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

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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ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Chauss�de Waterloo 1151, 1180 Uccle, Belgium
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