The Cinema of Displeasure Colloquium
The Cinema of Displeasure colloquium, organized by the 2010-2011 Cinema Studies Institute (CSI) graduate cohort, took place on May 9th and 10th in Innis College’s Town Hall. The cohort sought to explore the recent proliferation of displeasure, in a myriad of forms, as a prominent feature in a wide variety of movies.
Papers were presented by the cohort on a number of different subjects. Among them, to name a handful of examples, were an analysis of the current use of 3-D technologies in mainstream American horror cinema by Denver Wilson; Karly-Lynne Scott’s marriage of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to Internet-based BDSM pornography; and Karrmen Crey’s examination of the counter-hegemonic documentary practices in Alanis Obomsawin’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance.
The colloquium also welcomed papers from outside of the Cinema Studies Institute by Roxanne Samer (University of Southern California), Iona Pelovska (Ryerson University and York University), the duo Ganga Rudraih and Suresh Kumar (University of Western Ontario), Cassandra Silver (University of Toronto), and Tony Fong (University of Toronto). Topics included Pelovska’s study of the relation of pornography and vision in various sociohistorical contexts, as well as Samer’s examination of the feminist practices in the works of Marjorie Keller and Chick Strand.
The Graduate Student Union was grateful to newly appointed graduate faculty member Brian Price, who graciously accepted to be the colloquium’s keynote speaker. Price’s talk, The Inattentive Spectator, explored the philosophical ramifications of displeasure-as-inattentiveness on the part of spectators. The GSU was also appreciative of CINSSU, who made possible the screening of John Waters’ Cecil B. Demented that closed the colloquium.
CSI Graduate Coordinator Professor Corinn Columpar was impressed by the various talks. “I was struck by the extent to which the colloquium itself in its theme and individual participants in their papers foregrounded questions of sensation and emotion, making careful use of those film theorists that have initiated ‘the affective turn’ in film theory,” said Columpar. Ultimately, despite the texts explored, the event itself was anything but displeasurable.
David Hollands
CSI MA student
May 2011