SEPRO presents:
Mechanical metaphors: transfigurations of technology in Cronenberg’s film VIDEODROME
by Bettina Papenburg
Wends 15th of March 6PM MB 137
The talk shall focus on an analysis of the filmic strategies thatCronenberg deploys for establishing a metaphoric relation between man andmachine. Therefore the examination shall address visual icons and theirinterconnections as materialized fictions that show how both technologyand the human body are transformed and reshaped in the process of theircoupling. Particular attention will be given to the different effects thatthis intimate relationship with technology exerts on the female and on themale body respectively. The ambivalences and ambiguities that are at theheart of these new, technologically informed bodies might point to thenecessity to rework conventional binary frames. Drawing on methods fromstructural myth analysis some selected sequences of the film shall be readclosely in respect of the question, how the various sensual channels playtogether and resonate in the process by which novel meaning is created andcommunicated.
BETTINA PAPENBURG is currently completing her PhD with Peter Köpping atthe Institute of Ethnology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Herinterests revolve around ideas of the monstrous, the grotesque and theludic and their representation in contemporary film. For her thesis shefocuses on the subversive potentials of the grotesque body as it isimagined in the idea of the coupling of man and machine in the films ofthe Canadian director David Cronenberg. Bettina has worked as a filmeditor on productions in Berlin and Rome and has directed a documentary onrituals in Japan. She has taught courses on mythology and film at theUniversity of Heidelberg and has written several articles on theaesthetics of deformation, mechanical desire, monstrosity and technology,and the reconfiguration of the gendered body in film.
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