The Discipline of Film Studies at the University of Sydney is proud to present Dr. Michelle Menzies, who will speak on "Media Aesthetics: Bergson, Lumière, Marey."

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Michelle Menzies, "Media Aesthetics: Bergson, Lumière, Marey"

Media determine our situation, per a crystalline diagnostic by the German philosopher Friedrich Kittler. If so, the history and theory of media aesthetics subtend the form and logic of contemporary aesthetics per se. This discourse of ‘media aesthetics’ (a term coined by the Chicago film historian Miriam Hansen) has been understood to emerge from the work of the Frankfurt School, coalescing in the post-war environs of French post-Structuralism. But in this lecture I relocate its origin story to Paris in the nineteenth century fin de siècle. It was there that a young Henri Bergson viewed an inaugural public screening of the French Lumière cinema: a cognized and radioactive encounter that generated an enormously influential ‘Bergsonian’ aesthetic vocabulary. My argument, drawn from a current book project, benches the methodology implicit in Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Bergson in the Cinema books (1983, 1985). Instead I refocus the stakes of the primary encounter between ‘the first films’ and the twentieth century’s preeminent philosopher of movement through the disciplinary history of film. The intentionality guiding Bergson’s engagement with the new media of his time must be explicitly historicized if his confounding injunction against the cinema in Creative Evolution (1907) is to be grasped in its full complexity and persistent descriptive latency.

Michelle Menzies is a media theorist, art critic, and historian of film & photography. Her research interrogates the status of technical mediation within the history of ideas, considered simultaneously as a mode of aesthetic experience, a phenomenological determinant, and an epistemological construct. She is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne and an independent curator. Current projects include a monograph-in-progress Bergson and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Movement; archival research on the Lumière Company, Len Lye, and Frank O’Hara; and exhibition development focused on the oeuvres of three living artists: Diana Thater, Anthony McCall, and Ken (& Flo) Jacobs.

Cover Image: Lumière Company, frames from Dublin. Departure from the station. Panaroma [Dublin, Départ de la gare. Panorama]. 1897. 35mm, b&w, silent. France. Cameraperson: Jean Alexandre Louis Promio. Collection of the Institut Lumière, Lyon.