01/10/2026
JOIN US, Wednesday JAN 14th at 8:15pm for a screening of Dark City as part of the Film & Philosophy series, hosted by William Jennings. Tickets are available on the Screening Room website:
https://www.screeningroomkingston.com/movie/dark-city-film-philosophy-lecture
Unappreciated in its time, Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998) remains a haunting and dangerous vision of a humanity stuck out of time, lost in an unanswerable riddle of distant memories and lost futures. In the film, an amnesiac anti-hero must confront the stark nature of his fragmented reality, questioning whether our myths, our memories, and our histories add up to anything more than a just labyrinth of our own creation. Proyas’ masterful control of tone and narrative makes it exemplary of many of the literary and philosophical tenets commonly associated with ‘postmodernism’, a lofty and often misunderstood intellectual tradition emerging in Europe after the end of the Second World War. This special screening of Dark City will be accompanied by a short introductory lecture by Queen’s PhD candidate William Jennings, who will situate the film in the context of the key debates and discussions found across postmodern philosophy. What can we believe in when history itself disappears? Can we still be certain of who we are when everything we thought true is thrown into doubt? Or are we more than simply the sum of our memories? The answers may be found in the shadowy corners of Alex Proyas’ Dark City!
