Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Penn Colloquium: Franklin Cason

Franklin Cason (Temple University)
"Avant-Garde Jazz as a Model for Cinema Studies"

Wednesday, November 14, 2012
12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania

My current research considers that pragmatist philosophy offers a productive way through the impasse between traditional film theory and “post-theoretical” or cognitive approaches to film scholarship; a debate that had relatively little interest in, or effect on, the development of African American film practice or black film studies. To make this pragmatic inquiry address African American cinema with some specificity, I suggest an experimental approach to researching and writing about black cinema. Responding to both recent calls for a black cinema studies rooted in African-American cultural practices, and David Bordwell’s claim that film studies has much in common with musicology, I will argue that avant-garde jazz suggests several research and theoretical approaches. But unlike Bordwell’s musical analogies of film form, my target is film theory itself. Black cinema thus becomes an important case study for theorizing aesthetics and politics in cinema, generally. By exploring jazz, pragmatism, and black cultural practices, while following Richard Rorty’s lead in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1981), and Michael Magee’s Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing (2004), I take seriously the possibilities offered by bridging the unique interests between black film analysis, cognitive film theory, screen theory, critical race theory, musicology, deconstruction, and pragmatism.

Two talks: Galloway and McGonigal

Center for Humanities at Temple
Digitial Humanities in Theory
Lecture: "The Unworkable Interface" 
by Alex Galloway
Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

Tuesday, November 13
4:00–5:30 pm,
CHAT Lounge (10th flr Gladfelter)

Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the “Phaedrus” of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other has, since the 1980s and ‘90s, returned to center stage in the discourse around culture and media. Windows, doors, airport gates and other thresholds are those transparent devices that achieve more the less they do: for every moment of virtuosic immersion and connectivity, for every moment of inopacity, the threshold becomes one notch more invisible, one notch more inoperable. This lecture examines the interface, what Gérard Genette called a “zone of indecision” between the inside and outside of media. What is a computer interface and how does it structure interaction, work, and play?

Swarthmore College
Talk: "Games to Change the World" 
by Jane McGonigal

November 14th, 2012
7:30 PM
LPAC Pearson-Hall Theater
Swarthmore College

Game designer Jane McGonigal is harnessing the power of Internet games in new ways to help solve some of the biggest challenges facing our world. Her public talk is based on her book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World, as well as recent game designs. She asks her audience to imagine a world in which every great challenge we face is a quest; where the harder a task is, the more people want to do it; where people take pleasure in failing and come back invigorated; and where they communicate spontaneously with their collaborators to pool their knowledge toward shared solutions. It turns out that world already exists-in games.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Penn Colloquium: Adam Lowenstein

Adam Lowenstein 
Surrealism, Spectatorship, and Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart 

Penn Cinema Studies Colloquium 
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
12:00pm

330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania


The explosion of scholarship in recent years devoted to Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) has elevated this once marginal artist and avant-garde filmmaker to the center of modern art history. But something curious has happened along the way. Cornell’s ties to surrealism, the very movement that provided him with crucial inspiration and the first meaningful critical context for his art, have been minimized or erased. I will argue that Cornell’s most famous film, Rose Hobart (1936), presents vital opportunities for rethinking how spectatorship functions in surrealist cinema. Where Un Chien andalou (1929) never relinquishes the aura of violence around its relation to the spectator, Rose Hobart is equally but oppositely committed to nurturing the spectator’s vision, to engineering a gradual integration of the spectator’s gaze with that of the star and the filmmaker that relies on slow repetition rather than shocking suddenness. This makes Cornell central, not peripheral, to the ambitions and accomplishments of surrealist cinema’s experiments in spectatorship.

Adam Lowenstein is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also directs the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (Columbia University Press, 2005) as well as essays that have appeared in Cinema Journal, Representations, Critical Quarterly, boundary 2, Post Script, and numerous anthologies. He is currently completing a book concerning cinematic spectatorship, surrealism, and the age of digital media.

Hito Steyerl on Adorno

Adorno's Grey and other refusals 
Hito Steyerl 
in conversation with Nora M. Alter

Tuesday, October 09, 2012
6:30-8:00pm
Slought Foundation
Free, reservation not required

Slought Foundation is pleased to announce a public conversation with filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl, in dialogue with film scholar Nora Alter, on Tuesday, October 9, 2012 from 6:30-8:00pm. The conversation will be preceded by a special screening of Hito Steyerl's Adorno's Grey (approx. 14 min). The program is presented in conjunction with Temple University's Department of Film and Media Arts (FMA).

