PARASOPHIA 京都国際現代芸術祭2015

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How can film portray history? How can it render photographically that which defies representation, that which eludes visibility? Aren’t reality and representation like cats and dogs, immiscible? Three films depict three catastrophes: the American Civil War, National Socialism, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. At key moments, The Birth of a Nation (1915), Triumph of the Will (1935), and Hiroshima mon amour (1959) also feature a cat—a rhetorical figure perhaps, a metaphor for the cinematic relation between historical representation and catastrophe. Why a cat? This lecture explores the relationship between film, catastrophe, and cats. —Akira Mizuta Lippit

About the Open Research Program
The Artistic Director and his curatorial team will conduct part of their research for Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015 publicly, in the form of lectures and other events in this program.

Akira Mizuta Lippit
Born 1964 in the United States. Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts, and Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures in the University of Southern California Dornsife College. Publications include Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (University of California Press, 2012). He regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes in Japan, where he is a founding editor of the visual culture journal Ecce.