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.
Showing posts with label Penn colloquium. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Penn colloquium. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
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.
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.
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).
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).
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Penn Colloquium: Mia Mask
Mia Mask (Vassar),
"The Precarious Politics of 'Precious'"
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
"The Precarious Politics of 'Precious'"
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
12:00pm
Penn Cinema Studies Colloquium
209A Fisher-Bennett Hall
3340 Walnut Street
University of Pennsylvania
There has been considerable controversy over Lee Daniels' film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire since its release in 2009. Various news outlets such as The New York Times, ABC News.com and The Huffington Post have published discussion of the film's polarizing effect. For example, on November 21, 2009 Times writer Felicia R. Lee posed the question that seemed to be on many people's minds: Is the film a reinforcement of noxious stereotypes or a realistic and therapeutic portrayal of a black family in America? In its unrelenting close examination of the eponymous character's tragically abusive childhood, Precious is simultaneously a grueling social problem picture for the twenty-first century and an amalgamation of familiar images that resonate with racial stereotypes. The film -- and its controversial reception -- has even been linked to other contested movies like The Color Purple (1985). Prominent intellectuals and journalists such as author Jill Nelson and literary scholar Ishmael Reed have addressed what Nelson described as "self-hatred" and Reed termed "The racism at the heart of Precious." In my essay, entitled "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: Precious Discourse on Black Cinema," or "The Precarious Politics of Precious," I examine the critical controversy ignited by the film and offer my own close reading of the text. By closely reading the performances, the film's aesthetic, and the social context, I argue that Precious is complex and contradictory rather than simply offensive.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Penn Colloquium: Luis Moreno-Caballud
Luis Moreno-Caballud
"Editing Neighborhoods: the Politics of Urban Transformation in Recent Iberian Documentary Films"
Cinema Studies Colloquium
Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania
In the context of the latest developments of the Spanish May 15th movement, the social space of the neighborhood has suddenly regained importance. When “tent cities” in the main squares became unsustainable, the collective intelligence of the “indignados” crystallized in a clear message: let’s move to the neighborhoods. This movement echoes a long Spanish tradition of imagining the urban neighborhood as a space for political resistance, a tradition in which documentary film has had an important role. During the last decade, many documentary filmmakers have returned to the neighborhood to tell stories of urban transformation, in each case with a different vision of the political dimension of these changes. In this presentation, I will compare two divergent accounts of the “gentrification” of the so-called “Chinese neighborhood” in Barcelona. I will show how En construcción (José Luis Guerín, 2001) suggests that urban transformation can disclose accumulated layers of human experience, while De Nens (Joaquim Jordà, 2003) presents urban change as a surface phenomenon that cloaks an intricate web of manipulations and interests. These two cinematic approaches, which will be compared with those of other documentary films, establish radically different narratives for the political imaginary of the Spanish neighborhood. Parsing out these narratives is particularly important at a moment in which the space of the urban neighborhood has been revitalized by the May 15th movement.
"Editing Neighborhoods: the Politics of Urban Transformation in Recent Iberian Documentary Films"
Cinema Studies Colloquium
Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania
In the context of the latest developments of the Spanish May 15th movement, the social space of the neighborhood has suddenly regained importance. When “tent cities” in the main squares became unsustainable, the collective intelligence of the “indignados” crystallized in a clear message: let’s move to the neighborhoods. This movement echoes a long Spanish tradition of imagining the urban neighborhood as a space for political resistance, a tradition in which documentary film has had an important role. During the last decade, many documentary filmmakers have returned to the neighborhood to tell stories of urban transformation, in each case with a different vision of the political dimension of these changes. In this presentation, I will compare two divergent accounts of the “gentrification” of the so-called “Chinese neighborhood” in Barcelona. I will show how En construcción (José Luis Guerín, 2001) suggests that urban transformation can disclose accumulated layers of human experience, while De Nens (Joaquim Jordà, 2003) presents urban change as a surface phenomenon that cloaks an intricate web of manipulations and interests. These two cinematic approaches, which will be compared with those of other documentary films, establish radically different narratives for the political imaginary of the Spanish neighborhood. Parsing out these narratives is particularly important at a moment in which the space of the urban neighborhood has been revitalized by the May 15th movement.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Penn Colloquium: Carina Yervasi
Carina Yervasi (Swarthmore College),
Spotlight on the Continent: African Cinema at the 22nd FESPACO Film Festival
Cinema Studies Colloquium
Spotlight on the Continent: African Cinema at the 22nd FESPACO Film Festival
Cinema Studies Colloquium
University of Pennsylvania
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
12:00pm
The Africa that is represented at Fespaco “is torn between what it is and what it strives to be,” writes film critic Aboubacar Cissé in Africine, a film journal published by the African Federation of Film Critics. For Congolese historian and writer Elikia M’Bokolo such a cinematographic and historical interstice heralds optimism: that cinema is a “powerful memory media…[that has] always known how to testify to the progress of Africa.” Whereas for others, including the Delegate General of the 2011 Fespaco, Michel Ouedraogo this constant tearing apart means that “independent Africa has not yet decolonized its screens.” How can continent-wide film production respond to such antipodes of thought? How do both tendencies bear out over the course of the week-long festival? This paper will look at the ways in which Cissé’s observation is engaged in the articles by African writers and critics as they respond to African filmmaking and, more importantly, to the crucial place that Fespaco holds in the production and promotion of African film.
