Saturday, December 22 at 12:30 pm
Following the release of Eyal Peretz’s The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame (Stanford University Press, 2017), the author – Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington and the author, among other books, of Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses (Stanford University Press, 2007) – will discuss ideas connected to the book with Irad Kimhi – Associate Professor at the Committee on Social Thought at The University of Chicago and the author of Thinking and Being (Harvard University Press, 2018).
The book starts with the following premise: from the Renaissance on, a new concept of the frame became crucial to a range of artistic media, which in turn are organized around this frame. The frame decontextualizes its contents, cutting everything within it from the continuity of the world and creating a realm we understand as the realm of fiction. The modern theatrical stage, framed paintings, the novel, the cinematic screen – all present us with such framed-off zones.
Naturally, the frame creates a separation between inside and out. But, as Peretz argues, what is outside the frame, offstage, or off screen, remains particularly mysterious. It constitutes the primary enigma of the work of art in the modern age. It is to the historical and conceptual significance of this “off” that this book is dedicated. By focusing on what is outside the frame of a work of art, it offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema from D. W. Griffith to Quentin Tarantino, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the arts in general.
The event will be held in English. Free entrance.
Image: A still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).