À l'occasion des dix ans de la mort de Michelangelo Antonioni (le 30 juillet 2017), ce colloque se propose d'interroger la postérité du cinéaste. Une décennie après sa disparition et treize ans après son dernier film (Le Périlleux Enchaînement des choses), comment Antonioni est-il encore présent dans la création artistique et dans la réflexion critique, théorique et universitaire aujourd'hui ?

Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis, Laboratoire ESTCA, Septembre 2017

Argument

For the tenth anniversary of Michelangelo Antonioni's death (July 30th, 2017), this symposium suggests questioning the posterity of the filmmaker. A decade after his passing and thirteen years after his last movie (The Dangerous Thread of Things), how is Antonioni still present in the artistic creation and in critical, theoretical and academic reflection?

With the death of its author, his entire life’s work is "complete", "closed". It becomes a finished product that can be manipulated at will without any "risk" that a new project will come along to force a change in understanding or apprehension. The conclusion of the work triggers the great game of classification, interpretation and justification of the notion of authorship. How does his work resist the fixation imposed by the death of this filmmaker of quiver, metamorphosis, slippage and vanishing points? Can Antonioni’s wish to make movies "with a beginning but maybe without any end" apply to his own complete work to which his death brings, seemingly, an end?

Fragments of answers emerge from numerous contemporary artists who claim the work of Michelangelo Antonioni as a source of inspiration, sometimes in a particularly direct manner (distorted eclisse ǀ model for a video sculpture [after m. antonioni], Peter Welz, installation, 2011; Postscript/Profession reporter, Pierre Bismuth, 1996) or more implicitly (the photographic work of Lewis Baltz, for example). They extend the work beyond its author but especially outside the art of cinema. This free reappropriation of movies as moldable objects questions the construction of what we name – maybe for lack of a more specific term - the posterity of Michelangelo Antonioni. Who constructs the posterity of an artist? What do we choose from an entire art work and from an artist (first fine distinction) to find his posterity in other works? Does the author have to claim to be associated with this artist? Is the work of Antonioni, his esthetic and theoretical proposals, as Jacques Aumont writes, a necessary passage, a form of training for the eye of the spectator and the theorist of today who can now "see Hou Hsiao-hsien, or even Tsai Ming-liang"? How do the recent works renew the perspective on Michelangelo Antonioni’s creation? Does the reconsideration of the art of Antonioni – in terms we need to define – allow it to keep its inherent vibration and uncertainty?

This symposium seeks to instigate a shift of thinking on this work too often fixed in an unambiguous and consensual analysis by inviting new perspectives (from theorists of the cinema or the other arts, but also historians, writers, artists) to explore underused material in a work nevertheless very analyzed: discarded scenes, writings (film reviews and short stories), paintings.

Against themes repeated mechanically since the sixties such as the incommunicability, don’t we need to propose other ways to enter the work, other themes? What about the violence that Raymond Bellour suspects in the movies of the filmmaker? Where in the first movies hides the explicit eroticism of the last ones? What about the vulgarity found in Identification of a Woman? Antonioni is too quickly labelled "filmmaker of the bourgeoisie": what is his relationship to popular culture?

Submission guidelines

The submissions, in French or in English, will be a summary (max. 300 words) and a small bio-bibliographical note of the author. They should be sent to veronique.buyer@gmail.com

until May 21th, 2017.

Selection Committee

• Dork Zabunyan, professeur en études cinématographiques, directeur du laboratoire ESTCA, Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis.
• Nicolas Droin, maître de conférences en études cinématographiques, laboratoire ESTCA, Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis.
• Véronique Buyer, docteure en études cinématographiques, laboratoire ESTCA, Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis.
• Damien Angelloz-Nicoud, doctorant en études cinématographiques, laboratoire ESTCA, Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis.