Conference Review
The Moving Image: Reconfiguring Spaces of Loss and Mourning in the 21st Century
26-27 February 2010
This conference sprang from the conviction that the theme of loss and its psychological and emotional consequences mobilize certain aesthetics and sentiments in audiovisual texts. Contributors hailed from universities in Europe, North America and Israel.
Jay Winter’s speech identified a number of themes – silence, absence, memory – which rersonated throughout the papers and the subsequent discussions. Winter’s own paper characterized film from the post-World War I period as a form of public séance analogous to the then-popular culture of spiritualism, while moments of silence in later sound cinema mimic traditional mourning practices. Focussing on Chantal Akerman’s Histoires d’Amérique, Marion Schmid looked at the Jewish diaspora and its relationship to memory, loss and transmission. The spectre of trauma following World War II was explored by Colin Davis in a paper on Jean Renoir’s Hollywood film The Woman on the Beach, a release beset by the difficulty of depicting war trauma and by studio interference during production. In an event conscious of the wider context in which grief images play out, grief counsellor Colin Murray Parkes asked how filmmakers prepare audiences for dealing with real death and disaster. Using an Agnés Varda film, Jenny Chamarette looked at the distinction between static and ancient modes of mourning and more mobile represenations. Emma Wilson’s paper viewed museum spazces in Mariana Otero’s Histoire d’un secret as another form of palliative. Using the backdrop of Renaissance theatre and the development of perspective, Alex Dougherty explored the possibility of the ‘authentic’ disclosure of our ontological position in reality and the implications for the represenation of grief. Laura McMahon discussed Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy’s theorization of cinema as a rumination on existence, presence, mourning and ethics. Within a psychoanalytical context, Lisa Downing examined the relatiionship between childlessness and the death of a parent in Don’t Look Now and Antichrist.
The Holocaust elicted some powerful papers including Max Silverman’s on the relationship between the concentrationary image and loss in Resnais and Marker, Kristian Feigelson’s discussion of the Theresienstadt Nazi propaganda film, and Libby Saxton’s re-reading of the corporate thriller La Question humaine as a ‘horror film’ invoking memories of the Third Reich and the distinctions human/non-human and grievable/ungrievable. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict provided the context for thoughtful papers from Omri Grinberg on the cultural consequences of Biblical resonaces in coverage of the dispute, and Ariella Azoulay’s on the place of ‘lament’ as a political/cultural form of address.
A number of papers examined mourning as a persistent thread amid contemporary manifestations of cinema such as the digital – Martine Beugnet – the ‘death of cinema’ – Song Hwee Lim – and a histrionic pantheon of modern mourning – Richard Armstrong. Finally, Carol Mavor’s poetic contribution traced resonacnes of the colour blue through Akerman’s La Captive.
Sadly, time constraints made a roundtable discussion impossible, but Jay Winter’s closing words reiterated the themes of his address, congratulated the speakers and organizers for a resounding success, and proposed the theme of the conference as a fertile area for future research and exposition.
Richard Armstrong
University of Cambridge
