Join us for this year’s Working Papers on the Visible City Series: scholarly works in progress, presented in a casual salon setting in the spirit ofcollegial feedback.

2012 Theme: Cinema and Media

Wednesday January 25, 2012 4PM-6PM

Hosted at Free Times Cafe, 320 College Street, Toront

Dr. Nadine Boljkovac, Cambridge University

"Signs Without Name: An exploration of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982)"

This paper argues that Marker’s Sans Soleil derives its affective force from doublings and ‘faces’ of horror and beauty that reveal a twofold synthesis of actual and virtual. While a focus upon the material, ever in relation to transient yet lingering sensations, cannot discharge the power and force of the film, this paper endeavours nevertheless to assess and evoke Marker and Gilles Deleuze’s own interrogative methods that thoroughly explore, in the manner of a revelatory “schizoanalysis” or empiricism, molecular and variable operations beneath our molar structures and organisations. As Sans Soleil's voiceover states, “If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black,” a provocative remark that invokes indefinable singularities and the darkness of a wound, cracking of time and splitting of self in film, life and death. Considerations of death, consciousness and subjectivity extend this paper’s examinations.