On April 24-25, the Pennsylvania State University will host the conference Rendering Violence in Textual and Visual Media. Along with Se Young Kim (Colby College), Pedro Inock, doctoral researcher at the FILM AND DEATH project, will be a keynote speaker with a presentation titled "From Butcher of the World to Faithful Servant: Violence as Becoming".
His paper opens a path toward mapping the transformation of violence from its cinematic emergence to its apparatus-dependent digital manifestations, tracing its shift from a force of becoming into a more regulated and consumable form. Its hypothesis is how cinema, while exposing and mobilizing violence as rupture and intensity, also helped establish the conditions for its subsequent capture and domestication.
Through an analysis of time-based media — from Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid’s VR missions to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych, and Klaus Michael Gruber’s Die Bakchen (a rendition of Euripides’ The Bacchae) — violence is approached as explicit representation, atmospheric pressure, temporal manipulation, and metaphysical force.
What is at stake is a transformation in the ontology of violence. No longer encountered as a limit experience, violence is increasingly absorbed into continuous flows of images, where its disruptive potential is neutralized through repetition and speed. In this regime, the moving image modulates perception, compressing the temporal intervals necessary for reflection and reshaping experience. As cinema becomes one element within a wider constellation of time-based practices, its critical potential lies in reclaiming duration, slowness, and silence.
The full program is accessible here.
📸 Die Bakchen [1974], by Klaus Michael Gruber
