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[ecrea] CFP - Cross-Dissolve: A Series of Passages Through Mulholland Drive

Sun Jun 08 18:40:17 GMT 2014


Cross-Dissolve: A Series of Passages Through Mulholland Drive

October 18-19, Knockdown Center, Queens, NY


David Lynch’s 2001 film, Mulholland Drive, is a cipher, a mysteriously haunting and resilient work that, in its refinement compels interpretation even as its evasive narrativity resists the conclusiveness of that.

The film has been read as a postmodern comment on the fragility of subjectivity; a lurid hallucination summoned by an irrevocably traumatized and/or guilty conscience; a biting analysis of the fractured viewing necessitated by mass media and the entertainment industry. We read it as a series of doors, both literal and figurative, that usher in horror and excess, doors that act as rifts in fabric of the real, unlikely doors that open into and allow for space, even when there should be none. Doors presuppose division just as they entail leakage, transmission, and passage. With this in mind, we are calling for scholars and artists to propose strategies for reading Mulholland Drive through any interpretive door of their choosing. However, this point of entry to the film should be limited to a single one-second instance, an instant that might illuminate one’s own practice. We are not looking for participants to interpret the film so much as use it (one particular second, that is) as a passage through the barriers of disciplinarity, as a device for defamiliarizing one’s own work. We call this technique “hyperexegesis,” a method that reduces the frame of interpretation to an almost absurdly narrow proportion. The sort of attention this method allows might mimic a manic obsession with clue detection or the ecstasy of radicalized communicability.

We welcome submissions from any and all disciplines as we feel that this interpretive device should be no less useful to an anthropologist than to a cellular biologist, or a semiotician, or a composer.


Some wildly speculative possibilities we imagine such an intensive investigatory framework could prompt include:

• The second-long apparition of the ghastly, ghostly figure behind Winkie’s Diner signaling a psychoanalytic reconsideration of received ideas about repression.

• The slow-moving overhead pan of Los Angeles accompanied by unnervingly persistent, low drones comprising a fruitful case study in acoustic ecology.

• A hypothesis on what contagions might have been transmitted between bodies via Betty and Diane’s dramatic first kiss.

• A theological comparison between the unknown contents of the black book the hit man kills for (containing “the history of the world”) to other historically cloistered sacred texts.

• An art historical survey of distinctive blue vessels, their practical utility and cultural significance, in relation to the blue box revealed to be inside Rita’s purse hidden underneath neat stacks of bills.


Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short bio to (crossdissolve.conference /at/ gmail.com). We will be accepting proposals until August 1st and will notify invited participants by the middle of the month.


Organized by Bethany Ides (Pratt Institute) and Mitchell Akiyama (McGill University)
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