID]
Session Ten: Counter-Hegemonic Circuits of Theoretical Exchange
Chair: Aboubakar Sanogo
YouTube recording: 9.44.36-11.21.52
Ana Camila Esteves (Federal University of Bahia) and Jusciele Oliveira (University of Algarve), African Cinemas in Film History and Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Approaches [ONLINE]
Justin Foster (UCLA), “Like and Subscribe”: Emergent Black Voices in Film Theorization and Decolonization Through the Video Essay Format [ONLINE]
Michele Aaron (University of Warwick), Dis/obedience, Survivance and Sumud: Theorizing Film through Indigenous and Black Cultural Critique
Full conference programme/schedule here.
The Global Circulations of Film Theory network comprised a group of international scholars who work on African, Asian, European, Latin American, and Soviet film theory, and who share a common critique of film theory’s western imperialist foundations. The overarching aim of the network project (January 2023-October 2024) was not only to broaden through widescale collaborative research the understanding of what theory is and can do; it was also to set the agenda for how theory might continue to circulate in the light of our global approach.
More info on the network here