June 8, 7:30 pm
The Hidden Film Club: Thomas Elsaesser, a viewing of the films Serious Games and Parallel, directed by Harun Farocki, Germany 2009-2014.
18+
The sudden and untimely death of Harun Farocki in 2014 left us with his final, unfinished project: that of understanding the way that reality is becoming an artificial construct, in which the complex interweaving of “simulation” and “manifestation” leads to a situation where people no longer recognise themselves, and fall into a state of cognitive dissonance.
During his lecture, Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals, Thomas Elsaesser will endeavour to follow Farocki’s path from his early work to Serious Games and Parallels, which Elsaesser sees as two parts of a mental experiment on the future of his work. The third, missing part of this experiment was outlined in Farocki’s Labour in a Single Shot project.
Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam/New York) is one of the world’s leading contemporary media theorists. He is Emeritus Professor of Film and Television Studies at Amsterdam University, and a visiting professor at Yale University since 2006. In 1991 he was head of the Amsterdam University’s Department of Film and Television Studies, where he laid the foundations for a broad interdiciplinary approach to film and television studies. From 2000 to 2005 he ran the Cinema Europe international research programme. Elsaesser is editor-in-chief of the Film Culture in Transition series published by Amsterdam University Press.
The film is screened in its original language with subtitles.
Curator: Aleksey Artamonov, film critic.
Admission is free of charge. The number of participants is limited. Please register in advance.
Hidden, Film Club:
As part of the program, Hidden, film critics and film historians will showcase important films that have, for whatever reasons, remained in the shadows of the official canon, explaining their significance and what makes them extraordinary. But Hidden isn’t limited to the marginal, the forgotten or lost. It also explores the underbelly of films we thought we knew. By choice, the guests of these lectures on films will attempt to uncover these contradictions, leading us down into the depths of the human psyche and political systems, past and present. The speakers of this particular program include: Mikhail Ratgauz, Boris Nelepo, Vasily Koretsky, Mikhail Trofimenkov and many others, including one of Great Britain’s most preeminent film critics, Neil Young, and the renowned German media theorist Thomas Elsaesser. All of the films will be screened with subtitles.
