On Thursday, March 21, 2019, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in lecture hall 10011 on the Jacob-Bellecombette campus, the Languages, Literatures, Societies, Cross-Border and International Studies (LLSETI) laboratory will hold a study day on "Smartphones and cinema."
This event is co-organized by Anaïs Guilet, lecturer in comparative literature at LLSETI at the University of Savoie Mont Blanc, and Corinne Melin, professor of contemporary art history and aesthetics at the École Supérieure d'Art et de Design des Pyrénées in Pau-Tarbes.
The study day will be preceded on March 20, 2019, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., by a screening of the film Attack the Sun, attended by Fabien Zocco, one of the directors.
About the study day
Guardians of our nights, resting on our bedside tables, snuggled close to us in our pockets, effective guides for all our journeys, so-called smart/connected cell phones have become companions in our daily lives. In this way, they fundamentally change our relationship to space and time, and transform our cognitive and cultural practices and, consequently, our ways of thinking and acting. Naturally, this omnipresence cannot fail to appeal to artists, writers, and filmmakers. If, for David Shields in Reality Hunger, literature is "hungry for reality," the same is true for cinema, which in turn seeks to represent the individual in the throes of this hypermodernity, as noted by Nicole Aubert in the title of the book she edited in 2006.
In the films that will be of interest to us during this study day, smartphones are not just a referential object. They prompt in-depth reflection on the consequences of the hypermodernity they represent, the effects they have on contemporary individuals, their place in the world, and their relationships with others.
The aim of this day will be to examine how cinema reveals and questions the extent to which telephones shape our daily experiences while also shaping our mental representations.
Through the analysis of contemporary films, we will examine the unique representations of smartphones, which have the specific feature of allowing their users to be mobile and connected, and offer another screen as an interface. This new screen—which may be seen as competing with that of cinema—has established itself as a new place of reflexivity through the screen-within-a-screen effect that characterizes it. At the same time, it constitutes a window onto a new off-screen space for cinema, both in aesthetic terms and in terms of the philosophical, sociological and even anthropological issues to which its "narrative use" refers. Cinema clearly demonstrates that the banality and familiarity of smartphones/connected phones are as misleading as they are full of future narratives about the imaginaries associated with their representations.
This study day will be published inESADP's online art and design magazine,échappées.
Learn more
- Free admission
- Facebook page for the study day
- Contact: Anaïs Guillet, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at LLSETI