"In her works, Hito reflects upon the role of traveling images, those images, that crowd the realms of suburbs and the lowlands of the web. Images that change their meaning, outlook, framing, caption and often also their protagonists by traveling through time and space. She put some interesting questions like: Which role do digital modes of communication play in creating new political and aesthetical articulations? How do they accelerate, slow down or modify conflict, civil war and the writing of history? How are media – video or audio tapes, jpegs or posters – implicated in violence? How does the struggle over copyright and reproduction- over making things seen and heard - factor into these considerations? And is a withdrawal from representation perhaps a new form of strike or refusal?" (Rabih Mroue).

About the screening of Adorno's Grey
Legend has it that Theodor W. Adorno had the auditorium where he taught at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt painted grey to aid concentration. In Adorno’s Grey, a team of conservators burrows into the wall of this auditorium hoping to reveal the layer of grey paint beneath it. A voiceover recounts an incident in 1969 when, after three female students approached and bore their breasts to him during a lecture, Adorno collected his papers and ran away in a panic. This would be his last lecture.

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer based in Berlin. She teaches artistic media practice at the University of Arts Berlin. Her latest works include: The Kiss 2012, Adorno's Grey 2012, The Body of the Image 2012 (performance), Abstract 2012, Guards 2012 as well as the lectures Probable Title: Zero Probability (2012) with Rabih Mroué and I dreamed a dream (2012). Nora M. Alter is Chair and Professor of Film and Media arts, Temple University, and the author of Chris Marker.

Amanda Weidman on Tamil Cinema

Event at Bryn Mawr College

Amanda Weidman 
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College

 “Female Voice-Body Relationships and the Acoustic Organization of Tamil Cinema, 1940-1960” 


Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Thomas Library 224
Bryn Mawr College
12:30-2pm

This talk will explore how relationships between the female voice and the female body were managed in South Indian Tamil-language cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, during the transition from singing actresses to the division of labor between professional playback singers who recorded their voices in the studio and actresses who appeared on screen. While the relationship between the female voice and the female body was managed through a combination of technological, discursive, and performative means in the world of South Indian classical music, it was simultaneously being negotiated in the context of cinema, where technological mediation provided expanded possibilities for representing voice-body relationships. Examining several Tamil films from this period, we can see a variety of ways in which the potentially problematic spectacle of a performing female body was presented.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Animation conference at Penn

ENCHANTED DRAWING II: 
ANIMATION ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Sept. 21-22, 2012
University of Pennsylvania

a collaborative conference organized by KAREN BECKMAN (University of Pennsylvania), and ERNA FIORENTINI (Humboldt Universität), and OLIVER GAYCKEN (University of Maryland). 

Following up on the dynamic conversation that began in Berlin in March 2012 at ENCHANTED DRAWING I, this conference continues to explore a series of intersecting concerns that emerge through an engagement with animation history. The conference will feature the work of scholars and practitioners from a variety of fields, including cinema and media studies, the history of science, art history, animation design in the fields of science, gaming, engineering, medicine, and journalism.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2012
@ INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, University of Pennsylvania
Followed by screenings @ INTERNATIONAL HOUSE PHILADELPHIA

2:30-3:30 PM | Attendees are encouraged to visit ICA and see their new exhibition Jeremy Deller: Joy in People

3:30–5:30 PM | Keynote address by Vivian Sobchack, "Stop + Motion: On Animation, Inertia, and Innervation"

 5:30–6:30 PM | Reception at Institute of Contemporary Art 7:00 PM | Screening of animation at International House Philadelphia

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2012
 @ INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, University of Pennsylvania

8:15–9:15 AM | BREAKFAST

9:15–9:30 AM | OPENING REMARKS by Erna Fiorentini

 9:30-11:00 AM | PANEL ONE DIGITAL AND DATA DRIVEN ANIMATION | Moderator: Orkan Telhan (Penn, Fine Arts) • Norman Badler, "Digital Animation From a Technical Perspective" • Oliver Gaycken, "With Particle Swarms and Bad Hair: Animating Material Digitally" • Peggy Weil, "Immersive Journalism, Immersive Data"

