Series

Documentary and the Senses: Lucien Castaing-Taylor

CANCELED: Lucien Castaing-Taylor will not be in attendance at IU Cinema screenings.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, documentary filmmaker Lucien Castaing-Taylor will not be attending screenings at Indiana University Cinema this February, as previously scheduled. We are working at this time to reschedule his visit for a future semester. Though we are disappointed that he will not be in attendance, we are excited to still be able to share his work with our audiences.

All films in the February film series will be screened as planned, without the filmmaker in attendance.

This series will focus on three award-winning films produced by Harvard’s innovative Sensory Ethnography Lab. SEL is a filmmaking laboratory that works to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world through experimental video forms. Though distinct in style and topic, the three films reflect Center Director Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s goal “not to analyze, but to actively produce aesthetic experience, and of kinds that reflect and draw on but do not necessarily clarify or leave one with the illusion of ‘understanding’ everyday experience.”

The series is sponsored by the Center for Documentary Research and Practice, The Media School, Cinema and Media Studies Program, the Department of Anthropology, the College Arts and Humanities Institute, and IU Cinema.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Professor of Visual Arts and Anthropology and director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, Lucien Castaing-Taylor is an anthropologist whose work seeks to conjugate art’s negative capability with an ethnographic attachment to the flux of life. Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, his frequent collaborator, are currently at work on various installations set in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as forthcoming projects in Japan. Earlier film works include Leviathan (with Paravel), a film about humanity and the sea; and Sweetgrass (with Ilisa Barbash), an unsentimental elegy to both the American West and the 10,000 years of uneasy accommodation between post-Paleolithic humans and animals. His work is in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the British Museum and has been exhibited at the Tate, Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Berlin Kunsthalle, PS1, Whitechapel Gallery, and London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. His films and videos have screened at Berlin, Locarno, New York, Toronto, and other film festivals.