Contact with the Gaze

Seeing a film always means having an encounter: with people and landscapes, historical time periods and snippets of the present, with close confidants and strangers, and – last but not least – with oneself. With its own particular means, film shapes the kind of encounter we have and can therefore enable experiences that we would be unable to have outside of a movie theater. Using clips from documentary, fiction and avant-garde works, in this lecture we will investigate the special characteristics of cinematic encounters to get an idea of how movies can shift our gaze towards the Other and how they are always acting in new ways as an agent between us and the world. (A.B.)

Presented by Alejandro Bachmann