About this Event
In 2020 we have witnessed the fall of the cinematic ‘big’ screen, as prohibitions on group events and performative collective spaces closed our movie theatres for the first time in the history of cinema. At the same time we have experienced the unprecedented rise of the ‘small screen’ within our domestic, work, and intimate spaces. For most of us, lives have been lived and mediated by and through the prism of multiple small screens. Our work, our play, our education, and our sublimation have taken place in and over a variety of modalities such as Zoom and Team meetings, and on software applications such as Skype, Whatsapp, and Telegram.
In lieu of a film festival in 2021 the Irish Film Festival team supported by APPI and IFPP is organising a special conference event which seeks to question and discuss how the shifting of screens, the displacement of the cinema screen onto the small one(s), has impacted our aesthetic and subjective desires. If, as Žižek puts it, cinema teaches us how to desire, we ask what does the small screen in its various shapes and sizes do?