12.02.25, (cancelled) Lennart Soberon, Universal Soldier (1992) en de maakbare man

Due to personal circumstances, Lennart Soberon will unfortunately have to be absent for next week's Studium lecture. This Studium evening is therefore cancelled; at 20:30, however, the film will still play in the regular KASKcinema programme, without introduction.

Studium Generale and KASKcinema join forces for an anthology on cinematic corporeality. Although cinema deals in immortality, few bodies have been so successfully preserved for eternity as that of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Once Belgium's most sought-after export, JCVD melted celluloid prints throughout the 1980s and 1990s with the sight of his buttock, stomach and biceps muscles. Fresco-like fight manoeuvres and eyes full of childlike innocence made him stand out with splits and shoulders above the hunks of brute flesh that made up action cinema.

Soaked in techno-paranoia as only the nineties felt, this small-scale sci-fi epic outlines the story of a cyborg soldier on the run from the government agency that created him — as well as a gruff Dolph Lundgren. This breakthrough film from genre craftsman Roland Emmerich has the same genetic material as his later hits, such as ‘Independence Day’ (1998), but stands out for its more intimate scale and red-blooded characters. Van Damme takes centre stage here as Emmerich's supreme Vitriviusman; a body exposed from all sides to exhibit the bliss of action anatomy.

Prior to the film, film scholar and programmer Lennart Soberon will give an introduction on the body politics of American action cinema. In action cinema, (men's) bodies are always a canvas on which desires, insecurities and enemy images of their time are depicted. Using analysis of the genre and its history, Lennart discusses the incarnate power structures these icons represent.

• Lennart Soberon is a researcher in film studies (VUB) and artistic coordinator at KASKcinema. His PhD research dealt with the representation of violence and the construction of enemy images in Hollywood cinema. He is currently working on a project on the cinematic representation of national borders.

This lecture and film screening will take place at KASKcinema. The venue is wheelchair accessible and a limited number of places are provided in the auditorium. The toilet for wheelchair users is on the first floor, accessible by lift. A written-out version of the introduction will be provided. The introduction will be in Dutch and the film will be in English with Dutch subtitles. Anyone with further questions about accessibility facilities should contact the organisation: anais.vanertvelde@hogent.be.