Film Studies Faber Lecture: “Every Day Words Disappear”

Join filmmaker Johan Grimonprez for this Faber Lecture, presented by the Humanities Council’s Committee for Film Studies and hosted by the Program in Media + Modernity.

Respondent: Yasmina Price (Postdoctoral Research Associate and Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English)

Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it not the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given and who can become a time-traveler of the imagination? Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once coined that we are not made of atoms as scientists say, but that we are actually made of stories. Stories are what hold us together,—or tear us apart, shaping our very idea of belonging. Ironically writer Maurice Blanchot called language an act of murder, because naming things would be identical to killing them. But novelist Alfred Döblin claims exactly the opposite: language, he says, is a form of loving others, language lets us know why we are together. But maybe a more pertinent depiction is Vietnamese filmmaker Trin-Min Ha’s idea of language as a ‘leaking boat’. A lifeboat we are all stuck on together. It’s the disappearing meeting place, but also the same dire biosphere we all share.

By dialoguing about countercultural applications, including our own storytelling in our very art and/or film practice, in what writer Rebecca Solnit claims the “duty of delight’, we can find new, joyful ways of telling, figuring out how we belong together while choreographing new stories we share.  Not as victims of the future paralyzed by dystopian nihilism, but to garner new metaphors and untold stories generated by better questions that can invent new languages, “tools for the amazing wonderful possibilities for the terrible realities we face.”

On Monday, September 14, the Committee for Film Studies and the Program in Media + Modernity present “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” a Film Screening + Director Q&A. Both the screening and the lecture are free and open to the public.

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Johan Grimonprez is a renowned filmmaker, multimedia artist and curator. He achieved international acclaim with his film “Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y,” which premiered in 1997 at Centre Pompidou and Documenta 10 in Kassel and was awarded Best Director at San Francisco International Film Festival. His full-length feature, “Double Take” (2009), received the Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi film festival, a Spirit Award, and was an official selection of both the Berlin and Sundance Film Festivals. His 2016 film “Shadow World” won Best Documentary Feature Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and at the 61^st  International Film Festival of Valladolid, Spain, and his documentary essay “Soundtrack to a Coup d’État” was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary Feature category for the 2025 Academy Awards.

Yasmina Price is Postdoctoral Research Associate and Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English. Her work focuses on visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anticolonial cinema, and the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, e-flux, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, and the National Gallery of Art. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes and museum catalogues, and has been published in the Nation, the Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, and Film Quarterly.