Sharing this as some may be interested in attending, but also because it is an example of how what we’ve been doing is now appearing in lots of different contexts and practices.

Screen Studies Seminar Series – Thursday, 18th of May 4.30
Linkway, John Medley Building, Level 4,
University of Melbourne.

Jane Madsen ‘Film poetics: material and spatial practice[s]’
Experimental Film

I was walking back to the city, lost in my own thoughts, through an arched gate. Why, I asked myself, does this arch not collapse, since after all it has no support? It remains standing, I answered, because all the stones tend to collapse at the same time – and from this thought I derived an indescribably heartening consolation, which stayed by me right up to the decisive moment: I too would not collapse, even if all my support were removed!
(Heinrich von Kleist to Wilhelmine von Zenge, November 1800)

The thinking and making of my practice can be characterized as a poetic filmmaking of collapse. The initial aim of my film practice in the early stages of this research project was to develop, work with and demonstrate a visual equivalent or manifestation of the concept of collapse originating from reading Kleist.

This has been achieved through working with the idea that the materiality of collapse as a poetic is visual, literary, historical, spatial, architectural and philosophical, and that making films and videos is a constituent component of that interdisciplinary practice. The concept of collapse is intellectual and material.

The concept of collapse is explored and shown in experimental practices of moving image using 16mm film and digital video, stills and animation as visual poetics, demonstrated by situating and focussing the practice at Portland. The 16mm films made at Portland explore collapse as a visual poetic through the transience of film and its disappearance as a collapsing technology.

Dr Jane Madsen

Jane Madsen is an artist and writer working in moving image; her work includes experimental films, installation and documentary. She has an MA in Fine Art from Middlesex University and a PhD in Architectural Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture with practice supervised by the Slade School of Fine Art. She has exhibited widely and written and published articles on film and art. In her film, video and installation practice the main themes are: home, place, territory and architecture/s.