CFAC (Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures), University of Reading
Invites you to the Public Lecture by
Professor Dudley Andrew (Yale University)
‘André Bazin’s Dark Passage’
Bazin’s philosophy of cinema can be linked on one side to his association with actual philosophy (the existentialism rife in the Paris of 1946) and, on the other, to the films he was watching assiduously in these years, neorealism and Welles above all. Occasionally the films and the philosophy line up in a way that lets us peer into his own way of peering. Dark Passage (1946) is such a film, even if he wrote about it rather briefly. And what about the persistence of his film theory beyond the life cycle of existentialism? Can recent films shed light, so to speak, into Bazin’s philosophical passage? Or has cinema and philosophy evolved too much? We will look at one such recent film and pose these questions.
Date: Tuesday 21 October, 18h15
Venue: Bulmershe Theatre, Minghella Building, University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus
Prior booking essential with Gaenor Burchett-Vass, g.burchett-vass@reading.ac.uk
Further information with Prof Lúcia Nagib, l.nagib@reading.ac.uk
Dudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale. Biographer of André Bazin, he extends Bazin’s thought in What Cinema Is! (2011) and in the edited volume, Opening Bazin (2012). He has just translated and introduced a new collection called ‘André Bazin’ New Media. Working in aesthetics, hermeneutics and cultural history, he published Film in the Aura of Art in 1984, then turned to French film with Mists of Regret (1995) and Popular Front Paris (with Steven Ungar, 2005). He co-edited The Companion to Francois Truffaut (2013). For these publications, he was named Officier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
The Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC) is a centre of international excellence in research and teaching of film, both with regard to its medium-specific qualities and its inherent interdisciplinary and intercultural properties. Endowed with an outward-facing ethos, CFAC is a catalyst for expertise in film at the University of Reading. CFAC understands aesthetics in its broadest sense: as an important branch of philosophy; as style and beauty pertaining to art; as a mode of cultural experience; and as sensory pleasure connecting filmmakers and film spectators. It proposes culture as the locale for human interaction and improvement, and as the necessary background for the analysis of any aesthetic object, most notably film, whose intercultural aspect derives from its own nature as an industrial and transnational medium. CFAC investigates the ways in which film reflects the aesthetic politics inherent in the specificities of the medium as well as the cultural struggles and gains deriving from film’s interactions with different systems, practices and interests. CFAC fosters debates and links between the University of Reading and other research centres and film societies, as well as with the industries of production, distribution and exhibition, including international networks of arthouse film theatres and festivals. CFAC keeps a permanent schedule of activities, including: research grants applications and management; national and international networking; conferences and workshops; seminar series; prestige lectures; MA programmes; PhD and Postdoctoral training; publications and book launches.
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