Event details

Join filmmaker Johan Grimonprez for this Faber Lecture, presented by the Humanities Council’s Committee for Film Studies and hosted by the Program in Media + Modernity.

Respondent: Yasmina Price (Postdoctoral Research Associate and Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English)

Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it not the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given and who can become a time-traveler of the imagination? Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once coined that we are not made of atoms as scientists say, but that we are actually made of stories. Stories are what hold us together,—or tear us apart, shaping our very idea of belonging. Ironically writer Maurice Blanchot called language an act of murder, because naming things would be identical to killing them. But novelist Alfred Döblin claims exactly the opposite: language, he says, is a form of loving others, language lets us know why we are together. But maybe a more pertinent depiction is Vietnamese filmmaker Trin-Min Ha’s idea of language as a ‘leaking boat’. A lifeboat we are all stuck on together. It’s the disappearing meeting place, but also the same dire biosphere we all share.

By dialoguing about countercultural applications, including our own storytelling in our very art and/or film practice, in what writer Rebecca Solnit claims the “duty of delight’, we can find new, joyful ways of telling, figuring out how we belong together while choreographing new stories we share. Not as victims of the future paralyzed by dystopian nihilism, but to garner new metaphors and untold stories generated by better questions that can invent new languages, “tools for the amazing wonderful possibilities for the terrible realities we face.”