*5th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference “Interruptions” Toronto, 

Canada May 8-9, 2020*

**



In a recent essay examining the imperial legacy of the camera, Teju Cole 

writes of the camera as a weapon: “When we speak of ‘shooting’ with a 

camera, we are acknowledging the kinship of photography and violence.” 

Three decades earlier, Toni Morrison asserted in her Nobel Lecture: 

“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; 

does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” 

Both propositions share the same ideas, yet they demand further 

examination. Cole’s comment on the relationship between photography and 

violence was made by a practitioner of photography. Morrison’s 

observation on the relationship between language and violence was 

brought to our attention by a novelist. In each case, the writer focuses 

on the material /and/ social issues intrinsic to the use of a specific 

medium of expression. Refusing to look past the material and social 

conditions of expression, these two interventions allow us to imagine 

and to explore new, subversive paths of creation and criticism. It not a 

coincidence that Cole’s first essay on photography is entirely informed 

by the concept of the blind spot. And it is not a coincidence that 

Morrison’s speech, too, invokes a conjunction of blindness and 

knowledge: “Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.” In 

each case, the creation of images and thoughts stems from a joyous 

failure to comply and an imaginative refusal to go along. The work of 

art conjured in this process is one of generative interruption. In his 

study of the black radical tradition in poetry and music, /In the 

Break/, furthermore, Fred Moten has written of the interruptive power of 

such a poetics: “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that 

objects can and do resist. Blackness — the extended movement of a 

specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that /anarranges/ every line — 

is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of 

personhood and subjectivity.” Moten’s notion of “anarrangment” speaks 

here to the simultaneously disruptive and productive potential of paying 

attention to the social and material conditions of aesthetic forms and 

the radical potentiality inside aesthetic responses to such conditions. 

Both film and philosophy have participated and still participate in 

sustaining systemic oppression. This has taken both overt and covert 

forms of violence and exclusion — each perpetuating the policing of what 

counts as compelling questions to ask, what forms of knowledge matter, 

who is heard and seen, and under what conditions and where a subject can 

appear. And yet, if film has the ability to do philosophy, to question 

itself and its limitations and possibilities, and to pose new problems 

for philosophy, then perhaps film also has the potential to challenge 

its own imperial and oppressive habits and conditions as well. In a 

hegemonic context, the interruption of dominant ways of thinking and 

showing allows for alternative modes of knowledge and imagination, 

subjectivity and being, to emerge. Christina Sharpe, in her recent study 

/In the Wake/, makes a compelling case for what she calls the analytic 

of “wake work,” a theory and a praxis that turns on the imagination’s 

ability to /imagine otherwise/ with and against rupture. Alongside 

Cole’s and Morrison’s important points, in Moten’s and Sharpe’s work we 

discern a certain interruptive gesture that refuses the /work/ of 

normative canons and formations of knowledge, an aesthetics and politics 

of interruption that can both expose the ideological underpinnings and 

assumptions of institutional conjunctions like film and philosophy and 

contribute to new possibilities and spaces for (re)arranging 

subjectivities, communities, and the very legacies and practices of such 

institutions themselves.



For its 5th edition, the Spiral Film and Philosophy conference wants to 

bring the /potential/ of interruption to the forefront. It proposes to 

do so at the confluence of three areas: the epistemological, the 

political, and the aesthetic. What happens to ideas and forms when the 

imagination stumbles? What kinds of resistance emerge when traditional 

representation breaks down? Which modes of belonging do we share when 

the spectacle is suddenly interrupted? What happens when the dynamics of 

domination — in aesthetic, formal, durational, spatial, psychological, 

historical, etc. terms — are rendered inoperative? In the spirit of 

these questions, we challenge all participants to go above and beyond 

the common idea according to which it is “easier to imagine an end to 

the world than an end to capitalism.” We contend that cinema and moving 

images have value, even and especially when they do not work as 

intended, as programmed, or as expected; when they fail, stutter or 

stammer; when they confuse their objects, miss their targets, or 

(suddenly or gradually) fall apart. As such, this call for papers is 

open to but also extends beyond the experience of cinematic rupture. 

Spiral welcomes contributions for 20-minute presentations from scholars, 

artists and practitioners whose work pertains to topics and themes of 

interruptive and inoperative cinema, but also (and not limited to):



  * Postcolonial cinema

  * Towards a destituent cinema

  * Sabotaging the imperial gaze

  * Camera obscura and ideology

  * Militant cinema and activist cinema

  * Evasive cinema and mass surveillance

  * Images moving beyond the Western canon

  * Decommodification and the movie industry

  * Visibility and invisibility: filming the blind spot

  * Anarchaeological practices and the audio-visual

  * Pictures resisting productivity in neoliberal regimes

  * Indigeneity and visual culture in Canada and elsewhere

  * The subversive value of catastrophic failures in visual media

  * Reclaiming speculative vision in the age of the Anthropocene

  * “Anarranging” film grammars and representational economies

  * Failure in algorithmic cinemas and the value of digital artifacts

  * Breaking the status quo regarding representations of climate crisis

  * The virtues of failure in cinematic experimentation and in visual art

  * Queer and trans approaches to cinema aesthetics, history and politics

  * Afrofuturism and indigenous futurism and the reframing of

    science-fiction

  * Alternative imaginaries and histories of cinema as reconfigured

    through radical politics



The confirmed Keynote Speaker is Elizabeth Reich, Assistant Professor, 

Film & Media Studies, in the Department of English at the University of 

Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the intersections of Black Studies, 

digital media, Afrofuturism, and social movements in historical, global, 

and transnational contexts. She is author of Militant Visions: Black 

Soldiers, /Internationalism and the Transformation of American Cinema/ 

(Rutgers, 2016) and her coedited collection, Justice in Time: Critical 

Afrofuturism and the Struggle for Black Freedom, is under contract at 

University of Minnesota Press. She is also coeditor of “New Approaches 

to Cinematic Identification,” a special issue of /Film Criticism/. Her 

next monograph is on time and reparation, and recent essays have 

appeared in /ASAP Journal/, /Film Criticism/, /Screen/, /Post45/, 

/ASAP/J/, /World Records Journal/, and /African American Review/. She is 

also a contributing editor to /ASAP/J/ and serves on the editorial board 

of /Film Criticism/.



The 5th Spiral conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, on Friday, 

May 8 and Saturday, May 9, 2020.



Please send a 350-word abstract, bibliography (5 references max.), 5 

keywords, and biography (with institutional affiliation, if applicable) 

in ONE DOCUMENT and as an EMAIL ATTACHMENT to 

*[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>* 

by Feb. 15, 2020. Notifications about acceptance or rejection of 

proposal will be sent promptly.



Conference Registration Fee



  * Conference Attendance: $100 (Canadian)

  * Graduate Students and Underemployed: $50 (Canadian)



Conference website: *spiralfilmphilosophy.ca 

<http://spiralfilmphilosophy.ca>*

Facebook: *@spiralfilmphilosophy*



Organized by the Spiral Collective in collaboration with the Department 

of Cinema and Media Studies, York University.













----

For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives:

https://listserv.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html