Miriam De Rosa

In his book »The Century«, philosopher Alain Badiou touches upon the concept of anabasis. Tracing its origin back to Xenophon, he describes it as the trajectory in three-steps that the ancient Greek mercenaries followed after their adventure with the Persian army – a movement which namely included lostness, invention and wandering (1999:82).

This paper aims at looking at these mechanisms relating them to the cinematic. To do so, I focus on the oeuvre by French filmmaker Eric Baudelaire, and more specifically on his film »The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu«, »Masao Adachi«, and »27 Years Without Images« (2011). I intend to retrieve the three movements mentioned by Badiou in the film, in order to demonstrate how such trajectory characterizes the most recent development of cinema on the whole, as it enters its postmedia condition (Weibel2005). Almost losing and reinventing (Tryon2009) itself, what I want to draw upon is the processes involved in the phase of wandering. That is, the cinematic definitely widens its locations (DeRosa2013; Casetti2015) and, more interestingly, in doing so it shows its inherent multiplicity becoming fluid, intersecting with other codes, adopting various forms.

My talk hopes to highlight how this multifaceted nature opens up new ways of thinking film, by questioning its ontology and challenging the idea of medium specificity. Moreover, I wish to underscore how this wandering of the cinematic makes it profoundly complex, as reality also is, strengthening its magic efficacy to render life, and thus ultimately reassessing it as a privileged lens to look at the real.

Miriam De Rosa is Lecturer in Film Studies at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan and in 2014 she was DAAD Research Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt. She is the author of the monograph »Cinema e postmedia« (2013) and the co-editor (with Vinzenz Hediger) of »Post-what? Post-when? Thinking moving images beyond the post-medium/post-cinema condition«, a special issue of Cinéma&Cie forthcoming in fall 2016. She has published extensively on theories of cinema and visual arts, cinematic experience, medium specificity, and the relationship among subject, space, and filmic device (list of publications here). She is active within NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies), a member of SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) and co-ordinates IMACS (International Master in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies), a high education initiative gathering 13 universities all over Europe and Canada.