Dériver / Arrivée – FilmNotes: Conversations on the Travelogue
A century of travel in French cinema
Positioned as an inquiry around NUS Museum’s exhibition, “…you have to lose your way to find yourself in the right place” Selected Works by Gilles Massot, this four-part film series reflects on a century of journeys as presented within the French consciousness, where identity and itinerancy are twin notions that lay the tracks for such sojourns across fictional lands and foreign spaces.
The title takes its cue from Derrida and Malabou’s analysis of the voyage as a matter of “deriving and arriving” and examines the exhibition’s titular trajectory, picking out “…you have to lose your way” as a premise of dériver (to leave the shore), that stands in ambivalent relation to its conclusion “to find yourself in the right place”, the arrivée (to reach the shore). In an attempt to articulate the slippages that occur between these two states where derivations and driftings may reach a destination anticipated or unexpected, the films presented meander through the sentiments of play, travel and art-making, arriving eventually at the dialectics of cultural baggage, socio-political dynamics and memory.
This roundtable is limited to 30 participants who are encouraged to actively engage in discussions. Register now to receive all relevant reading and video material before the event, and to secure a spot.
How have accounts of sojourns shaped our modern consciousness of the world and our identities? Can new meanings and voices emerge from the interstices between cinematic, photographic and textual elements? Using Gilles Massot’s video work Meeting in Macau (2019) as a point of departure, placed in conversation with Nocture Indien directed by Alain Corneau, this roundtable examines the travelogue as a medium that has characterised the politics of representation overt the course of history, as well as a process in which narrative can emerge from a bricolage of intertextual materials.
To think about these shifting modes of representation, this iteration of FilmNotes engages Dr Tania Roy alongside Dr Anne Thell and curator Hsu Fang-Tze who will draw on discourse inherent to accounts on sojourns such as recapitulations of the self, hermeneutics, ideology, post-colonial consumptions of Asia, and self imposed amnesia. Framed as an open discussion with participants, the dialogic space is amenable to new threads of conversaion that will hopefully illuminate and reify perspectives on foreignness and the ambiguities of identity.
Free admission upon registration on : https://deriverarrivee.peatix.com/
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