Apologies for cross posting
UWE Film Studies Research Group
Charlie Kaufman Symposium
Wednesday 10 March 15.30 – 18.00
University of the West of England (UWE)
St Mathias Campus Room MO33
Bristol
All Welcome
Speakers
Dr David Sorfa, (Senior Lecturer in Film Studies) Liverpool John Moores University
Show & Tell: Sycotic Fetishism in Synecdoche, New York (2008) and The Trial (1925)
Dr Havi Carel (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy)
The return of the erased: Memory and forgetfulness in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Respondent
Dr Greg Tuck (Senior Lecturer in Film Studies) UWE
Charlie Kaufman’s ‘mind games’, or, Being Charlie Kaufman
For details please contact greg.tuck @uwe.ac.uk
Abstracts
Dr. David Sorfa
Show & Tell: Sycotic Fetishism in Synecdoche, New York (2008) and The Trial (1925)
If film can be thought to do or be philosophy then one way in which it seems to be able to do this is by showing us - allowing us to personally experience - the full emotional force of a philosophical problem (e.g. What it means to die; What it means to have no free will; What it means to act in an ethical manner) in a way that philosophy “itself” can only ever tell us about. Does it make sense to say: “Film can show us philosophy in a way that philosophy can only ever tell us about”? In Charlie Kaufman’s recent film, the apparently brilliant theatre director, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), asks Hazel (Samantha Morton) what book she is reading. “The Trial,” she answers, “Have you read it?” “Yes”. In this paper I would like to sketch out a number of issues that proceed from this short encounter. My general claim is that Synecdoche, New York is indeed an adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial and it is the issue of adaptation as such that will be the subject under discussion. By adaptation I broadly mean the movement of meaning from one place to another, whether it be from text to screen or from person to person or from philosophy to film, and it is the central importance of language - broadly understood - in this process that I particularly wish to explore.
Dr Havi Carel
The Return of the Erased: Memory and Forgetfulness in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film about remembering and forgetting loss. This paper reads the film as an examination of mourning and melancholia, which are distinct ways of remembering and forgetting both a love object and its loss. Freud distinguished mourning from its pathological counterpart, melancholia, claiming that there is a normal way to grieve, mourning, and its degeneration into an abnormal pattern, melancholia. I aim to make two points: firstly, that both processes are characterized by ambivalence and identification and therefore have some commonalities; secondly, that there is a difference between the two processes that is less apparent than the ones discussed by Freud. This is the difference between remembering a good and a bad object. Following Klein the author argues that this is a crucial qualitative difference between mourning and melancholia. She concludes that a central issue in grieving is not forgetting but remembering well.
This email was independently scanned for viruses by McAfee anti-virus software and none were found
|