The Africa that is represented at Fespaco “is torn between what it is and what it strives to be,” writes film critic Aboubacar Cissé in Africine, a film journal published by the African Federation of Film Critics. For Congolese historian and writer Elikia M’Bokolo such a cinematographic and historical interstice heralds optimism: that cinema is a “powerful memory media…[that has] always known how to testify to the progress of Africa.” Whereas for others, including the Delegate General of the 2011 Fespaco, Michel Ouedraogo this constant tearing apart means that “independent Africa has not yet decolonized its screens.” How can continent-wide film production respond to such antipodes of thought? How do both tendencies bear out over the course of the week-long festival? This paper will look at the ways in which Cissé’s observation is engaged in the articles by African writers and critics as they respond to African filmmaking and, more importantly, to the crucial place that Fespaco holds in the production and promotion of African film.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Penn Colloquium: Ivone Margulies
CINE Colloquium, Ivone Margulies
Wednesday, April 6, 2011 - 12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
Wednesday, April 6, 2011 - 12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Ivone Margulies (Hunter College)
The Real/Actor: Reenactment and Transmission in Contemporary Cinema
Claude Lanzmann’s statement that “no true knowledge exists prior to transmission,” firmly couples the addressee to a scene in which speech acts. The performative efficacy of an in-person address has depended on the return, through cinema’s agency, of people to places in which they underwent traumatic events. This qualified “return,” brings into scene the real/actor, evidence that is most disturbing, and my object here. This paper complicates Lanzmann’s testimonial credo in Shoah looking at two examples of self-reenactment—atrocities dispassionately replayed by Khmer rouge guards in Rithy Panh’s S21 the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and the return of Carapiru, an awa-guaja Indian to reenact his first contact with whites 20 and 30s years earlier when his tribe was massacred in Andrea Tonacci’s Sierras of Chaos (2007). I argue that by staging unconscious and problematic agencies relayed in faulty memories, inarticulate voices and unclear ethical stances these films deploy the real/actor to invalidate a necessary link between re-enactment, self-knowledge and exemplarity. Through a close reading of Sierras of Chaos I discuss how Carapiru, a presence pervaded with temporal ambiguity and categorical instability, is used as a catalyst to implicate more broadly cinema and the media in the National exclusion of indigenous groups in Brazil.
Ivone Margulies (Hunter College)
The Real/Actor: Reenactment and Transmission in Contemporary Cinema
Claude Lanzmann’s statement that “no true knowledge exists prior to transmission,” firmly couples the addressee to a scene in which speech acts. The performative efficacy of an in-person address has depended on the return, through cinema’s agency, of people to places in which they underwent traumatic events. This qualified “return,” brings into scene the real/actor, evidence that is most disturbing, and my object here. This paper complicates Lanzmann’s testimonial credo in Shoah looking at two examples of self-reenactment—atrocities dispassionately replayed by Khmer rouge guards in Rithy Panh’s S21 the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and the return of Carapiru, an awa-guaja Indian to reenact his first contact with whites 20 and 30s years earlier when his tribe was massacred in Andrea Tonacci’s Sierras of Chaos (2007). I argue that by staging unconscious and problematic agencies relayed in faulty memories, inarticulate voices and unclear ethical stances these films deploy the real/actor to invalidate a necessary link between re-enactment, self-knowledge and exemplarity. Through a close reading of Sierras of Chaos I discuss how Carapiru, a presence pervaded with temporal ambiguity and categorical instability, is used as a catalyst to implicate more broadly cinema and the media in the National exclusion of indigenous groups in Brazil.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Penn Colloquium: Xiaojue Wang
Xiaojue Wang (Univ. of Pennsylvania)
"Building Leisure and Everyday Life in Socialist Shanghai"
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
"Building Leisure and Everyday Life in Socialist Shanghai"
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Abstract:
My talk considers socialist urban imaginations and reconstructions of Shanghai as represented in a small group of low-budget films in the late 1950s focusing on the everyday life of early socialist China among the vast bulk of war films and Cold War conspiracy films. It examines how ideological hegemony of the fledgling socialist state is projected onto the reconfiguration of urban space and urban landscape, and how the construction of socialist new person, and the conceptualization of work and leisure, and the production of new socialist spaces are tightly intricated in the cinema of the Seventeen Years Period.
