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.

Penn Colloquium: Mia Mask

Mia Mask (Vassar),
"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.

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":

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":

Dan 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.

Friday, February 25, 2011 - 10:30am
Class of '55 Conference Room, Van Pelt Dietrich Library Center

Feb 2011: Franklin Cason

The rescheduled inaugural talk of the semester takes place this Friday:

"The Pleasures of Black Cinema"
Franklin Cason (Temple University)

Respondent: Caitlin McGrath (Univ. of Chicago)

Temple University Center City campus (TUCC)
Room 420
(bring ID to show front desk)
Friday, February 4, 6:00 pm

Abstract:
Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1976) exemplifies early, post-’68 African American art films, and as such is an excellent place to begin thinking about writing practices that re-address cinema aesthetics and politics. Where do we begin analyzing such an intentionally politically charged film?

The root of the indexical dilemma of photogénie found in Bush Mama can be seen in silent, pre-classical examples of black presence on screen. For example, can “blackness” as an aesthetic quality be expressed when presented on film? What criteria do we have for recognizing it? What does black presence evoke on-screen? What are the aesthetic and political effects of this expression? At first, these ideas seem too simplistic for consideration, uncritically aesthetic. Scholarship about black film often privileges social and political interpretations and criticism, while marginalizing aesthetic discussions. Yet, what is rarely addressed in black film analysis is the degree that photogénie, cinematic qualities of excess or aporia, might also mark the interplay between the signification of what is understood as “the black tradition” and the figural possibilities of artistic production. Cinematic aporias as research tools, like Roland Barthes’s “third meanings,” amount to interruptions, sites analogous to Michel Foucault’s third principle of heterotopias, “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” They “conduct” their observer along multiple routes, only some of them anticipated by the filmmaker. I suggest, paying attention to cinematic excess complements the priority of critique, enriching our understanding of pleasures found in films like Bush Mama by emphasizing a different approach to writing about films.

Bios:
Franklin Cason Jr. is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Temple University’s Film and Media Arts department, teaching media production, film theory, and film history courses. He received a PhD in English, with a specialization in film theory, from the University of Florida, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His research interests have been primarily concerned with Film, Modern Visual Culture, and Media Studies. As such, his research, writing, and artistic practice reaches across the disciplines of art history, film studies, digital multimedia, graphic novels, philosophy, sociology, literature, musicology, aesthetic theory, visual studies, and historical poetics. Drawing on his experience as an artist, writer, and filmmaker, his current research explores aesthetics, cinematic excess, and an improvisational approach to film analysis, in order to reconsider the role of aesthetics in African-American cinema, encouraging a different set of discussions.

Caitlin McGrath completed her dissertation "Captivating Motion: Late-Silent-Era Sequences of Modern Urban Perception" in 2010 from the University of Chicago. Her two current projects are a history of film screenings in department stores, centered on the Wanamaker screenings begun in 1907 and a history of amateur films from the 1939 New York World's Fair.