Interdisciplinary approaches to the theoretical discussion of the cinematic medium have often engaged with philosophical or psychoanalytic perspectives. While philosophy and psychoanalysis are by no means opposed schools of thought, the potential to develop new ways of understanding film remains an opportunity to be explored. In seeking out further lines of enquiry, the study of intersections between cinema/philosophy/psychoanalysis, seems most pertinent to our generation of ‘film thinking’, to invoke Daniel Frampton’s concept of the ‘film mind’, whose future still stands, to some extent, in the shadow of psychoanalysis. Recent philosophical models of thought offered by film theorists such as Frampton and D.N Rodowick embrace a new ontological grasp of the cinema, but what then are the implications of this shift for psychoanalysis? The question, therefore, remains whether philosophy and psychoanalysis are indeed irreconcilable, or if the specific philosophical turn sets up boundaries that unjustly seal off the possibility of dialogue between the two methodologies.

We invite proposals of 200 words for papers of 20 minutes on areas including:

-Films as philosophical and/or psychoanalytical form of representation

-Questions of realism and illusion, from documentary cinema to the fantasy genre

-Ethical responses to, and within, cinema

-The family, sociality, fraternity and sorority

-Changes and developments within spectatorship

-The impact of, and approaches to, new technologies

-Responses and approaches to film aesthetics/film art

-Corporeal subjectivity, embodiment and the senses

-Temporality, memory and amnesia in the cinema

-Depictions of criminality, revenge and guilt


Please send abstracts by 14th November 2008 to encounters@kcl.ac.uk

Enquiries may also be sent to davina.quinlivan@kcl.ac.uk