Dear All,
The following recent seminar may be of interest (there is an audio
recording available of the papers available via the following link):
http://sydneyseminar.org/wp/2012/09/seminar-20-melancholia-non-grata-lars-von-trier-and-the-infinite-sadness/
Seminar 20: Melancholia Non Grata: Lars von Trier and the Infinite Sadness
Friday, September 28, 2012
Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, Level 1, 280 Pitt Street, Sydney.
Lars von Trier’s most recent film Melancholia (2011) has provoked no
end of debate: simultaneously hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ and
‘tiresome’, von Trier himself half-dismissed the work as ‘too
polished’ and ‘a woman’s film’ at its premiere at Cannes (where he was
infamously declared ‘persona non grata’ after noting that he had come
to ‘understand Hitler’). This seminar seeks to cut through the
controversy in order address some of its major themes and contexts.
Drawing from Jacques Derrida’s contention that the death of the other
spawns a melancholia that amounts to the annihilation of the entire
world, Christopher Peterson’s “The ‘Magic Cave’ of Allegory” argues
that von Trier’s film visually stages a planetary clash whose
literality is never fully dissociable from, yet never entirely
collapsible onto, the allegorical content of Justine’s psychological
depression.
In “Between Saturation and Exhaustion: Lars von Trier and the
Melancholy Death of Cinema”, Alex Ling argues that Melancholia – and
von Trier’s cinema more broadly – offers a profound meditation on the
current state of cinema as simultaneously saturated and exhausted.
Taking as given cinema’s imminent demise, the film asks the question:
did cinema live up to its potential?
Robert Sinnerbrink‘s “Anatomy of Melancholia” analyzes the various
aesthetic and philosophical strands of von Trier’s film, arguing that
it performs a complex ethical critique of rationalist optimism in the
guise of a neo-romantic allegory of world-destruction.
Taking the starting point in the controversies raised by von Trier’s
depictions of female protagonists in his cinematic oeuvre as either
“sacrificial love” or “virtuous excess,” Magdalena Zolkos’s
“Turbulence and Urgency: Von Trier’s Melancholic Femininities at the
End of Times” offers a reading of the female figuration of Melancholia
(impersonated in the protagonist Justine) from the perspective of the
Romanticist aesthetics and undertones of the film.
Programme
Chair Lorraine Sim
5:00 to 5:30 Chris Peterson (University of Western Sydney)
The ‘Magic Cave’ of Allegory
5:30 to 6:00 Alex Ling (University of Western Sydney)
Between Saturation and
Exhaustion: Lars von Trier and the
Melancholy Death of Cinema
6:00 to 6:15 Break
6:15 to 6:45 Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University)
Anatomy of Melancholia
6:45 to 7:15 Magdalena Zolkos (University of Western Sydney)
Turbulence and Urgency: Von
Trier’s Melancholic Femininities at
the End of Times
7:15 – 8:15 Question and Answer
8:15 to 9:30 Drinks and canapés
Dr. Christopher Peterson is Senior Lecturer in the School of
Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney.
Dr. Alex Ling is Research Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies
in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of
Western Sydney.
Dr. Robert Sinnerbrink is Lecturer in Philosophy at Department of
Philosophy, Macquarie University.
Dr. Magdalena Zolkos is Senior Research Fellow in Political Theory in
the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western
Sydney.
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Dr Robert Sinnerbrink
Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy
Building W6A, Balaclava Rd
Macquarie University
North Ryde NSW 2109
Sydney, Australia
email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +612 9850 9935
Fax: +612 9850 8892
www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/sinnerbrink.htm
http://mq.academia.edu/RobertSinnerbrink
Communications Officer, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy
http://www.ascp.org.au/
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