THE FILM-PHIL LISBON SEMINARS: CRISTÓBAL ESCOBAR

Susana Viegas (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

The first Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar in 2025 will be led by Cristóbal Escobar (University of Melbourne and Santiago International Documentary Film Festival) who will talk about “A Classic Never Dies: On Cinematic Intensity and the Contemporary.”

The Zoom session will be held on January 29, 2025, at 10:00 WET / 21:00 AEDT.

ABSTRACT

The dead linger and occasionally reappear as ghostly figures on screen. From their once-living past, they possess the ability to forge new relations in our present, which is a future that mattered to them. To achieve this, the dead require a “medium” that extends their existence, allowing their bodies to be felt once more. Such a medium must therefore traverse time and space, recollecting what has been buried in the past to renovate it into something new in the present. Etymologically, this is the essence of the word contemporaneous, from the Latin con [together with] plus tempor [time]. It suggests a temporal coexistence where past and future merge within the present—hence, a state of “being with” time, rather than a time divided into a “before” and “after”. In this sense, cinema functions as a time machine for the dead—a medium composed of crystalline, overlapping, and contemporaneous realities. This seminar will explore how cinematic intensity emerges through images that dissolve temporal and taxonomical boundaries, blending the classical-old with the modern-new in a continuous flow where filmmaking not only revitalizes itself but also resurrects the dead. As the saying goes, “A classic never dies”, and this persistence of a past into the present is what sustains the intensive-image and allows it to reemerge time and again throughout cinema’s history.

BIO Cristóbal Escobar is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne and a Film Programmer at the Santiago International Documentary Film Festival (FIDOCS). His publications include “The Intensive-Image in Deleuze’s Film-Philosophy” (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), an edited collection on “Cine Cartográfico” (La Fuga Ediciones, 2017), and a forthcoming second volume with Barbara Creed on “Film and the Nonhuman” (University of Exeter Press, 2026).

Note that this lecture will be held uniquely online. Please, register in advance:https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ld-ygqj8iHtZirbtZBe6cBWK-HZDKjS1W. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Funded by the European Union (ERC, FILM AND DEATH, 101088956). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.