11:00AM-12:30PM | PANEL TWO HISTORY OF SCIENCE | Moderator: Karen Beckman (Penn, History of Art and Cinema Studies) • Jimena Canales, "Animating Einstein: 'The final days of my Zurich stay resemble a runaway motion picture projector'" • Scott Curtis, "Rough and Smooth: Toward a Rhetoric of Animated Scientific Images" • Hanna Rose Shell, "The Animation of Evanescence: Camouflage in Motion"

 12:30–2:00 PM | LUNCH

 2:00–3:30 PM | PANEL THREE TRANSMEDIALITY | Moderator: Peter Decherney (Penn, English and Cinema Studies) • Alexander R. Galloway, "Polygraphic Photography and the Origins of 3D Animation" • Bob Rehak, "Graphic Engines: Videogame Animation as Transmedia Bridge" • Melissa Ragona, "Algorithmic Aesthetics vs. Punk De'collage: From Animation to Live Performance" 3.30–

4:00 PM | COFFEE BREAK

 4:00-5:30 PM | PANEL FOUR BODY | Moderator: Beth Linker (Penn, History and Sociology of Science) • Kirsten Ostherr, "From Health Films to Healthy Games: Interventionist Animation" • Donald Crafton, "Inside and Outside the Toon Body: Challenging Somatic Integrity through Animation History"

5:30–6:00 PM | ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION with Erna Fiorentini + speakers to conclude the day; CLOSING COMMENTS Registration is free and open to the public.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Lucy Fischer on Abel Gance

Penn Cinema Studies Colloquium | Lucy Fischer
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 12:00pm
University of Pennsylvania
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall

Lucy Fischer
"Modernity, Machine, Movies, Mind: Abel Gance’s La Roue (1923)"


A discussion of French director Abel Gance‘s film La Roue (The Wheel / 1923), viewed as a pinnacle work of the silent cinema. Jean Cocteau agreed, stating: “There is the cinema before and after La Roue as there is painting before and after Picasso.” The film is a watershed modernist text because it makes innovative use of all the elements of cinematic discourse at this time—tinting, matting, the close-up, intertitles, but especially montage. Beyond the film’s innovative formal attributes, I will focus specifically on two issues. First is the film’s valorization of the machine (here, the railroad system) --an icon of modernity and a new subject of art (e.g. in Futurist painting and in photography). Secondly, I explore how La Roue, fashions various modes for presenting human consciousness—another concern of modernity in this era, as sparked by the writings of Freud and others.

Lucy Fischer is Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies as well as director of the Film Studies Program. She is the author of ten books: Jacques Tati (G.K. Hall, 1983), Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women's Cinema (Princeton, 1989), Imitation of Life (Rutgers, 1991), Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre (Princeton University Press, 1996), Sunrise (British Film Institute, 1998), Designing Women: Art Deco, Cinema and the Female Form (Columbia University Press, 2003), Stars: The Film Reader (co-edited with Marcia Landy, Rutgers University Press, 2004), Teaching Film (coedited with Patrice Petro, forthcoming MLA, 2012) and Body Double: The Author Incarnate in the Cinema (forthcoming, Rutgers University Press, 2013).

Monday, April 9, 2012

Two talks at Temple

I will be giving one of two talks this week at Temple's Humanities Center (home institution for the Cinema and Media Seminar):

Patricia Aufderheide
Film and Media Arts, American University
"Free Speech and Fair Use in the Academic Environment: Libraries, Scholarship, and Teaching"
Tuesday, April 10
4:00 pm

Chris Cagle
Film and Media Arts, Temple University
"When Hollywood Met Durkheim: Popularized Social Science and the Social Problem Film"
Thursday, April 12
12:30–1:50 pm,

Both talks to take place at the Center for Humanities at Temple Lounge, 12th floor Gladfelter Hall, main campus

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Cathy Lee Crane on Poetic Biography

Sorry for the late notice, but I wanted to highlight a filmmaker discussion event this evening at International House.

The Films of Cathy Lee Crane: Poetic Biography: An Investigation of Words from Two Radical Polemicists

Co-presented by Temple Film Media Arts Department, School of Communication and Theater and The Bryn Mawr College Program in Film Studies.

