Film Screening, April 19th, 2018
THE BLINDSPOT MACHINE: HOW TO FILM THE FUTURE
Featuring the work of Eric Cazdyn using his blindspot camera.
5pm-6:30pm, Friedl 107, Duke East Campus
THE BLINDSPOT MACHINE: HOW TO FILM THE FUTURE
This presentation will develop Eric Cazdyn’s ongoing exploration of the blindspot. The blindspot can be conceptualized in many ways (from the unrepresentable to the impossible), but is usually understood as something missing, as something to be exposed or concealed. Cazdyn argues that the dominant ideology of the blindspot today (from culture to politics to academia) is the deadliest weapon used by those in power (justifying everything from war to environmental destruction to psychological suffering). To develop this critique, Cazdyn has built what he calls a “Blindspot Machine”–a rotating rig consisting of four cameras, that, instead of exposing blindspots produces a new theory of the blindspot itself…one that can be mobilized as a unifying principle of radical film, politics, and intellectual work. In this iteration of the Blindspot Machine project, Cazdyn will screen his newest film (The Blindspot Variations IV, shot in Italy), accompanied by a live lecture that connects the problem of the blindspot to cinema, surveillance, forensic desire, the refugee crisis, theories of temporality (including the Buddhist category of Ma, or negative time-space) as well as to the relation between theory and practice itself.
Presenter Biography
Eric Cazdyn is a professor at the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of East Asian Studies. He has written the following books: The Already Dead (Duke 2012); After Globalization (with Imre Szeman, Wiley-Blackwell 2011); The Flash of Capital (Duke 2002); and is editor of Trespasses (Duke 2010). In his most recent book, Nothing (with Marcus Boon and Timothy Morton, University of Chicago Press 2015), Cazdyn re-thinks the concept of praxis within Buddhism, Marxism and Psychoanalysis. Cazdyn is also a filmmaker and over the past five years has been engaged in a multi-faceted project called “The Blindspot Variations,” that experiments with the live-essay-film.
