The first 'Critical Positions' film season was screened at Brighton Cinematheque in November 2004.

See the programme below to read about the films we screened or see the Cinematheque archive

3rd – 10th November 2004: Archive
Cinematheque in association with nuisance.org.uk presents a season of documentaries featuring some of the ‘heavyweights’ of contemporary theory. These analysts of 20th century thought and vision become themselves the objects of our gaze as they are interviewed about psychoanalysis, deconstruction, notions of biography, the future and belief. Critical viewing for those who want a new sense of Lacan, Derrida and Zizek or who want to exercise the grey matter.

Wednesday 3rd November at 8pm
+ Saturday 6th November at 2.30pm
Derrida’s Elsewhere
Safaa Fathy France 2003 68 mins Digital
A highly personal exploration of the parallels between the personal life and the work of Jacques Derrida, arguably the most important philosopher of the 20th Century. Drawing from his book ‘Circumfession’ the film traces a number of seemingly disparate themes including hospitality, religion, sexuality and the place of the subject in philosophy. ‘Elsewhere’ takes viewers into Derrida's worlds - that of his work in present day Paris and, using stills and super 8 footage, of his childhood and adolescence in Algeria and Spain. ‘A film that preserves on one level the coherence and cogency of Derrida's work, highlighting it against a vivid series of autobiographical backdrops. A unique and intensely personal examination.’ Theory and Event

Thursday 4th November at 8pm
Jacques Lacan’s Psychoanalysis: Part One
Benoit Jacquot France 1972 60 mins digital
In 1972 Jacques-Alain Miller, then an analyst in training, approached French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to request a television interview. ‘I wanted Lacan, just once, to speak to the common man’, said Miller. ‘Psychoanalysis’ has survived as the only document of Lacan on film, the only record of the once-notorious lecture style that Lacan showcased at his infamous seminars in Paris during the late 60s to early 70s. It exposes with unexpected simplicity his most complex theories of the unconscious; the cure; the difference between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, love and women. For those aiming to understand the institutionalisation of Freudian thought and the challenge Lacan represents, this is an essential work.

Sunday 7th November at 2.30pm
The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord France 1972 85 mins video
At the heart of Situationist theory is the idea that capitalism has subsumed creativity by responding to desires with commodities, heralding an era of ‘banalisation’. Situationist strategies sought to disrupt this passivity. This is Debord’s adaptation of his own 1967 polemic - an assemblage of crudely re-appropriated Spectacle iages from Hollywood through to soft porn. Non-linear, mismatched and disorientating, with a voice over from Debord himself.
+ L’Anti-Concept (G.J.Wolman France 1951) Wolman was a key figure in the Lettriste Movement, precursor of the Situationists. L’Anti-concept is an anti - film originally projected onto a balloon. There are no sub-titles to distract you from the play of light and Wolman’s energised narration - a printed translation will be available.

Sunday 7th November at 8pm
Ashura: This Blood Spilled in my Veins
Jalal Toufic Lebanon 2002 104 mins Beta SP.
‘Al-Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and the son of the first Shi‘ite imam, Ali, was slaughtered alongside many members of his family in the desert in 680. This memory is torture to me. The memory that the yearly commemoration of Ashura is trying to maintain is not only or mainly that of the past, but the memory of the future, namely the promise of the Parousia of the twelfth imam, the long-awaited Mahdi, as well as the corresponding promise of Duodecimal Shi‘ites to wait for him. Ashura: a condition of possibility of an unconditional promise’. Toufic. Ashura was one of the outstanding films at this year's International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam. Alternately visceral and intellectual the film follows the preparation and religious procession during the Islamic commemoration of Ashura. The sequences are punctuated by interviews with Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.

Wednesday 10th November at 8pm
Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual
Ben Wright UK 2004 70 mins 16mm
In this tour de force filmed lecture, Slavoj Zizek lucidly and compellingly reflects on belief - which takes him from Father Christmas to democracy - and on the various forms that belief takes, drawing on Lacanian categories of thought. In a radical dismissal of today’s so called post-political era, he mobilises the paradox of universal truth urging us to dare to enact the impossible. It is a characteristic virtuoso performance, moving promiscuously from subject to subject, but keeping the larger argument in view. Based at Ljubliana University, Slavoj Zizek's main body of work includes ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’ and, most recently, ‘The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity’.
Thanks to Lux for this screening.