Under the “Eye of the Sun” (ekleipsis): A Talk by Akira Mizuta Lippit
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.
Bio
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.
Accessibility
- Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
- For elevator access, RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
- e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.
Time: 7:00 pm EST
Free!
