News Archive
The Imagination-Image Professor Sarah Cooper (King's College London)
Monday 13 February 2017 at 4pm in the CACSSS Seminar Room, G27, Ground Floor, O'Rahilly Building
In this paper I reflect on the image-making capacity of the imagination with reference to the work of Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Godard, distinguishing this activity from broader audio-visual thinking. I draw upon Gilbert Simondon’s philosophical understanding of images in order to explore the spaces these directors create for imagining their films. Images, less limpid than concepts, both objective and subjective, coming and going like phantom presences, but nonetheless crucial to psychic and social life, provide the foundation here for a film philosophical dialogue through which I outline the formation of what I term ‘imagination-images’ between film and spectator.
Sarah Cooper is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her books include Selfless Cinema?: Ethics and French Documentary (Oxford: Legenda, 2006); Chris Marker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); and The Soul of Film Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013). She has also edited a special issue of the journal Film-Philosophy, ‘The Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema’ (vol. 11, no. 2, 2007). Currently she is writing a book on film and the imagination.