Close to the Screen, Close to Reality

Date: 8 April 2015 Time: 4.00 pm

Faculty of Architecture and Design and Film staff and students are invited to a Lecture by Philippe Gauthier from Harvard University:

Close to the Screen, Close to Reality:
Archaeology of ‘Screen Intimacy’ from Cinema to Web Drama

The relationship between fictional worlds described in texts and the everyday reality of the reader/spectator/gamer has been explored mostly through the concept of immersion. Using the concept of intimacy developed in television studies, I argue that the main strategy behind the methods of storytelling implemented in new audiovisual productions such as the webseries Marble Hornets (2009-2014) is not to immerse the spectator into another world but to give the impression of presence of fictional elements into his or her everyday reality.

Inspired by Lev Manovich’s archeology of compositing, my goal is to do an archeology of what I call “screen intimacy”, starting with cinema, through to early television and ending with online drama. I will analyze how online dramas are being shaped by two cultural traditions (cinema and television) and the visual culture
created by new media technologies.

Bio: Dr. Philippe Gauthier is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Visual and Enviromental Studies at Harvard University.

Gauthier had the honor of receiving three international awards for his doctoral work on film historiography (from the international society for the study of early cinema, Domitor, and the Film Studies Association of Canada).

His current research focuses on media archaeology, remediation and philosophy of media history and analyzes the unspoken pas de deux between film, television and new media.