FCAM colloquium - SULGI LIE (Freie Universität Berlin): 'Total TV: From the cinematographic to the televisual subject in Charlie Chaplin’s "A King in New York"'
| When: | Tu 19-03-2024 18:00 - 20:00 |
| Where: | Room A2, Academy building |
Film and Contemporary Audiovisual Media colloquium
Abstract
The talk uses an analysis of Charlie Chaplin's underrated film "A King of New York" (1957) to examine the remediation of film through television and the associated formation of a new cultural-industrial subject. Based on Adorno's reflections on the entanglement of comedy and historical horror, it will be shown how the seemingly harmless humor of film touches on the totality of a culture industry that, in the transition from film to television as the new leading medium, produces ever more aggressive ways of psychotechnical control. In this sense, the film continues the media-historical analysis of capitalism and fascism in "Modern Times" and "The Great Dictator" under new televisual conditions.
About the speaker
Sulgi Lie is a film scholar and theorist. He is lecturer in the department of Media Studies at Bauhaus-University Weimar. He studied film studies, German studies and philosophy in Bochum, Amsterdam and Berlin. From 2005 to 2015, he was a research assistant in the department of film studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Since then, he has held visiting professorships and fellowships in Los Angeles, Basel, Bonn, Tyumen, Vienna and Berlin. His doctoral thesis "Die Außenseite des Films. Zur politischen Filmästhetik" was published in 2012. An English translation of the book was published in 2020 under the title "Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film" by Amsterdam University Press. In 2022, his habilitation thesis "Gehend kommen. Adorno's Slapstick: Charlie Chaplin & The Marx Brothers" was published by Vorwerk 8 as well as a short monograph on the Korean director Hong Sangsoo entitled "Hong Sangsoo. The Ridiculously Serious". He is currently working on a study on the relationship between technology and body in film comedy.