Powers of
the False Symposium
Institut Francais & Cine Lumiere, London, UK
May 25th-26th 2012 (dates to be confirmed)
CALL FOR
PAPERS AND FILM/VIDEO SUBMISSIONS
“There is a power inherent in the false: the positive power of
ruse, the power to gain a strategic advantage by masking one’s life force.”
(Brian Massumi, REALER THAN REAL, The
Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari)
This two-day symposium addresses the complex ethics of the
manipulation of real people and events in documentary, fact-fiction hybrid
cinema and artists’ moving image.
Through close readings and screenings of contemporary and historical
films that deliberately falsify actuality, the Powers of the False symposium
will ask, can there be an ethic of falsification in the encounter between
filmmaker and subject? How can we document something whose truth has many sides
or may be inscrutable? Is the act of documenting always inevitably
performative? The symposium will
also examine instances where the subjects of films have deliberately deceived
filmmakers. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s theories of minor cinema and his term
‘powers of the false', the symposium will turn to other philosophers too, to
approach its central conceptual and ethical questions, including Levinas’
philosophy of alterity.
Academic research methods regard most filmmaking practices as
unethical, particularly documentary filmmaking because of its direct encounter
with actuality. The principles of consent for sociological research are
anathema to factual film production, because total editorial control can never
be given to the subjects. Instead, prior-consent is necessary. Moving image
artists tend to disregard contributor consent forms and often freely intervene
in the lives of their subjects. The activity of filmmaking is clearly
predisposed to manipulation, and film productions inexorably produce alteration
and change. Powers of the False looks at filmmaking as a site for performing
difference and as a manipulative and coercive agency. When and for what reason
is forgery, manipulation and deception conceptually motivated, even ethically
necessary? How are we as human subjects changed by filming and by being filmed?
Topics may include:
*
Inventing the past and fictionalising the present in the factual film;
ethno-fiction.
* Staged
events and re-enactments.
*
Instances where filmmakers have deliberately delayed, intervened in, or given
testimony in legal proceedings, or have broken the law.
* Films
that have to come to light as true/false over time; film hoaxes.
* Films
where authorship has been shared with, or passed over to, a subject.
* Films
where the subject has manipulated the filmmaker.
* Films
that have significantly altered personal or historical events, whether
positively or negatively.
*
Directionless films guided by an encounter with a subject.
* The
docudrama, the drama-documentary, the mock-documentary and the cinematic essay.
*
Iterations of subjectivity within the factual frame, recollection images, use
of free indirect discourse.
Suggested artists and filmmakers for consideration as topics of
discussion include Jean Rouch, Chantal Ackerman, Werner Herzog, Agnes Varda,
Sophie Calle, Chris Marker, Abbas Kiarostami, Errol Morris, Nick Broomfield,
Ulrich Seidl, Andrew Kötting, Ben Hopkins, Clio Barnard. This list is by no
means exhaustive.
The papers and short film/video works presented over the weekend
will be edited into a published collection of essays (accompanied by a DVD).
Please email abstracts for papers or films no more than 20 minutes
in length by Dec 1st 2011, attn of:
Steven Eastwood
(University of East London): eastwood@uel.ac.uk
Catherine Wheatley (Kings College London): catherine.wheatley@
kcl.ac.uk
kcl.ac.ukThe University of East London and Kings College London
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