Concordia's Film Studies Joint Symposium with the University of Pennsylvania

The Film Studies department is initiating an academic alliance with Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. To kick off what we hope will be at least an annual event with UPenn, we'll be hosting a joint PhD Symposium on May 27 here at Concordia (EV-11.705 from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) 

To open this initiative on May 26, Professor Timothy Corrigan from UPenn will present on “Adaptation and the Trembling Ethics of the Real” at the Milieux Resource Centre, EV-11.705 (preceded by a welcome from Rebecca Duclos, Dean of Fine Arts). All events are being organized by the Film and Moving Image studies PhD students.

Abstract of Prof Corrigan's presentation

Dramatizing and problematizing the movement and tension within the adaptation of so-called real or historical events and people foregrounds a central question about ethics and value within adaptation itself—as both a questioning and securing of the assumptions and fath in the power to adapt and appropriate realities. With touchstones in the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy, here I want to look at two recent and extraordinary auto/bio pics--The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2014) and Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012) to see how these film investigate and complicate the real and, in the process, valorize specific relationships to it.

Whereas more conventional adaptations often appear to promote an ethics of the real as what I’ll call self-evident, these films explore the difficult terrain of demarcating the real across the shifting and unstable grounds of uncertain evidence. The word “trembling” in my title comes from Jean-Luc Nancy and I emphasize it to mark this other encounter with the real—in its most provocative and creative state—as something that is there but not there, as evidence that resists adaptation.