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.