Language, Place, and the Politics of Presence

Film is often referred to as a kind of language. In some cases, film’s relationship to language helps articulate techniques that travel through the history and present of cinematic form. But unlike language, film cannot be broken down into discrete units–words, letters, etc.–and turned into a comprehensive linguistic system. Film is bound to the real. It absorbs and recontextualizes a multisensorial world of many overlapping dimensions: linguistic, corporeal, technological, environmental, infrastructural, all woven together in ways that resist clear categorization. Film’s relationship to language is not simply a theoretical or technical problem, it informs our whole approach to film and its social, environmental, and political roles.

I was taught to understand language as the innovation that most clearly distinguishes the human from the environment. Against this common idea, David Abram’s now classic book The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), presents an expansive historical and philosophical study of early language systems to argue that it is the other way around: language is the means by which the environment speaks through the human body.

This two day workshop explores Abram’s position as a profoundly cinematic problem. Across contemporary and historical work, we explore film as a means of environmental expression. But this is not an idealized view of embodiment and contingency. Film emerged as the quintessential technology of industrial modernity, and has continued to evolve on the troubled threshold between the body and its surroundings. For this reason, film is particularly able to show the post industrialized experience of place, where the continuous rupture, dissociation, possession, impersonation of reality all participate in and sculpt the real.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Chapter 4
Erika Balsom, Reality Based Community
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: Chapter 1
Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film
Hal Foster, Real Fictions: Alternatives to Alternative Facts

Dorian Jespers, Sun Dog (2020)
Pham Thien An, Stay Awake Be Ready (2019)
Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer, Nosferasta (2022)
Morgan Quaintance, South (2020)
Morgan Quaintance, Surviving You Always (2021)
Sky Hopinka, Visions of an Island (2016)
Gerard Ortin Castelvi, Agrilogistics (2022)
Roberto Minervini, The Damned (2024)
Heiny Srour, Leila and the Wolves (1984)
Abbas Kiarostami, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)
Brett Story, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016)
Carla Simon, Alcarras (2022)
Caroline Monnet, Mobilize (2015)
John Wilson, How to With John Wilson (2022)
Deborah Stratman, O’er the Land (2008)
Walter Ruttmann, Berlin: Symphony of a City (1926)
Aleksander Dovzhenko, Earth (1930)
RaMell Ross, Hale County This Morning This Evening (2018)
Nicholas Roeg, Walkabout (1971)
Jenny Brady, Receiver (2019)
Jumana Manna, Foragers (2022)
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, This is Not a Burial It’s a Resurrection (2019)

Dates: 26 + 27 February 2026
Times: 10:00—18:00
Venue: Pianofabriek (rue du Fort 35, 1060 Brussels)

Tickets: €30 at the door (limited availability, booking is required at soundimageculture@gmail.com)