Over the last decade, Cathy Lee Crane has committed herself to an ongoing experiment with the biographical film, cultivating a fictional form of biography that seeks to penetrate what late filmmaker Raul Ruiz described as the “subtle tissue of life”. Combining staged and archival material, Crane materially renders the spectral life of thought itself as a kind of poetry. These two films contend with the end of the lives of two radical polemicists from the 20th century whose social critiques were provoked into being by the political extremities of their times. Acknowledging that the past has an intimate relationship to the present, the films utililze the re-enactment as a function that seeks to make history a living presence. Through theatrical, or ritualized gesture, the present maintains its distance from the past while also evoking it.

Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil
dir. Cathy Lee Crane, US, 2006, video, 45 mins, b/w

This portrait of French writer Simone Weil is not simply an account of her life, but rather the embodiment of her ideas. The “unoccupied zone” is therefore only marginally meant to refer to the southern part of France under Vichy. It is more importantly an existential labyrinth imaged by the film itself; a psychic space through which Weil passed while in exile in her own country from 1940-1941. Winner Best Narrative Film – University Film & Video Association Juried Screening (2006).

followed by
Pasolini’s Last Words
dir. Cathy Lee Crane, US, 2012, HD video, 60 mins, b/w and color

Known as one of Italy’s most important filmmakers, Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and foremost, one of its poets. This elegiac essay looks at Pasolini’s brutal murder in 1975 alongside the texts he published or left unfinished during the last year of his life.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

David Laderman on the European road movie

David Laderman
"Arresting Mobility: Crossing Borders and Going Nowhere in the Films of the Dardenne Brothers"

Tuesday, March 20, 2012
5:30pm
401 Fisher-Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania

This talk will explore some of the distinctive road movie elements found in selected films by the Dardenne brothers. Beginning with their breakout film of 1996, La Promesse, we will situate their work in the broader context of contemporary European road movie trends. We will consider how and why urban mobility becomes a pressing motif throughout much of their oeuvre, where bodies forced into frenetic motion become circumscribed by various socio-economic conditions. Usually revealed through a fragile yet insistent mobile camera, the desperate instincts driving many Dardenne characters articulate the moral quagmires around human trafficking. Their tightly focused documentary style captures the fits and starts of the Belgian underclass, which in turn speaks to and for some of the darker features of transnational, neo-liberal Europe.

David Laderman is a Professor of Film Studies at the College of San Mateo. He also teaches for the Film and Media Studies program at Stanford University. He is the author of Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (University of Texas Press) and Punk Slash! Musicals: Tracking Slip-Sync on Film (University of Texas Press).

This program is made possible thanks to the support of University of Pennsylvania's Cinema Studies Program and Department of French Studies, and Temple University's Department of Film and Media Arts.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Friday (3/16): Patrick Keating on Film Noir Lighting

This Friday is the next talk in the PCMS series:

Patrick Keating (Trinity University)
“Illuminated Space: Electricity, Modernity, and Film Noir”

March 16, 2012
5:00 PM
Temple University Center City (TUCC), 1515 Market Street
Room 420

Although film noir is famous for its shadows, the style offers a remarkably wide range of lighting effects. In some noirs, the flatly lit office building is just as important as the dimly lit alley, and the warm glow of the living room can be just as fateful as the darkened hallway. This talk reconsiders noir lighting in films such as Call Northside 777, The Asphalt Jungle, and The Sweet Smell of Success. In particular, Keating proposes that an important context for noir lighting is the increasing industrialization of electric light during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Just as the electricity industry was developing a narrative of progress to both explain and promote the expansion of light over these years, the film noir was using a combination of lights and shadows to describe and criticize that expansion.


Patrick Keating is an assistant professor of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, where he teaches courses in film studies and video production. He is the author of Hollywood Lighting From the Silent Era to Film Noir, published by Columbia University Press, which was selected by the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) as the Best First Book in 2011. Recently, he was awarded an Academy Film Scholars grant to support his research on the relationship between camera movement and the representation of modern spaces in Hollywood cinema.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Syrian Film Screenings

Cross-posted with Philadelphia Repertory Film Blog

In collaboration with the DOX BOX Documentary Film Festival in Syria,
the Temple Middle East North Africa Group
presents

2 Evenings of Syrian Cinema

Wednesday, March 15
A Flood in Baath County,
Omar Amiralay, Syria/France 2003
Silence
Rami Farah, Syria, 2006

Thursday, March 15
Six Ordinary Stories,
Meyar Al Roumi, France/Syria 2007
Before Vanishing,
Joude Gorani, France/Syria 2005
+ a special, surprise film about current events

All screenings run from 5:30-7:30 in Tuttleman 101 on Temple University's main campus and are free and open to the public.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Lisa Gitelman (2/24)

Lisa Gitelman (New York University)

"Network Returns"

Network Returns is a preliminary work-in-progress aimed at network archeologies. It offers two different episodes in the history of self-addressing.

