Screening Collectives and Collectivity

This symposium and film screening event will bring together a core group of scholars working on questions of collectives and collectivity in relation to moving image media. The symposium will explore how cinema has represented and re-imagined historical and future concepts of the collective. Notions of how collectives emerge, cohere, and are sustained are central to our contemporary politics and they are indebted to moving image culture’s figuration of collectives and collectivity. While film and media scholarship has long been interested in spectatorship—the collective experience of watching films in a cinema—it also has engaged in a sustained investigation of the inextricable relation between aesthetics and politics. Film movements from diverse geopolitical contexts have mobilized the raw power of the moving image to foment collective action. This symposium will examine questions of the formation of, desire for, and reshaping of collectives and collectivity as elaborated by moving images.