Philosophy, Politics and Film: a season of film screenings at CSM

Open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students, this Philosophy, Politics and Film series comprises screenings of five films, each introduced by a member of staff on the MRes: Art Theory & Philosophy course at CSM.

The films range over movies made in Hungary, Iraq, Mauritania, Taiwan and North America . They are notable for their formal innovations and for raising political issues and debates relevant to the post-colonial era.

The aim is to open up thinking and discussion, sharing ideas across the community of courses in CSM. Please come along!

The screenings are linked to recommended texts which you may like to read in connection with each film.

Med Hondo, Soleil Ô (1970)

Thursday 27 April, 6.15 pm. E002

Introduced by Dr Alex Fletcher

The first feature of Mauritanian-French film and theatre director Med Hondo (1936-2019), Soleil Ô tells the semi-autobiographical story of an African immigrant who arrives in Paris with the dream of making a better life for himself in the postcolonial metropole. Inspired by theories of neo-colonialism and Pan-Africanism, and deploying experimental and hybrid aesthetic techniques and narrative forms, the film confronts a world still haunted by the spectres of Europe’s colonial past.

Recommended reading:

Aboubaker Sanogo, ‘The Indocile Image: Cinema and History in Med Hondo’s Soleil O  and Les Bicots-Nègres, Vos Voisins’, Rethinking History, vol. 19, issue 4 (2015), pp. 548-568. Login using your UAL username and password.

Tsai Ming-liang, The Hole (1998)

Thursday 4 May, 6.15 pm, E002

Introduced by Dr Alex Fletcher

Set in a rain-deluged Taipei during the final days of the last millennium, Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole depicts a city beset by a mysterious contagious epidemic and a government shutdown of the water supply to quarantine zones. Combining deadpan long takes with unmotivated musical interludes, the film explores themes of social alienation, gender and ecological crisis.

Recommended reading:

Kai-man Chang, ‘Gender Hierarchy and Environmental Crisis in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole’, Film Criticism, vol. 33, no. 1 (2008), pp. 25-44. Log in using your UAL username and password.

Béla Tarr, Damnation (1988)

Thursday 11 May, 6.15 pm. E002

Introduced by Dr Elzbieta Buslowska

Damnation tells a ‘noir story’ of a depressed man in love with a married woman who sings at the local bar, Titanik, where life’s hopelessness and despair mingle with dry humour in the excruciating beauty of cinema.

Recommended reading:

Virginia Woolf (1926), ‘The Cinema’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4. 1925-1928, Ed. Andrew McNeillie, Harvest Books 2008

Available at:

https://www.scribd.com/document/216600563/Virginia-Woolf-The-Cinema-1926# and

https://kaligramma.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-cinema-virginia-woolf.html

Werner Herzog, Lessons of Darkness (1992)

Thursday 18 May, 6.15 pm. E002

Introduced by Dr Elzbieta Buslowska

Lessons of Darkness is a documentary of sorts which the director calls 'a poetical science-fiction.' It films the burning oil fields set on fire by retreating Iraqi troops during the last days of the Gulf War, capturing the destruction, tragedy and beauty in an almost single shot.

Recommended reading:

Virginia Woolf (1926), ‘The Cinema’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4. 1925-1928, Ed. Andrew McNeillie, Harvest Books 2008

Available at:

https://www.scribd.com/document/216600563/Virginia-Woolf-The-Cinema-1926# and

https://kaligramma.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-cinema-virginia-woolf.html

David Prior, The Empty Man (2020)

Monday, 22 May, 6.00 pm. E002

Introduced by Christopher Kul-Want

The Empty Man is a supernatural horror film about a former cop who, in the process of investigating the disappearance of a teen girl, stumbles upon an occult group engaged in the practice of summoning a ‘tulpa’ – a being that is created through the collective mental powers of the imagination and which acts as a medium of self-transformation.

Recommended reading

A quote by one of the characters in the film, Amanda, describing the tulpa:

"I like to think of him as a carrier. Because he’s like a disease, in a way. But he’s also like a carrier signal, you know? Modulated by an input signal. He transmits, we receive. And his message is contagious."