Event overview
Filippo Ursitti uses Anders' categories of "Nach Holocaust" to criticize the recently released TV series "Chernobyl" for questioning the morality or immorality of TV itself
Glits seminar
All ECL students are welcome to join - there will be wine!
Filippo Ursitti, PhD candidate Goldsmiths University of London, ECL Department
In the thirty-three years since Chernobyl, people forgot the lesson which could be obtained from the actual events that many books and rigorous statistics were not able to reproduce. Only through fiction, through individual cases, can the actual event and the innumerable be turned in something capable of being remembered. When the dimension of the events challenges the human perception, both memory and the lesson contained in it fade away, only the fictional narration of a singular event can shed light on its lesson. Anders strongly criticises the mass media, in particular, the television, for its effect to reduce the world into image-commodity which turns individuals into phantoms through the elimination of the distance between the viewer and the broadcast events. Nonetheless, Chernobyl goes beyond this world-viewer relation because it is not the representation of a today’s event but the fictional re-creation of a long time past happening.
Chernobyl is a magnifying glass which initiates a work of miniaturization in order to make truth, unintelligible because of its dimension, visually and emotionally understandable by millions of people. The abnormity of the catastrophe, even if already described by history’s tools of abstraction and conceptualization, could be felt and understood only through the usage of a dwindled representation which materializes data and numbers via familiar micro-stories. The TV series has been highly successful because it re-personalizes singular individuals of their human status through the scientific and mechanical work of depersonalization that the Soviet Union produced to cover the events. This perspective reversal has been carried out by showing how the homo materia1 was once a form of existence: the TV show reveals that what was considered “raw material”, once pronounced “I” and “we”, hoped and loved, was indeed a “person”.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Oct 2019 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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