Cristóbal Escobar (University of Melbourne)

ABSTRACT The dead linger and occasionally reappear as ghostly figures on screen. From their once-living past, they possess the ability to forge new relations in our present, which is a future that mattered to them. To achieve this, the dead require a medium that extends their existence, allowing their bodies to be felt once more. Such a medium must therefore traverse time and space, recollecting what has been buried in the past to renovate it into something new in the present. Etymologically, this is the essence of the word contemporaneous, from the Latin con [together with] plus tempor [time]. It suggests a temporal coexistence where past and future merge within the present—hence, a state of being with time, rather than a time divided into a before and after. In this sense, cinema functions as a time machine for the dead—a medium composed of crystalline, overlapping, and contemporaneous realities. This seminar will explore how cinematic intensity emerges through images that dissolve temporal and taxonomical boundaries, blending the classical-old with the modern-new in a continuous flow where filmmaking not only revitalizes itself but also resurrects the dead. As the saying goes, “A classic never dies”, and this persistence of a past into the present is what sustains the intensive-image and allows it to reemerge time and again throughout cinema’s history.

Cristóbal Escobar is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne and a Film Programmer at the Santiago International Documentary Film Festival (FIDOCS). His publications include The Intensive-Image in Deleuze’s Film-Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), an edited collection on Cine Cartográfico (La Fuga Ediciones, 2017), and a forthcoming second volume with Barbara Creed on Film and the Nonhuman (University of Exeter Press, 2026). 

This lecture will be held uniquely online. To receive information about joining the meeting online, it’s mandatory to register in advance here.