What do we see if we attune our vision to waves rather than rays, diffraction – superimpositions of and interferences between images – rather than reflection? This seminar investigates the aesthetic and political shifts that occur when cinematic practices, old and new, privilege difference, errantry, momentum in their worldmaking activity. Here the term quantum expresses the attempt to move beyond the constraints of classical physics and see/think/feel in relation to indeterminacy and the world’s constitutive potential to be other than what it is. We will consider sci-fi and experimental films and readings in film-philosophy, new materialisms, and Afrofuturism, while also asking questions of truth, evidence, and historicity.
Seminar 1 – The Wave and the Index
- Read: Karen Barad, “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable,” New Formations 92 (2017): 56–86.
- Read: Karen Barad, “What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice,” in Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
- View: Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972, 166 min)
Seminar 2 – Montage as Cinematography
- Read: Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture,” trans. by Michael Glenny. Assemblage, No. 10 (December 1989): 110-131.
- Read: Lakshmi Padmanabhan, ed., Forms of Errantry (New York: UnionDocs Editions, 2024).
- View: This House (Miryam Charles, 2022, 75 min)
Seminar 3 – Theory Underwater
- Read: John Akomfrah, “Digitopia and the Specters of Diaspora,” Journal of Media Practice 11, no. 1 (2010): 21–29.
- Read: Domietta Torlasco, “Vertigo Sea: Suspension, Errantry, Flesh,” Liquid Blackness: Journal of Aesthetics and Black Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (October 2023)
- View: Theory Underwater (Domietta Torlasco, 2026, 19 min)
Lecture
Quantum Cinema: For a New Politics of Location
Film and photography have traditionally been understood as media of indexicality, capable of providing a veritable trace of what is in front of the camera. The camera, especially in its mechanical version, has long been hailed as the guarantor of evidence. Even today, audiovisual recordings hold the power to bear witness to momentous but otherwise fugitive events. On the other hand, new technologies – from Augmented Reality (AR) to Artificial Intelligence (AI) – seem to erode or even undo this capacity to record what really happened in a specific place at a specific point in time. This lecture is an invitation to step back and ask what we mean by location – to move beyond the constraints of classical physics and explore cinema’s historical capacity to bear witness to a more complex reality. What claims of truth and justice can be made in this other location opened up by technology? How can we reconceive of our responsibility as both spectators and makers of images?
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Session 1
Mon, Oct 5, 20265:00 pm to 7:00 pm -
Session 2
Tue, Oct 6, 20265:00 pm to 7:00 pm -
Session 3
Wed, Oct 7, 20265:00 pm to 7:00 pm -
Lecture
Thu, Oct 8, 20265:00 pm
Domietta Torlasco is a critical theorist and filmmaker. She is core faculty in the Comparative Literary Studies Program and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Radio/Television/Film. She graduated in Semiotics at the University of Bologna and, after receiving a doctorate from UC Berkeley, she completed an MFA in Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 2003 to 2007 she was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
Torlasco’s research and teaching interests include critical theory, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, feminist/queer theory, as well as Italian and French cinema, science fiction and noir in film and literature, and time-based media arts. She is the author of three books on memory and technology, life and labor, queer materialities, and cinema’s potential to reimagine histories and forms of life: The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (Stanford University Press, 2008), The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Her articles have appeared in several journals, including Camera Obscura, Discourse, and World Picture, and edited collections, most recently the Oxford Handbook of Film Theory. She is currently completing a book that comprises critical essays and outlines for film scripts, titled More Life: An Essay on Memory, Matter, and Race. She is also at work on a book that reframes classic and modern theories of montage in the context of the contemporary image economy.
Torlasco’s video essays explore questions of domestic labor, borders, surveillance, and debt. In these experimental pieces, Torlasco often makes use of a split screen and layers archival footage, personal interviews, and silent portraits to document experiences of entrapment and endurance. Her essays have appeared in online journals and screened at national and international venues, including the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She has recently curated the AV Essay section of the journal NECSUS, titled “The Impersonal Essay, or Montage as Memory of the World.”