AMMI colloquium - MARIE-AUDE BARONIAN (University of Amsterdam): "Dressing the Screen: Notes on Textile, Fashion, and Film"

This guest lecture is part of the Arts, Media and Moving Images research colloquium of the Research Centre for Arts in Society.

For more information, contact Julian Hanich: j.hanich rug.nl

Abstract

Costume and clothing are central to filmmaking and play a major role for anything from ensuring characterization and the coherence of the narrative to the typical attributes of certain film genres. In this talk I would like to extend and complicate this functionality by suggesting some other and alternative ways to acknowledge the intimate and productive relationship between film and fabrics. Drawing on a few cases and objects that I have been actively researching the last few years I wish to offer thoughts on how textile, fashion and cinema are inherently yet dynamically interwoven. In exploring film together with fashion and textile we are close to understand not only the persistence of film in our contemporary (digital) culture but also to provide a prism for re-reading central motifs and questions that are at the heart of film history and film-philosophy. Ultimately, my aim is to dress and undress the screen as a tangible and similarly imaginary surface that is continually moved by the very (im)materiality of fashion and fabrics.

About the speaker

Marie-Aude Baronian is an Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She works in the fields of memory and visual culture, film-philosophy, material objects, and Armenian diasporic audiovisual practices. She has written extensively on the relationship between images, archive, and testimony, and between ethics and aesthetics. She also writes on textile, clothing, and fashion. Her latest monographic book is Screening Memory: The Prosthetic Images of Atom Egoyan (Belgian Royal Academy, 2017). She is currently completing a monograph on Emmanuel Levinas and the moving image, and another one on cinema and material objects. She is a member of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and a regular guest fellow and professor at the University of Michigan.