More Than Personal: Self-Portraiture & Auto-Perceptive Screens

A lecture by Nadine Boljkovac, CTM Fellow

“Inscribed within Chantal Akerman’s 2015 No Home Movie, Michael Haneke’s 2012 Amour and Philip Hoffman’s 2001 What These Ashes Wanted are experiences of transience and home, illness and mourning. And yet, poignantly persistent throughout these works are also flashes and images of enduring life and duration that emerge via instances of filmic self-portraiture and self-perception. These particular moments function as temporal cracks or materialised disruptions. While they render visible invisible strains and dimensions of pain, grief and loss, the brief fissures embody living portraits of both the deceased and the ‘living’ (the late filmmaker/motherless daughter, grieving partner, beleaguered widower) that attest not only to cruel actual separations between loved ones but also an endless process of distanciation from one’s former self. Such momentary glimpses of other worlds within the films, as enacted via seconds of self-portraiture and self-perception, reveal possibilities for difference as they envision alternative trajectories and futures – especially for the women of these works – with reverberations that long linger. Through an auto-perceptive screen, these processes materialise, fragment and liberate these already dead and endlessly dying women…”

Nadine Boljkovac is Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University. She is an August-October 2018 Visiting Fellow of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, and the recipient of a University of Cologne 2018-19 Research Fellowship (Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies). Boljkovac was a University of New South Wales 2015-17 Postdoctoral Fellow (Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia), the Brown University 2012-13 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow (Pembroke Center for Teaching & Research on Women), a University of Edinburgh 2010 Postdoctoral Fellow (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities) and University of Aberdeen 2009-10 Film Teaching Fellow. Her monograph examining affect and ethics via Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (Edinburgh University Press 2013), was reissued in paperback in 2015. A second monograph is in progress, Beyond Herself: Feminist (Auto)Portraiture and the Moving Image. Most recent peer-reviewed works appear in ‘Materialising Absence in Film and Media’ (a 2018 Special Dossier, co-editors Saige Walton and Nadine Boljkovac for Screening the Past: A Peer-Reviewed Journal of Screen History, Theory & Criticism); The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory (editors Tom Conley and Hunter Vaughan, 2018); and On Style: Transdisciplinary Articulations (editor Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank, 2018).

Event took place on October 16 at 6pm at Parsons 25 East 13th street, ‘Glass Box’ room E206, second floor.