Critique of Calculation. Labour, Productivity, Limits and Love in Dogville

I propose to interpret Lars Von Trier's Dogville (2003) as a film that continues with a philosophical tradition of critique of reification in contemporary capitalism. I thus explore notions of labour, productivity and limit in the film as part of an artistic project aimed at creating an image of total calculation or calculative cinema.
- Nicolas Lema

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Spectres of the Past: Documentary Evidence and Poetics at the End of the Cultural Revolution (1976-1981)

Drawing from the speaker’s book project on socialist documentary in China, this presentation examines how documentary cinema during the immediate years after the Chinese Cultural Revolution participated in the public trials of the “Gang of Four” as well as in the rehabilitation campaigns that corrected wrong verdicts and restored persecuted cadre to previous status and position. This period’s heightened interest in history and justice brought new appreciations to documentary images’ deep bond to the physical and historical world, and its potency to reverse time, resurrect the dead, and revise history.  As both visible evidence and spectre from the past, documentary images during 1976-1981 helped articulate an empirical epistemology, a new historical agency of bearing witness, and a poetics of mourning that did not sever the past but kept revisiting it to illuminate the present and the future.   – Ying Qian

Nicolas Lema holds a double degree in History and Aesthetics. He completed honours in Ancient Greek last year and is currently completing honours in Philosophy at ANU.  

Ying Qian is a Post-doctoral Fellow with the Australian Centre on China in the World, ANU.  She received her doctoral degree from Harvard University in Chinese history with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies.  She is now revising her dissertation “Visionary Realities: Documentary Cinema in Socialist China” for book publication, while starting a new research project on the history of photography and cinema in China’s multi-ethnic border regions.