Cinematic Evocations: Occultism in Obscure Cinema March 5, 2009

In this lecture, which is illustrated with film clips, Dr MacCormack will explore the occult themes in some lesser known films from the history of cinema; you will be regaled with a cinematic panoply of rituals, demonic incarnations, witchcraft, magi and ancient ones. As she takes you from silent Weimar to Italian horror, from Anglian Pan paganism to French occult vampirism, she shows how cinema has not only shown audience members the esoteric, but summoned them into its spell as enchanted acolytes. Occultism, she shows us, was part of the inception of cinema: spectators, with their dreams and fantasies, entered into Faustian pacts with the enigmatic plane of the screen and its magickal intensities. Its spell continues to this day, with the screen continuing to open up for us other worlds and planes of intensity.

Dr Patricia MacCormack is senior lecturer in Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin University; she works and has published extensively in Continental philosophy, cinesexuality, post-human ethics, chaos magic, sexuality and occult culture. She returns to Treadwell's, having last year given the highly provocative paper 'Enfolding Magic' which sold out and generated some of the most vigorous debate the seminar series has known.

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