Dr. Utterson, Assistant Professor of Screen Studies, recently presented at an annual film and philosophy conference organized by York University. This year’s special topic was ‘Love and Death.’

05/16/17

Contributed by Stephen Tropiano

In a paper entitled ‘Cinephilia in the z-Dimension: Jean-Luc Godard’s Intertextual Vectors of Love and Death,’ he spoke on how the recent 3D films of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard engage ideas on death espoused by French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas (‘Bad Conscience and the Inexorable’) and in turn Jacques Derrida (The Gift of DeathAdieu to Emmanuel Levinas).

Derrida’s 1995 funereal eulogy to Levinas, titled simply ‘Adieu,’ for example, offers a useful model for thinking through Godard’s own repeated proclamations of the metaphorical ‘death’ of cinema, most recently expressed as a Levinasian ‘adieu’ in his 2014 film Adieu au langage(Goodbye to Language). 

For Levinas, and later Derrida, the 'adieu' of death is not a finality––and so too in the instance of Godard’s experiments with 3D cinema, films that reflexively bid ‘adieu’ to existing conceptions of cinema to in turn reframe the medium, literally and metaphorically, through the 3D image.

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https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20170516174442812