The Irish Psychoanalytic Film Festival presents…
CALL FOR PAPERS
In 2020 we have witnessed the fall of the cinematic ‘big’ screen, as prohibitions on group events and performative collective spaces closed our movie theatres for the first time in the history of cinema. At the same time we have experienced the unprecedented rise of the ‘small screen’ within our domestic, work, and intimate spaces. For most of us, lives have been lived and mediated by and through the prism of multiple small screens. Our work, our play, our education, and our sublimation have taken place in and over a variety of modalities such as Zoom and Team meetings, and on software applications such as Skype, Whatsapp, and Telegram.
In lieu of a film festival in 2021 the Irish Film Festival team supported by APPI and IFPP is organising a special conference event which seeks to question and discuss how the shifting of screens, the displacement of the cinema screen onto the small one(s), has impacted our aesthetic and subjective desires. If, as Žižek puts it, cinema teaches us how to desire, we ask what does the small screen in its various shapes and sizes do?
Some issues seem immediately salient to consider.
Through the dictates of the public health narrative, we have been constrained, restrained and ordered to stay at home, to stay safe, to take responsibility by being absent from the “social dilemma” as it were. And yet, psychoanalytically we know that imposing these restrictions as an external injunction on ‘being out there’ in the world, poses a question internally to the subject at the level of desire. In other words, how do we, as subjects with an unconscious, obtain enjoyment and satisfaction now that we have become more hermetic, isolated and less physically present in the embodied gaze of others? Of course, in being asked to stay inside, what we often encounter is not safety but the anxiety of libidinal drives that clamour for organisation, or, at the very least something with which to be occupied. In a time when the apparently benevolent superegoic message in the top right hand corner of our screens (in Ireland) encourages us to “Fan Sa Bhaile”, how do we counter the no-limits binge and splurge accommodated to the drive by the ‘All You Can Eat’ permanently available buffet of film on offer by services such as NetFlix, Mubi, and Amazon Prime? In this way, the small screen serves as an extension of both our desires now and perhaps in Zizek’s terms, what our desires may become through the perversion of the screen.
In our increasingly techno-mediated world, the dystopian imagined visions of sci-fi where avatars and robots substitute for embodied human beings are now bearing an uncanny similarity to the empty street ‘reality’ we are experiencing now. Our “new normal” to quote a certain spaceship engineer “is life Jim but not as we know it!” Even though Charlie Brooker, creator of the prescient and dystopian series Black Mirror has remarked that the pandemic is “the most, on some levels, boring apocalypse you could imagine”. In our ‘post truth’ age where social media predominates as purveyor of facts, fake news, and general dissemination of knowledge, the semblance of authority beneath institutional structures is undermined. We think here of recent Netflix releases such as “The Social Dilemma” and “The Hater”. We wonder, how we will remember to engage socially or professionally with the unmediated, and unmasked dimension of the other/Other given our protracted mediation of the relation to the Other via the disengaged, screened, masked, and otherwise techno-assisted devices we have grown familiar with during 2020. How do we, and will we, relate to others now that our bodies are mostly absent from social interactions and represented by a screen?
The 2021 Film Festival event also allows us to take account of these times of uncertainty through the prism of the small screen and interrogate the shifts in the uniquely subjective and yet social experience of our relation to the gaze. What bodily and psychic effects are incurred through alternate viewing experiences, if any, that frame or precipitate the human being as a captivated subject both within and on the screen? Why, as a nation, have we been riveted during lockdown watching poignant small screen productions such as Normal People? Is it perhaps that like Conor and Marianne, we are now unable to go to sleep without “leaving the Skype on”?
If at the end of this, we have become vulnerable to the perversion(s) of the screen, at the mercy of so-called post truth and disinformation, and passive recipients of manipulations and political falsehoods, will we once again be capable of choosing to desire through the vector of the big screen?
These and other dilemmas and questions will be the themes of our 2021 event to be held over Zoom on the afternoon of Saturday 27th March 2021.
Please send a paper proposal (up to 300 words) or any informal queries to carolowensappi@gmail.com by 18th January 2021.
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