Published: May 10, 2025; Aithor: Julia Sonrisa
Address: 172 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205, United States
Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, May 20, for Under the “Eye of the Sun” (ekleipsis) by Akira Mizuta Lippit.
This talk considers eclipses as a trope for theorizing cinema. What occurs during an eclipse — solar or lunar — and what are its effects, both actual and imagined? Why have eclipses held such enduring sway over the human imagination across history? A part of an early-stage inquiry, this talk moves from a reflection on eclipses as planetary and light phenomena to their effects on time, particularly the way they disturb the balance between day and night. En route to imagining a planetary cinema, it also considers translation and the myth of the Tower of Babel.
Ultimately, the talk seeks to explore the light effects produced by eclipses — specifically, the penumbra, a dark within dark, and the line at the edge of darkness (shadows) — as phenomena that might illuminate a primordial, elemental, and perhaps even universal myth of the founding of cinema.
This event is part of the ongoing lecture series Film Beyond Film: Art and the Moving Image at e-flux Screening Room by researchers whose work has formed the discourse at the intersection of art and cinema, situating moving-image within broader aesthetic, political, and economic contexts.
Akira Mizuta Lippit teaches literature and film at the University of Southern California. He is the author of four books, Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016); Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)( 2005); and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000). Lippit is presently completing a book on the nonexistence of Japanese cinema and another on David Lynch’s baroque alphabetics.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Time: 7:00 pm EST
Free!
Detailed information and discussion of the event.