The keynote lectures will be presented in the ZKM Media Theater and focus on a theoretical approach to philosophy of film. Each lecture will be video-streamed online and archived on the ZKM website.
Five outstanding films will be screened in the ZKM Media Theater and the ZKM Lecture Hall during the conference. Each screening is followed by a director’s masterclass or Q&A session.
Group 1 | The Real and the Reproduction of Reality
According to Stanley Cavell, the photographic reproduction of reality constitutes an ontological puzzle, which is reinforced by film. Yet what of reality exactly is reproduced by film and what can film and its analysis contribute to the philosophical debate on the real? What does it say about reality to be reproducible?
The ideas of film as world and world as film raise questions: where are we when we’re watching a movie? Photography and film are not simply doubles of reality but have the ability to shape reality itself. On the one hand, we have an image of reality and, on the other hand, this image dominates reality - becoming real in itself.
Group 3 | Film, Language and Reality: How Does a Movie Move?
Film reproduces moving images of reality. But what exactly is an image of reality in movement? And what is an image at all? Furthermore, which kind of emotions are conveyed by these moving images of reality?
Group 4 | Film, Reality and Truth: What Does a Movie Show?
What can film make visible? What are the mechanisms of filmic perception? Do we have access to reality that is not based on images or narrations? And what kind of access to truth does film permit? Are we in Plato’s cave or does film help us to leave the cave?
With which kind of presence do we have to deal in film? What exactly is the being of film and the being-in-film? And which kind of entanglement between body and film is happening in cinema?
Group 6 | Film and New Forms of Realism and Materialism in Contemporary Philosophy
New questions on reality and matter are raised by film in a special way. Yet the contemporary comeback of materialism and realism presenting a new speculative twist concerning the knowledge of reality and the problem of human access has hardly been explored in the context of aesthetics and even less in the context of film.
We have selected for this section those approaches on film which show a new way to explore established positions by philosophy of film or which dare to conceive film in experimental and unconventional ways.
