Online event to be held on March 27th 2021: 1400-18.45 GMT

5 CPD Points Awarded

In 2020 we have witnessed the fall of the cinematic ‘big’ screen, as prohibitions on group events and performative collective spaces closed our movie theatres for the first time in the history of cinema. At the same time we have experienced the unprecedented rise of the ‘small screen’ within our domestic, work, and intimate spaces. For most of us, lives have been lived and mediated by and through the prism of multiple small screens. Our work, our play, our education, and our sublimation have taken place in and over a variety of modalities such as Zoom and Team meetings, and on software applications such as Skype, Whatsapp, and Telegram.

In lieu of a film festival in 2021 the Irish Film Festival team supported by APPI and IFPP is organising a special conference event which seeks to question and discuss how the shifting of screens, the displacement of the cinema screen onto the small one(s), has impacted our aesthetic and subjective desires. If, as Žižek puts it, cinema teaches us how to desire, we ask what does the small screen in its various shapes and sizes do?

What bodily and psychic effects are incurred through alternate viewing experiences, if any, that frame or precipitate the human being as a captivated subject both within and on the screen? Why, as a nation, have we been riveted during lockdown watching poignant small screen productions such as Normal People? Is it perhaps that like Conor and Marianne, we are now unable to go to sleep without “leaving the Skype on”?

Schedule: All TImes GMT

2pm Welcome

2.10pm Panel 1: Corona Vision(s) – cough, cough, breathe, don’t breathe

Chair: Carol Owens

Patricia Gherovici and Jamieson Webster: “Take a breather”

Miles Link: “Crying on screen”

Robert Kilroy: “Zooming with Freud: Screen contagion in the shadow of Covid19”

3.40-3.50pm: Break -

3.50pm – 5.30pm Panel 2: Small Screens – altered images

Chair: Marie Walshe

Carol Owens and Eve Watson in conversation: “Lacan on the Telly; Psychoanalysis on the small screen(s)”

Sarah Meehan O'Callaghan: “Stay home, stay safe, watch TV: Passivity and its vicissitudes

Don Kunze and Anahita Shadkam: “Is the Alethosphere not the perfect place to hold a pandemic?”

5.30pm-5.45pm :Break

5.45pm-6.45pm: Roundtable Discussion - Looping psychoanalysis into film – Guest Discussant: Ian Parker

Chair: Barbara Fitzgerald