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.

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.

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).

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

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.