My talk considers socialist urban imaginations and reconstructions of Shanghai as represented in a small group of low-budget films in the late 1950s focusing on the everyday life of early socialist China among the vast bulk of war films and Cold War conspiracy films. It examines how ideological hegemony of the fledgling socialist state is projected onto the reconfiguration of urban space and urban landscape, and how the construction of socialist new person, and the conceptualization of work and leisure, and the production of new socialist spaces are tightly intricated in the cinema of the Seventeen Years Period.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Penn talks this week
Tomorrow, Wed., Feb. 23, Tanji Gilliam, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, will be giving a colloquium talk titled, "or colored girls who also saw PRECIOUS and the rainbow is always outside":
Class of '55 Conference Room, Van Pelt Dietrich Library Center
Left, after the historic stereotyping of black women's bodies as sexually available, and the disciplined silences around rape and other forms of domestic violence, is the project of sharing black women's intimate experiences with violence when they have, however uncharacteristically, permitted this. This must be done in a way that makes use of silence, an agency that black women have historically enacted. This talk is excerpted from a larger manuscript, do you have any scars?/The Architecture of Violence. It looks at the cartographic record of domestic violence in Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses and maps popular representations of vernacular architecture in film and video in relationship to that media.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
Friday, Dan Cohen from George Mason University will be giving a lecture on "The Ivory Tower and the Open Web":
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
Friday, Dan Cohen from George Mason University will be giving a lecture on "The Ivory Tower and the Open Web":
Friday, February 25, 2011 - 10:30amDan Cohen will share insights from his new book The Ivory Tower and the Open Web. The Web is now over twenty years old, and there is no doubt that the academy has taken advantage of its tremendous potential for disseminating resources and scholarship. But a full accounting of the academic approach to the Web shows that compared to the innovative vernacular forms that have flourished over the past two decades, we have been relatively meek in our use of the medium, often preferring to impose traditional ivory tower genres on the Web rather than import the open web's most successful models. For instance, we would rather digitize the journal we know than explore how blogs and social media might supplement or change our scholarly research and communication. In this talk, Dan explores what might happen if we reversed that flow and more wholeheartedly embraced the genres of the open Web.
Class of '55 Conference Room, Van Pelt Dietrich Library Center
Monday, February 7, 2011
Penn Colloquia: Caitlin McGrath and Tim Murray
University of Pennsylvania's Cinema Studies continues its colloquium series with two talks this week:
Timothy Murray (Cornell Univ.)
"Performing the Future, or Longing in the Age of New Media"
The talk will consider "longing" within the context of a psycho-philosophical approach to new media studies. The place of longing will be discussed not so much in a material context (the vanishing of materials) but more in a spectral sense: from consideration of models of mourning and melancholia in relation to the "loss" of analogue textual and cinematic formats to a reformulation of the dynamics of "analogy" in the digital age. In considering a number of performance pieces and new media artworks from Asia, the talk will raise the possibility of a flexible model of "the fold," in contrast to the mechanics of perspective, while positioning the valence of longing in relation to the future pull of informatics rather than the past lament of lost artifacts.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Caitlin McGrath
"'Seasickness is Decidedly Pleasant': Display and Movement in Late-Silent-Era Film Aesthetics"
What connects the rollercoaster in Hindle Wakes, the display window in Asphalt, and the trolley in Sunrise? They all use mobile camera work and experimental editing techniques to recreate the perceptual experience of modern life for the viewer. This paper will consider the role of these three sites in the modern urban environment—the department store, the city street, and the amusement park – in cinematic visualizations of modernization and industrialization. Examining this mix of pleasure and discomfort through the lens of the history of perceptual psychology becomes a means of exploring the affective dimension of the history of film style from early cinema through to Classical Hollywood.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
"'Seasickness is Decidedly Pleasant': Display and Movement in Late-Silent-Era Film Aesthetics"
What connects the rollercoaster in Hindle Wakes, the display window in Asphalt, and the trolley in Sunrise? They all use mobile camera work and experimental editing techniques to recreate the perceptual experience of modern life for the viewer. This paper will consider the role of these three sites in the modern urban environment—the department store, the city street, and the amusement park – in cinematic visualizations of modernization and industrialization. Examining this mix of pleasure and discomfort through the lens of the history of perceptual psychology becomes a means of exploring the affective dimension of the history of film style from early cinema through to Classical Hollywood.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Timothy Murray (Cornell Univ.)
"Performing the Future, or Longing in the Age of New Media"
The talk will consider "longing" within the context of a psycho-philosophical approach to new media studies. The place of longing will be discussed not so much in a material context (the vanishing of materials) but more in a spectral sense: from consideration of models of mourning and melancholia in relation to the "loss" of analogue textual and cinematic formats to a reformulation of the dynamics of "analogy" in the digital age. In considering a number of performance pieces and new media artworks from Asia, the talk will raise the possibility of a flexible model of "the fold," in contrast to the mechanics of perspective, while positioning the valence of longing in relation to the future pull of informatics rather than the past lament of lost artifacts.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
5:00pm
401 Fisher-Bennett Hall
401 Fisher-Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania
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