Giorgio Agamben’s “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films”

Provoked by Cineworks’s newly acquired annex space that is, essentially, half black box and half white cube, June’s meeting will feature Girogio Agamben’s essay “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” taken from Art and the Moving Image, a new critical reader edited by Tanya Leighton. Says Leighton in her introduction, “Agamben examines Debord’s films in view of the proximity between cinema and history. Where does this closeness, this link, come from, Agamben asks, and what kind of history is involved?…Every image, Agamben claims, can be seen in the light of cinema. The dimension of ‘history’ that has a time with cinema, he suggests, is not chronological but messianic: each moment in time is charged with history.” Drawing on the attraction that moving images have for contemporary artists, and the transposition of moving images from theatres to galleries, Agamben’s essay explores Debord’s films as an example of how the traditional concerns of cinema are reconciled to the more embodied qualities of moving image art.

THOUGHT ON FILM
reading Giorgio Agamben’s “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films”
Cineworks [1131 Howe, back lane entrance], Vancouver BC
09 June 2009, 18:00
Free

Facilitated by cheyanne turions