Due to the recent developments concerning the corona virus this program has been cancelled. Please check our regularly updated news article for further updates about the Studium Generale program.
In this third lecture of the Dark Dystopias series we'll look at dystopian stories in film. Dr. Yasco Horsman discusses dystopias in The Matrix and V for Vendetta.
In an essay published in 1990 philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued that western societies have undergone a fundamental political shift. Societies nowadays are controlled through the use of algorithms that collect and analyze data in order to steer populations. Yasco Horsman discusses how dystopian science-fiction cinema has responded to this shift.
The focus lies with two films: The Matrix Trilogy The Wachoswski’s, 1999-2003 arguably the first of a new wave of dystopian films and V for Vendetta McTeigue, 2005, whose protagonist the masked V became a symbol of global protest movements, ranging from the hacktivists of Anonymous to the participants of Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish Indignados. We will discuss how both films differ from earlier dystopian cinema and opened the door to recent television series such as Mr Robot and Black Mirror and contemporary Art House cinema, such as Claire Denis’s High Life 2018.
In this series we’ll delve deeper into works of fiction in literature, film and TV series that are set in dystopian societies. What are the characteristics of dystopias and why do they fascinate us so much? We’ll also discuss what we can learn from those stories and what is applicable to our societies today.
Dr. Yasco Horsman is a University Lecturer in Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University and has published on literature Kafka, Beckett, Coetzee, cinema Resnais, Graphic Novels Spiegelman, Ware, Clowes, Animation Mickey, drones and flipbooks.
This program will take place in the Auditorium building at TU/e campus. To find the location check this page for route and map