On February 27^th and 28^th 2025, the doctoral program in Moving Image Studies in the School of Film, Media & Theatre at Georgia State University hosted Constellations: A Celebration of Emeritus Professor, Dr. Angelo Restivo. 

The event featured papers and presentations, conversation and collegiality, and other intellectual and creative work reflecting on “constellation”:  as method, as mode , but also those forged through Dr. Angelo Restivo’s intellectual practice: its joining—and holding together—of theories and methods, artmaking and scholarship, and students, colleagues, and friends around a certain idea, or dialectical image, of moving image studies—one profanely illuminating, communal, cinematic. 

Constellations: an informal staging of study, of making, of questions asked, answered, and asked again—our gathering’s (continuing) mise-en-scene:

-Constellation as Method: What is the value of the provisional combination, of ensemblic mediation, the openly composited image of thought, to the doing of film studies and critical theory? Of joining Marxism and queer theory, psychoanalysis and Deleuze, porn studies and cinephilia? Of deploying this molecular montage to the study of cinema or to visual culture broadly? Of using such an assemblage to constellate the form, the force of the cinematic in and through that concept-generating symptom called television? (Assemblages, symptoms, the cinematic: any of these could just as well as title this event (or events to come).) Or consider cinematic realism and spatiality, their free-indirect figurations, how they map the relations of modernization, post-modernism, subject and nation, and the production and reproduction of social space? What is it to think Buñuel with Walter White? Ivan Dixon with Antonioni? Hitchcock with everything? All the while insisting that history, its multiple thresholds and events, including the present itself, mark and shape all these heuristics and objects—doing so unevenly, allegorically, virtually? 

-Constellation as Mode (of Production): What is the value of a certain paradigm of film practice—of which constellation could well be its name, if not creative motor—to moving image studies today? Is periodization still necessary? Are we post-constellation? If so, might constellation take on a new name, new functions, new media forms? Do we ‘constellate’ via the video essay or podcast, in vlogs and Substacks, as para-academic content production? Bundling for circulatory shock, a metrical mash-up of online citational attractions: is this now constellation today? If that’s the case, do we nevertheless (still) constellate through filmmaking, literature, and other such ‘old media’ forms? And how is such generative work already immanent in the seminar room, the dance floor and cineclub, and in our theoretical writings and conversations? 

-Constellation as Ethos, as Practice—A Life. We can at the very least agree that to think constellation is to think the work of Angelo Restivo. And to think Angelo Restivo is to think constellation’s constant becomings: as figured in his scholarship and filmmaking, his mentorship and friendship, and in those who’ve so invaluably benefited from his loyalty, love, and care. 

These were the questions explored, this was the man celebrated, this is what we constellated—without completion, without end.