Edinburgh Film Seminar: Dr Felicity Colman

Materialist practices and theories seek to account for the reality of things in the world as comprised of constructed, material things, determined not just by social and political agendas but also by biological and geophysical, chemical matter. This paper maps out some of the key practices that we can understand as being driven by an interest in materialist investigation into the moving image – thinkers and makers of film including Sigfried Kracauer, Peter Gidal, Agnes Varda, Richard Serra, Annette Kuhn, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Sean Cubitt, Andrea Arnold, Bernard Stiegler, Joanna Hogg, Sophia Coppola. The paper asks can materialist analyses avoid the instrumentality of intention that film theories can thrust upon the reader, and instead offer a more holistic evaluation of the screen ecology?

Dr Colman’s area of practice is the research, teaching, and writing of philosophies of film and media forms, with a focus on feminist epistemologies, and new materialist cultural and media theories. Felicity has worked in the arts industries and has been teaching and researching at Universities and in Public Art Galleries for over 20 years. Dr Colman is the author of Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar(2014 CUP), Deleuze and Cinema (2011 Berg) and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Acumen Publishing 2009), co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (Cambridge Scholars Press 2007). She is working on several publishing projects, including monographs on “Digital Feminicity” and “The Material Image: Media After Bergson”, and she is working on a co-edited Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Film.