Strange percepts. Cinematographic configurations of non-human sensibilities

The aim of this conference is to shed light on a phenomenon that is well known, that is recorded in the technical vocabulary (for once) when it refers to certain camera angles or lens types (bird-eye view, fisheye view), but which has yet to be analysed. For decades, very different fiction films, in a variety of contexts, have made room for perceptual propositions that are as irreducible to human perception as they are to any supposedly objective view. Seeing and/or perceiving as a tree, an insect, an animal, or even as a thing, what does this imply, aesthetically, but also ethically and philosophically? The proliferation of recent essays proposing such shifts in perspective as part of an overhaul of ecological thinking, with a view to revising our way of making the world, were in fact preceded a long time ago by sensitive cinematographic proposals in image and sound. The time has come, then, to consider these filmic proposals as a corpus, and to examine their ecological implications, the way in which they were already preparing the advent of new anthropological imaginaries that challenge anthropocentrism. Such is the ambition of this conference, which is already certain to be extended by the publication of an issue of the journal Études Cinématographiques..

Conference organised by Benjamin Thomas, with the support of ACCRA (UR 3402), the Faculty of Arts (University of Strasbourg), ITI Lethica, and the Cosmos cinéma municipal, as part of the activities of the Visual Cultures group.