If poetry, as Maurice Blanchot writes, is that which always eludes philosophical questioning, what philosophy of history could emerge from thinking with the poetic cinemas of the Global South? 

Time lies at the origin of both poetry and cinema—two art forms deeply rooted in the temporal folding and unfolding of words and images. This seminar explores the folds of time in the poetic cinemas of the Global South. By poetic cinema, we refer to expressive forms of filmmaking that seek to emancipate cinema from its representational functions. Inspired by works of filmmakers and artists such as Glauber Rocha, Sergei Parajanov, Ritwik Ghatak, Férydoun Rahnéma, Forugh Farrokhzad, Mona Hatoum, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, among others, this understanding of the cinema of poetry celebrates excesses of meaning, proposes forms of self-reflexivity that foreground the materiality of the medium, literalizes the metaphorical, and invites poetic performances that unsettle the conventions of narrative cinema. 

In thinking between poetry and cinema, we also seek to investigate the politics of rhythm in the cinemas of the Global South. By rhythm, we refer to the revitalization of the pre-Socratic notion of rhuthmos as a manner of flowing, always open to contingency, in the writings of Emile Benveniste, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and, more recently, Domietta Torlasco. What alternative notions and theories of rhythm emerge in the works of filmmakers outside the purview of Western cinematic traditions? Colonial modernity constituted its subject based on a regulated rhythm, often tied to questions of labor, where rhythm is an ordered and orderly movement and the promise of a return in a pattern. How do poetic films, produced under conditions of (post)coloniality, challenge the structures of modernity imposed on forms of life in the singular? How to approach the specters of pre-colonial past and post-colonial Other in these films? What politics of memory and forgetting, of absence and presence, are at work and how do these politics affect ciné-poetic narratives of selfhood?

We are looking for articles that explore these questions and examine the stakes of filmmaking in the Global South. The seminar is open to submissions that reflect on a wide range of filmic practices (narrative, experimental, new media, etc.) and geographies. Possible topics include:

• Rhythm and Poetic Temporality in Film


• Indigenous and Decolonial Epistemologies in the Cinema of Poetry


• Poetry and New Wave Cinemas Across the World


• The Figure/Specter of the Poet in Cinema


• Experimental Cinema and Poetic Techniques of Inflecting Time


• Poetry and the Interrogation of Historical Narratives in Film


• Ciné-Poetic Constructions of Self and Other


• The Poetics of Performance in the Cinemas of the Global South