The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: James Williams

The next Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar (2024-2025) will be led by James Williams (Deakin University, Australia) who will talk about “Death, Démontage and Time in Bande Dessinée as a Precursor to Film: The Works of Jean-Marc Rochette”. The session is hybrid and will be held on October 23, 2024, at 15:00 PM (Lisbon time), at Colégio Almada Negreiros (room SE1) and online, via Zoom. To receive information about joining the meeting online, it’s mandatory to register in advance here.

Abstract

Starting from the concept of ‘démontage’ as applied to bande dessinée, this talk reflects on the implications for time and death of the shift from narrative and linear times to a free floating and interventionist interaction with chains of images and within images themselves. If movements in time can be rearranged, broken, interrupted by any reader (and maybe any watcher) does this also mean that death can be manipulated and reinvented in this way? The French author Jean-Marc Rochette’s recent works are, among other things, an intimate and original portrayal of many interacting deaths: from human, to animal, to machines and the cosmos. Taking inspiration from his artistry, I will begin to sketch a process logic of time in its implications for thinking about death, while reflecting on its implications for film, as perhaps a less liberated opportunity for accessible démontage.

Bio

James Williams is Honorary Professor of Philosophy and member of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization at Deakin University (jamesrwilliams.net).