Think:Film – International Experimental Cinema Congress 2012

From October 10-14, Arsenal is organizing an international congress for the very first time, in collaboration with the Film Institute at the Berlin University of the Arts. Think:Film, the International Experimental Cinema Congress 2012, is taking place at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg with the goal of examining the special position occupied by experimental cinema in contemporary artistic and intellectual practice in philosophical terms and redefining just what this position might be. Fifteen panels over five days bring together international filmmakers, artists, film and arts scholars, authors and curators, who will jointly be exploring questions relating to the influence of the cinematic image on today’s thought and discussing how cinema itself can become an act of thought. Rather than grasping experimental film a definitive genre, the congress seeks instead to pose some fundamental questions, many of which go beyond the central theme of how film and thought influence one another (such as how film itself can be understood as theory) to encompass the institutionalization of the cinematic image, the relationship between acting, performance, the stage and film, film as a means of political practice, the production and distribution of today's experimental cinema and the current status of such terms as "underground" and "avant-garde".