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.

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.

Malcolm Turvey next week

The PCMS has two events planned for end of the semester.

Malcolm Turvey
(Sarah Lawrence College)
"Medium-Specificity Defended"

respondent: Timothy Corrigan (Univ. of Pennsylvania)

Tuesday, May 3
5:00 pm
Temple Univ. Center City, room 420


Abstract:

Medium-specificity, which informed much theorizing about the arts in the twentieth century, has not fared well among theorists recently. Those influenced by the opposition to essentialism in much post-structuralist thought have tended to reject medium-specific arguments as essentialist. However, even theorists who have no such opposition to essentialism have found it wanting. For example, contemporary philosopher Noel Carroll has proposed an essential definition of cinema or what he calls the moving image, in other words a definition in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, while eschewing medium-specificity and launching an all out assault on the doctrine. This paper defends a version of medium-specificity from the criticisms of Carroll and others by returning to some of the medium-specific arguments of classical film theorists such as Jean Epstein and Dziga Vertov. In the process, it untangles medium-specificity from other doctrines with which it is often confused, such as medium-essentialism, and it ends by explaining why a defensible version of medium-specificity remains relevant today.



Malcolm Turvey is a professor of film studies at Sarah Lawrence College and an editor of October. He is the author of Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2008) and The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (MIT Press, 2011).