Beyond the Scorched Earth of Counter-Cinema

11.30am Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons, 1974, 94 minutes.

1.05pm Theory Films/Counter Cinema: Laura Mulvey in-conversation with Nicolas Helm-Grovas.

 1.45pm Lunch

2.45pm A lecture by Volker Pantenburg

3.45pm Break

4.00pm Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 91 minutes.

5.30pm Closing Comments and Discussion

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was Director of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) from 2012 to 2015. She is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan 1989; second edition 2009); Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute 1996; second edition 2013); Citizen Kane (BFI Classics series 1992; second edition 2012); and Death Twenty- four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books 2006). She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx (British Film Institute 1977; DVD publication 2013), and two films with artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis.

Nicolas Helm-Grovas is a PhD candidate in the Media Arts department at Royal Holloway, University of London. His PhD is a study of the films and texts of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen from 1963-1983. He has a chapter forthcoming on ‘British Film Culture and the Discourse of Semiotics’ in Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey, eds., Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and British Experimental Film in the 1970s. (I.B. Taurus 2017).

Volker Pantenburg is assistant professor for Moving Image Studies at Bauhaus University Weimar and guest professor at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2010 to 2013, he was Director of the PhD program “Theory and History of Cinematographic Objects” at IKKM Weimar. He has published widely on essayistic film and video practices, experimental cinema, and contemporary moving image installations. Recent book publications include: Farocki/Godard. Film as Theory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP 2015); Cinematographic Objects. Things and Operations (Berlin: August 2015, Editor); and Screen Dynamics. Mapping the Borders of Cinema (Vienna: Austrian Film Museum 2012; Co-Editor). In 2015, he co-founded the “Harun Farocki Institut,” a non-profit organisation designed as a platform for researching Farocki’s visual and discursive practice and supporting new projects that engage with the past, present and the future of image cultures.