Sorry for cross-posting.
With best wishes,
Saer Ba


TALK

24 March 2009

5:15 pm. Centre for Film Studies

Lecture Theatre, Ground floor, Arts Building, University of St. Andrews

David Fleming, PhD student, University of St. Andrews

/
Changing Minds, Bodies and Identities in the Pill-films of Alejandro 
Jodorowsky./


Within this paper I aim to open up a philosophical investigation into 
the work of ‘nomadic’ filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky; who 
opportunistically tapped into the US /head-cinema/ movement during the 
1970s. Following Deleuze, we can approach the work of a filmmaker in the 
same way we would a philosophic author; extracting concepts and ideas 
that reverberate within and throughout their works. /Thus, if it is 
still possible to treat Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Artaud in this way, why 
not Welles, Resnais, and Jodorowsky?/ In 1971 Jodorowsky stated that: “I 
believe that the only end of all human activity whether it be politics, 
art, science, etc – is to find enlightenment, to reach the state of 
enlightenment. I ask of film what most North Americans ask of 
psychedelic drugs. The difference being that when one creates a 
psychedelic film, he need not create a film that shows the vision of a 
person who has taken a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill.”

Predominantly examining esoteric /pill-/films like /El Topo/ (1970) and 
/The Holy Mountain/ (1973), I aim to explore the diachronic 
thought-images and ontological models found underpinning and informing 
each. Together, I examine the films as a complex cinematic diptych found 
exploring a complete philosophical reversal: both in the perception of a 
body and mind dualism and through introducing a transfigured concept of 
expanded thought, perception, and identity. The pill-films ultimately 
emerge as a powerful cinema of the body which intercepts and embeds an 
expanded and transfigured concept of thought, and perception. How and 
what the films attempted to communicate will be examined in context and 
a model of ‘parallel-image’ cinema explored.

Bio:

David Fleming is a full-time PhD (scholarship) student at the University 
of St-Andrews, currently engaged in teaching and writing up his doctoral 
thesis. He has previously studied at the University of Aberdeen and the 
University of New Mexico. His thesis is a Film-Philosophy project 
entitled ‘/Dreams, Drugs, Delusions, and Deterritorialisations: A savage 
Deleuzian journey into and beyond the parallel mind and body’/. He 
previously acquired a MLitt in Visual Culture with an A.H.R.B. grant and 
examined models of spectatorship surrounding Stanley Kubrick’s /2001: A 
Space Odyssey /(1968). He also has M.A. in English and Film Studies and 
completed a dissertation on the films of David Fincher through an auteur 
paradigm.