The Greenaway Oration: Necrosexuality

Event information

The inaugural Greenaway Oration will be given by Dr Patricia MacCormack of Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. The lecture, entitled "Necrosexuality", will be introduced by Dr Sarah De Nardi and followed by a screening of Margheriti's 1973 masterpiece "Flesh for Frankenstein".


ABOUT NECROSEXUALITY

Cinesexuality, as the unique inflection of image and spectator, elicits an event of desire. Certain configurations of flesh and pleasure offer further challenges to dialectics of image, recognition and sexuality. Necrosexuality found in cinema is one of these. Not violent aggressive murder-for-sex, some examples of necrosexuality configure the cadaver as unfurling planes of potentiality. The necrophile is launched upon a trajectory of imagination, where organs are no longer signified by metaphor or gendering function but by desire as the liminal encounter with terrains of flesh and the fun and possibilities these despotic organs give. Antonio Margheriti’s 1973 film Flesh for Frankenstein is one example of these – as Baron Frankenstein tells us, ‘to know death, you have to fuck life… in the gall bladder’.


ABOUT DR PATRICIA MACCORMACK

Dr Patricia MacCormack is Reader in English, Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published extensively in Continental Philosophy (particularly the works of Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray, Blanchot and Serres), Spectatorship, Visceral Horror, Perverse Sexuality, the Post-Human, Animal Rights, Ethics and theories of Monstrosity. She has appeared in film documentaries and commentaries including Suspiria, The Complete History of Video Nasties and the films of Jean Rollin. She is the author of Cinesexuality, the co-editor of The Schizoanalysis of Cinema and has essays in such anthologies as Deleuze and Law, Queering the Non-Human, The BFI 100 Best Horror Films, Body and Society, Afterimage, Deleuze and Queer Theory, Rhizomes, Senses of Cinema and Caligari’s Heirs. http://www.myspace.com/patriciamaccormack


ABOUT THE GREENAWAY ORATION

Named in honour of Peter Greenaway - for his work of the 1960s and 70s particularly - the Greenaway Oration will be an annual feature of the London Underground Film Festival programme, delivered by a distinguished scholar whose work has significantly drawn on film theory or films as texts.


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THOSE WHO LIVE, LIVE OFF THE DEAD

Throughout the 2010 London Underground Film Festival new works by Paul Kindersley will be shown at the Horse Hospital in an exhibition called "Those Who Live, Live Off the Dead".