Friday, February 24
4:00 p.m.
room 420, Temple University Center City (TUCC)

With the support of the Center for Humanities at Temple, the University of Pennsylvania Cinema Studies, and Bryn Mawr's Film Studies Program.


Lisa Gitelman is associate professor of English and of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She works on media history and textual media. She is the author of Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press 2006) and Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford University Press, 2000), as well as editor, with Geoffrey B. Pingree, of New Media 1740-1915 (MIT 2004). Current projects include a monograph, "Making Knowledge with Paper," and an edited collection,"'Raw Data' Is an Oxymoron." She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Rey Chow on Documentary Realism

Rey Chow will be a keynote speaker at this Friday's Graduate Humanities Forum at Penn. The entire forum is an interesting series of talks on adaptation. Rey Chow will be speaking on "Documentary Realism Between Cultures," addressing the effect of new media on global nonfiction forms. It begins at 5:00pm at the Harrison Auditorium at Penn Museum. The event is free and open to the public but requires advance registration.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Henry Jenkins at Swarthmore

Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture
A Public Lecture by Henry Jenkins

Swarthmore College
Science Center 101

Thursday, February 9
at 7:00 PM

ABSTRACT: Of all of the changes in the new media environment over the past two decades, perhaps the biggest has been a shift in how media content circulates—away from top-down corporate controlled distribution and into a still emerging hybrid system where everyday people play an increasingly central role in how media spreads.

Cultural Studies has historically been centered on issues of production and reception and has had much less to say about circulation. What issues emerge when we put the process of grassroots (often unauthorized) circulation at the center of our focus? How does it change our accounts of the relationships between mass media and participatory culture? How might it shake up existing models of viral media and web 2.0?

This far-reaching talk, based on a forthcoming book authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, offers snapshots of a culture-in-process, a media ecology still taking shape, suggesting what it means not only for the futures of entertainment but also of civic life.


Henry Jenkins is Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has written and edited more than a dozen books on media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006). His other published works reflect the wide range of his research interests, touching on democracy and new media, the “wow factor” of popular culture, science-fiction fan communities, and the early history of film comedy.

As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Jenkins has been at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics, and culture. His research gives key insights to the success of social-networking websites, networked computer games, online fan communities, and other advocacy organizations, as well as emerging news media outlets.


Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Adaptation Roundtable at I-House

Penn Cinema Studies and the Penn Humanities Forum on Adaptations is presenting a forum tomorrow.

Adaptations Film Series:
Pleasures and Pitfalls of Film Adaptation Forum

Wednesday, Feb 01
5:00 PM
The Ibrahim Theater at the International House

The history of cinema is one of adaptations from other media. Great adaptations are often more innovative and enduring than their sources. Indeed, they compel us to rethink the whole relationship between originals and copies, sources and targets. Distinguished faculty from Penn and NYU discuss some of their favorite film adaptations, including those featured in the Adaptations Film Series. With Carolyn Abbate, Christopher H Browne Distinguished Professor of Music, Penn; Tim Corrigan, Professor of English and Cinema Studies, Penn; and Alex Galloway, Associate Professor of Culture and Communication, NYU.

David E. James on Feb. 3

I would like to announce the first event of the semester for the Philadelphia Cinema and Media Seminar. The event this Friday will be hosted by University of Pennsylvania Cinema Studies, with the support of Bryn Mawr's Program in Film Studies and the Center for Humanities at Temple.

David E. James (Univ. of Southern California)
"Twenty-nine Pictures Like That: The Elvis Movie”

Friday, February 3
5:00 pm

231 Fisher-Bennett Hall
Univ. of Pennsylvania

The talk will overview Elvis Presley’s film career, including its punctuation by television, and examine the changes in its relation to the social meaning of rock'n'roll in the fifties and sixties. It will pay particular attention to the -- usually reviled-- movies he made in the 1960s after his return from the army, approaching them as a distinct genre.




