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Film screening: Ryan O’Shea, ‘Modern Penitent’ part of QMCRL Symposium: Vision and Form

When: Thursday, April 24, 2025, 1:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Where: BLOC Cinema, Mile End

A half-day research event exploring the relations between religious literatures and material and visual cultures.

      

1-2pm                Keynote 1, Caroline Levitt (Courtauld), Worry Lines: Jean Cocteau, Corita Kent and the Word as Form                                

2-3pm               Panel 1: Tessa Whitehouse (QMUL), ‘William Cowper (1731-1800): What does the poet see?’

                             Emily Vine (Exeter), ‘Devotional Objects in Early Modern Wills’

3-3.15pm         Break (Foyer Laws Building)

3.15-4.15pm  Keynote 2, Hannah Yip (Manchester), ‘Visualising the Crucifix in Early Modern England’ [see abstract below]

4.15-4.30pm  Break and move to BLOC cinema for panel 2 and film screening

4.30-5.30pm  Libby Sexton (QMUL), ‘Mushroom Clouds, Moving Images and the Postsecular’

Ryan O’Shea (QMUL), Flagellation on Film: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Harry Revier’s Lash of the Penitentes (1936)

5.30-6pm         Film screening:  Ryan O’Shea, ‘Modern Penitent’

Stemming from research into 20th century literature and ‘mortifications of the flesh’, this film explores a form of spiritual yearning in the face of modernity. Following the increasingly extreme actions of an unnamed narrator, religious practice becomes a way to access a private form of spirituality yet also works as a potential outlet for obsessive modes of thinking. 

6-7pm                Reception

Image: Hilma af Klint, Alterpieces (1915), www.hilmaafklint.se

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