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.

December Talk: Michael Dwyer on American Graffiti

It has taken a while for the seminar to get started this semester, but I am pleased to announce an end-of-semester talk for next Thursday.

Michael D. Dwyer (Arcadia University)

Re-Reading American Graffiti

Respondent: Chris Cagle (Temple University)

Thursday, December 8

5:00-6:30pm

Temple University Center City (directions)

Room 420 (bring ID and check in with front desk)

Abstract:
In the 1980s, nostalgia for the fifties became an enormously lucrative and politically resonant trope in American popular culture. The text most often identified as the founding document of this "nostalgia wave" in America is American Graffiti (1973). The film was received warmly by critics and audiences, establishing its young director George Lucas in Hollywood. In retrospect, however, critics and theorists have largely condemned American Graffiti. Popular critics have aligned the film with the emergence of Reaganism, while theorists have isolated the film as a symptom of the postmodernist commodification of history.

Discourses that surrounded the film's release, however, reveal that the political function of fifties nostalgia was radically different in 1973 than it was in ensuing decades. In fact, as I'll show, the repeated re-releases of the film in various theatrical and video formats continually reposition it within new cultural contexts and reconfigure its ideological function. Taking note of the historical emergence of nostalgia and recent work by Richard Dyer on the self-reflexive nature of pastiche, I'll argue that re-reading American Graffiti affords us the opportunity to acknowledge the diverse aesthetic, political, and cultural uses of nostalgia.

Michael D. Dwyer is an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at Arcadia University, teaching courses in film, media studies, and cultural studies. His manuscript, Back to the Fifties, centers on the function of nostalgia in popular media, evolving practices of allusion, citation and quotation, and their relationships with history and cultural memory in the Reagan Era.

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 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.

Hal Foster at Tyler School of Art

Not strictly film or media studies, but this might be of interest....

Hal Foster

Toward a Grammar of Emergency

Wednesday, October 5

6:00 PM

TYLER SCHOOL OF ART, BO4
2001 N. 13TH STREET
(Temple Main Campus)

In his talk titled "Toward a Grammar of Emergency," Hal Foster will discuss four key concepts in the work of Thomas Hirschhorn: the precarious, the creaturely, expenditure, and emergency.

“Crystal of Resistance” by Thomas Hirschhorn at Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2011.


Hal Foster is Townsend Martin '17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He teaches lecture and seminar courses in modernist and contemporary art and theory; he also directs the graduate proseminar in methodology. Foster is an associate member of the School of Architecture and the Department of German; he also works with the programs of Media and Modernity and European Cultural Studies. Recent books include Art Since 1900 (2005), a co-authored textbook on 20th-century art; Prosthetic Gods (2004), concerning the relation between modernism and psychoanalysis; and Design and Crime (2002), on problems in contemporary art, architecture, and design. His book, Figment: Painting and Subjectivity in the First Pop Age, is due out in 2011, to be followed by Image Building: Essays on the Art-Architecture Rapport. He is presently at work on a theory of modernism as a way (in the words of Walter Benjamin) “to outlive culture, if need be.” A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foster continues to write regularly for October (which he co-edits), Artforum, and The London Review of Books.

The Critical Dialogue Series, a core component of the MFA program at the Tyler School of Art, is co-sponsored by the Philosophy Department, the Architecture Department, the Department of Journalism, the Film and Media Arts Department, and the Department of Art History.

Raymond Bellour and Christa Blümlinger

This Thursday, September 29, 2011, from 6:30-8:00 pm, at the Slought Foundation:

"Film as object of study and as archive"
Raymond Bellour, Christa Blümlinger

Raymond Bellour will speak for 30 minutes on "Forty years of stopping moving images, "followed by Blümlinger on "Archival Gestures," with a moderated conversation to follow.

This program has been organized by Nora Alter, Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University, with generous support of the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University; the Program in Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College; French Studies in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania; and the Society of Friends of the Slought Foundation.

Fuller biographies and descriptions available at the Slought website.

P Adams Sitney talk at Tyler

As part of the ongoing Critical Dialogues Series at Tyler School of Art (Temple main campus), P. Adams Sitney will be appearing in person for a lecture and critical conversation. The lecture will take place Wednesday evening, September 14, in the Tyler School of Art auditorium (13th and Norris St), room B004, and will begin promptly at 6:00PM .

Talk title:
"Cinema as Rhythm"

Biography:
P. Adams Sitney is a preeminent film theorist and historian of European and American avant-garde film. Known for his early intellectual and critical support of the New American Cinema movement, he wrote Visionary Film (Oxford University Press, 1974), widely regarded as the first major history of postwar American avant-garde filmmaking. The author of Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford University Press, 2009), Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics (University of Texas Press, 1995), and Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (Columbia University Press, 1992), he has also edited several essay collections on filmography. Sitney was an important figure in the early years of New York University’s doctoral program in Cinema Studies, which was established in 1970. He was a founder of New York’s Anthology Film Archives and has served as a member of its Essential Cinema film selection committee.