| 8 Jun 2005 - 9 Jun 2005 | All day | CRASSH | |
- Description
Description
CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1RX
The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), in association with the Cambridge University Film Seminar
This conference will interrogate the interplay between the events of war and their representations in film and video. While certain representations suppress the tensions and ambiguities contributing to a war's emergence and its devastation, thinkers such as Virilio, Baudrillard, Zizek and others have turned a reflexive gaze upon our voyeuristic fascination with war. A search for total visibility through film and attention to instantaneous fragments of 'real time' characterize current representations of war in screen media. But the thoroughness of our cultural saturation provokes questions concerning the dangers of such image assimilation. To what extent is our gaze aligned with insidious modes and bodies of power that participate in games of surveillance and paranoid rationalisations? How and why do images of destruction, which are disseminated at the speed with which weapons are engaged, enthral and mesmerize? How are these images a means to identity creation, at the cost of certain exclusions and inclusions? What is at stake in the expansion of a 'society of spectacle'?
