The Death-Work of Cinema

Rizvana Bradley• University of California, Berkeley

October 14th @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons

Refusing the tendencies that would place the ante-empirical facticity of black death before dreams of reparation, remembrance, or generative alterity, this talk explores the material and symbolic predations from which, after Walter Benjamin, not even the dead are safe. Foregrounding a theory of black anteriority with crucial implications for the grammar of ‘technics’ that predominates in the philosophy of media, the figure of the dialogical spectator advanced by film phenomenology, and the media archeology that subtends historiographical debates within film theory, Bradley explores the ways that black death is put to work in the service of form, not least the form that is the medium. Undertaking a close reading of Glenn Ligon’s 2008 video installation, The Death of Tom, Bradley argues that Ligon’s work does far more than simply expose or indict the racist origins of American cinema—Ligon’s practice recursively deconstructs the cinematic itself, disclosing black mediality as the condition of possibility for the medium’s emergence.

Dead Reckonings
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