Lecture: Francesco Casetti- “Media, Fears, Protection”
Many contemporary media function as filters that protect us against the dangers from the exterior, rather than as tools that help appropriate the world. Consequently, mediation becomes a process in which contact with the world relies on some kind of distancing, and in which grasping reality also means recognizing the threats it may pose – threats that are, more often than not, the result of human action on the world. This lecture explores the widespread presence of protective media in our contemporary media landscape, with a particular focus on the ways they reshape our environment and elicit new forms of governmentality.
Francesco Casetti is Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (1999), Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995 (1999), Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (2008), The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (2015), and Screening Fears: On Protective Media (2023).
Sponsored by the Department of Film & Media, the Department of German, and the Program in Critical Theory.
