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.