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.

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.

James Chandler on Sentimentality (Rutgers)

The Rutgers British Studies Center presents

James Chandler
"Sight Lines and Sentiment: Schiller, Shaftesbury, Sterne, Cinema"

Thursday, March 3, 2011

4:30 pm

Teleconference Lecture Hall

Alexander Library

169 College Avenue
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Griffith and Capra—filmmakers strongly associated, respectively, with two important moments in the classical system of narration in Hollywood (1910s silent film and 1930s talkies)—have long been casually called “sentimental.” But when Eisenstein famously argued that one couldn’t understand the cinema of Griffith and his disciples without coming to terms with Dickens,
he programmatically refused to concern himself with the sentimentalism of the connection, arguing instead for a particular genealogy of montage that he saw leading to his own practice and that of other Soviet filmmakers. Professor Chandler’s aim is to take seriously the complex legacy of the sentimental to classical Hollywood cinema, by going back not just to what is sentimental Dickens but to the eighteenth-century emergence of the category: especially to how the sentimental constructs spectators, articulates space, redeems the concept of the soul from materialist challenges, and negotiates canons of probability.

Prof. Chandler will be introduced by Michael McKeon of the Department of English. A reception will follow the lecture.


James Chandler is the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, where he is the Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities and Co-Director of the Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. Prof. Chandler is the author of Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (1984), England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (1998), and the forthcoming The Sentimental Mood: From Sterne to Capra. Prof. Chandler also has edited or co-edited Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines (1994), Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene in British Romanticism, 1780-1840 (2005), The Cambridge Companion to Romantic Poetry (2008), and The New Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (2008).

Yunte Huang on Charlie Chan

The Center for Humanities at Temple is holding a talk by Yunte Huang on the flamboyant cinematic and cultural icon, Charlie Chan and his influence on American culture.

Center for Humanities at Temple University

Gladfelter Hall, 10th floor lounge

Thursday, February 10

12:30pm

Still from DVD Beaver

Yunte Huang is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He came to the U.S. in 1991 after graduating from Peking University with a B.A. in English. He received his Ph.D. from the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo in 1999 and taught as an Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University from 1999-2003. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (2008), CRIBS (2005), Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2002), and Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (1997), and the translator into Chinese of Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos. His new book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, is to be published by W. W. Norton in August 2010.