MEDIT Seminar: Contingency in Contemporary American Multi-Protagonist Film – A Film-Philosophical Perspective
Time: April 26, 15:30-17:00
Place: M-439
Abstract
In this talk Teet Teinemaa will explore the multi-protagonist/network narrative film – a film form with several lead characters that has risen to particular prominence since the 1990s, with films such as Short Cuts (Altman, 1993) and Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994), among others, popularising the form. The film form has a tendency to favour contingency as the main organisational device of the film narrative to the more traditional causal connections. Because of this the multi-protagonist film can be seen to hold great philosophical potential. This talk will bring the multi-protagonist film’s interest in contingency together with the thinking of Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek who can also be recognised as granting detailed attention to the notion of contingency.