David E. James is on the faculty of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Written Within and Without: A Study of Blake's Milton (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1977), Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton University Press, 1989), Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popular Culture (London: Verso Books, 1996), and The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2006), and over 100 articles and reviews in PMLA, October, Social Text, Representations, Film Quarterly, the minnesota review, Grey Room, and other journals and periodicals. His teaching and research interests currently focus on avant-garde cinema, culture in Los Angeles, East-Asian cinema, film and music, and working-class culture. In 2011-2012 he is the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Allan Sekula events

There are two events with Allan Sekula this week:

"The Demonstrators Also Waited"
Allan Sekula in Conversation with Kaja Silverman

Tuesday, January 17, 2012
6:30-8:30 pm
Slought Foundation
4017 Walnut St.
Free; reservation not required

The Forgotten Space
with an introduction by Allan Sekula
dirs, Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, 2010, 112 mins, color/black-and-white, sound

Wednesday, January 18
7:00pm
International House


The title "The Demonstrators Also Waited" comes from a short essay written by Kaja Silverman about Allan Sekula's Waiting For Tear Gas, a slide show consisting of 81 images taken in Seattle during protests against the World Trade Organization in the autumn of 1999. In Waiting For Tear Gas, Sekula records "the lulls, the waiting, and the margins of the events." Photographing without a flash, telephoto zoom lens, or auto-focus, he refuses the pressure "to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence." Instead he presents us with a sequence that evokes the slow time of conflict in the street where the orchestration of police operations opens onto moments of uncertainty. These are scenes where everyone's role is pre-determined, but no one is quite sure how things will actually proceed.

With the clearing of many of the Occupy camps late this fall, we have come again to see how conflict in the street entails waiting and how uncertainty and anticipation color the experience of bodies asserting themselves against the abstraction of global capital. Occupation has been described as a tactic that is opposed to the temporality of protest since it does not begin or end at a pre-given moment, but rather insists on the principle of open-endedness. But waiting occurred everywhere and threats of eviction shaped the Occupy movement's struggles. Occupation as a tactic has now opened on to new and as of yet undefined horizons, in some cases trading visibility for new forms of self-organization. The first few months of Occupy gave rise to an explosion of documentation, indelible moments of violence, but also many images that correspond more closely to the principles of what Sekula has called the "anti photojournalism" behind Waiting For Tear Gas. Such scenes of volatile collectivity invite reflection, especially now as many of the most visible elements of the occupations have begun to disappear from view. The conversation between Sekula and Kaja Silverman will be an occasion to ask how a work like Waiting For Tear Gas appears now in the light of the politics of occupation that have taken hold in our own moment, as well as a time to consider the shifting relationship between photography and temporality in Sekula's larger body of work on the operations of global capitalism, particularly at sea. This subject has been the focus of a related series of projects focused on maritime trade, in works such as Fish Story, The Lottery of the Sea, and Sekula's latest film, The Forgotten Space.


Since the early 1970s, Allan Sekula has theorized the practice of documentary photography as both an artist and a critic. He often works in essay form in order to challenge the apparent autonomy of the singular image; for example in "Untitled Slide Sequence" (1972) employees at General Dynamics emerge one by one or in small groups at the end of the day just as workers at the Lumière factory did nearly a century before. Sekula is also the author of a number of seminal essays including, "The Traffic in Photographs" (1981) and "The Body and the Archive" (1992). His trenchant critique of social documentary turns on his account of the tension between the technological and aesthetic discourses of photography. Sekula's prolific body of work has continued to revolve around issues of labor and the aesthetic and economic traffic in images bound up with the processes of globalization. In recent years Sekula has turned to the medium of film which has offered up new and rich means for bringing together image and word in works such as The Lottery of the Sea (2006) and The Forgotten Space (2010).

Sekula lives and works in Los Angeles where he also teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. He has had solo shows recently at MuHKA, Antwerp, Belgium; Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest, Hungary; e-flux, New York; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; and the Generali Foundation, Vienna, Austria.

This program is made possible in part through the generous support of the Department of the History of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.