March 28, 2017
All Day
Page Hall, Room 020
Nikolaj Lübecker, University of Oxford
Professor of French and Film Studies, Fellow of St John's College
In many narrative films and tv-shows the crime scene is first of all a riddle that appeals to our hermeneutic desire. This riddle will be solved by highly trained experts and at the end of the process the scene no longer holds any interest.
This talk considers a number of experimental fiction and documentary films that operate differently: in films by James Benning, Chantal Akerman and Arnaud des Pallières our hermeneutic desire is frustrated and there is no erasure of the scene. This paper draws on affect- and eco-theory as it explores the ethical and political potential of such experimental approaches to the crime scene.
