Presented by the Centre for Cinema Studies and Cinema Thinks the World, the Critical Thinkers Series features research talks by notable and emerging scholars in Cinema and Media Studies. Join us for the next talk in the Fall 2025 Series by Dr. Rizvana Bradley, Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Worldless Image
This talk takes up Lars von Trier’s film, Melancholia, at the crossroads of film philosophy, (black) critical theory, and art historical analysis. Though distinct in their disciplinary approaches and methodologies, most scholarly engagements with Melancholia share a concern with the articulation of a world, of the world—its aesthetic constitution, its precarious preservation, and the possibility of its impending obliteration. Such engagements offer an occasion to consider the ways in which pressing contemporary questions regarding subjectivity, modernity, and politics are implicitly threaded through late humanist, posthumanist, and new materialist ruminations on the end of the world. Critically reassessing Trier’s film and its stakes, this talk advances a critique of the failures and limitations of philosophical and theoretical heuristics that privilege world and worlding over worldlessness, as well as those heuristics that cleave the temporal horizon of humanity’s extinction from the cataclysm that always already precedes fantasies of human advancement or decline.
About Dr. Rizvana Bradley
Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Bradley is the author of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of the Top Books of 2023 by FRIEZE. Her art criticism has been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, and Parkett, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs, including for the Serpentine Galleries, the New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. She serves on the advisory boards of October and Camera Obscura. Bradley has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events at the British Film Institute, the Serpentine Galleries, the Stedelijk Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
This talk is presented in partnership with the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory.
This event is free and there is no need to RSVP.
