The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Addison Ellis & Byron Davies

The next Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar will be led by Addison Ellis (American University of Cairo) and Byron Davies (University of Murcia), who will talk about the “Cinema De Trop: Brakhage and Existentialism”. The session will be held exclusively in person on 29 October 2025 at 15:00 WET, in room B607 at NOVA FCSH (Berna Campus).

Abstract

Philosophically-informed writing on the U.S. experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) has only cursorily engaged with his relationship to existentialism. Nevertheless, a remarkable and rarely commented-on fact is that Brakhage explicitly “adapted” Jean-Paul Sartre’s writing to film. In 1961 Brakhage made a short film, now known as Sartre’s Nausea, for a ten-part public television introduction to existentialism hosted by Sartre translator and scholar Hazel Barnes. He then returned to that work, editing and directly intervening on it in order to make Black Vision (1965), which according to his catalog description in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, was inspired by “the only passage in Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings which has ever specifically concerned me — the passage from Nausea wherein the protagonist sits in a park and imagines his suicide.” Despite the ambivalence towards Sartre that Brakhage expresses here, we will argue Brakhage’s film work contributes to our understanding of Sartre by offering an occasion for understanding continuities between hypnagogic consciousness and nausea, despite formulations by Sartre that would seem to distinguish sharply between them. We will additionally argue that there is an important respect in which Brakhage was the most appropriate filmmaker imaginable for “adapting” Nausea, and it has to do with his careerlong grasp of how nausea could impinge on not only individual consciousness, but also on the filmmaking medium itself. Enacting an idea of the medium as neither perfectly transparent nor perfectly solid, Brakhage in effect asks, “What is it for the film medium to be radically contingent?” And, “What is it for the medium to be experienced as melting in our hands?”

Bio

Addison Ellis is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019, was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City, and then a lecturer at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on Kant and post-Kantian European Philosophy (especially existentialism). Within these areas, Ellis places particular emphasis on the study of self-consciousness. Byron Davies is a researcher in philosophy, film programmer, and visual artist originally from the U.S. and a naturalized Mexican citizen. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain, where he is conducting the research project “Materialism and Geographic Specificity in the Philosophy of Film” (2024-26). From 2018 to 2020 he was a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and just before that, he completed his PhD in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University.