Penn Colloquium: Carina Yervasi

Carina Yervasi (Swarthmore College),
Spotlight on the Continent: African Cinema at the 22nd FESPACO Film Festival

Cinema Studies Colloquium

University of Pennsylvania
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

12:00pm

The Africa that is represented at Fespaco “is torn between what it is and what it strives to be,” writes film critic Aboubacar Cissé in Africine, a film journal published by the African Federation of Film Critics. For Congolese historian and writer Elikia M’Bokolo such a cinematographic and historical interstice heralds optimism: that cinema is a “powerful memory media…[that has] always known how to testify to the progress of Africa.” Whereas for others, including the Delegate General of the 2011 Fespaco, Michel Ouedraogo this constant tearing apart means that “independent Africa has not yet decolonized its screens.” How can continent-wide film production respond to such antipodes of thought? How do both tendencies bear out over the course of the week-long festival? This paper will look at the ways in which Cissé’s observation is engaged in the articles by African writers and critics as they respond to African filmmaking and, more importantly, to the crucial place that Fespaco holds in the production and promotion of African film.

Javed Akhtar: "Bollywood and the Global India"

The New India Forum of the Center for Humanities at Temple is hosting two events this week:

"Bollywood and the Global India"

Javed Akhtar in conversation with Priya Joshi

Thursday, April 14, 2011
5-7pm

Alter Hall Auditorium, A31
Temple University

1801 Liacouras Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19122

Javed Akhtar has been a defining voice in Bollywood cinema and its global diffusion for decades. Screenwriter, poet, and Member of Parliament, Akhtar co-wrote the screenplays for Bollywood's biggest blockbusters in the 1970s, including Sholay, Deewar, and Trishul. His lyrics articulate responsibility and conscience, politics and grief, and capture the zeitgeist of India in transition. A staunch believer in secular ideals, Akhtar has been an outspoken voice in the streets and in Parliament on matters of social justice and religious harmony. He has been honored by every major film award in India numerous times (including 14 Filmfare awards) and both the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan, given for exemplary citizenship by the Government of India.

The 1970s and its Legacies:
A Workshop on India's Cinemas

Friday, April 15, 2011
Weigley Room, 914 Gladfelter Hall
Temple University

1115 Polett Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19122

Organized by
Priya Joshi, Temple University
Rajinder Dudrah, University of Manchester

PROGRAM

Keynote: Javed Akhtar

9:00: Breakfast

9:30: Introduction and Opening Remarks

10.00: The Family
Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University
Structures of Fictive Kinship in 1970s Hindi Cinema

Priya Joshi, Temple University
Cinema as Public Fantasy

Discussant: Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsylvania

11:00: The Figures
Ajay Gehlawat, Sonona State
The Construction of 1970s Femininity

Satish Poduval, The EFL University, Hyderabad
Gender, Conjugality and the Remaking of Class in 1970s Hindi Cinema

Discussant: Kavita Daiya, George Washington University

12:00: Lunch

1:30: The Industry
Corey Creekmur, University of Iowa
Popular Hindi Cinema, Periodization, and Manoj Kumar


2:00: The South
S.E. Pillai, Michigan State University
1970s Tamil Cinema and the Post-classical Turn

Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, Rice University
A Retake on Malayalam Cinema of the 1970s

Discussant: Amanda Weidman, Bryn Mawr College

3:00: Tea

3:30: Closing Remarks
Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University
The 1970s in Perspective
4:00: Concluding Roundtable
Moderator: Rajinder Dudrah, University of Manchester

Because seating is limited, RSVPs are recommended.

Cinefest 2011

The other major Philly film festival, Cinefest starts tonight. The schedule is a bit heavier on indie genre film and quirkumentary, a little lighter on the festival hits that the Philadelphia Film Festival is specializing in. Highlights (for me) include François Ozon's Potiche and the documentary Project Nim.

Penn Colloquium: Ivone Margulies

CINE Colloquium, Ivone Margulies
Wednesday, April 6, 2011 - 12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall

University of Pennsylvania

Ivone Margulies (Hunter College)

The Real/Actor: Reenactment and Transmission in Contemporary Cinema

Claude Lanzmann’s statement that “no true knowledge exists prior to transmission,” firmly couples the addressee to a scene in which speech acts. The performative efficacy of an in-person address has depended on the return, through cinema’s agency, of people to places in which they underwent traumatic events. This qualified “return,” brings into scene the real/actor, evidence that is most disturbing, and my object here. This paper complicates Lanzmann’s testimonial credo in Shoah looking at two examples of self-reenactment—atrocities dispassionately replayed by Khmer rouge guards in Rithy Panh’s S21 the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and the return of Carapiru, an awa-guaja Indian to reenact his first contact with whites 20 and 30s years earlier when his tribe was massacred in Andrea Tonacci’s Sierras of Chaos (2007). I argue that by staging unconscious and problematic agencies relayed in faulty memories, inarticulate voices and unclear ethical stances these films deploy the real/actor to invalidate a necessary link between re-enactment, self-knowledge and exemplarity. Through a close reading of Sierras of Chaos I discuss how Carapiru, a presence pervaded with temporal ambiguity and categorical instability, is used as a catalyst to implicate more broadly cinema and the media in the National exclusion of indigenous groups in Brazil.

Linda Williams at Bryn Mawr

Linda Williams
Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley

“Megamelodrama: Vertical and Horizontal Suspensions of the 'Classical'”

Monday March 21, 2011

4:30 p.m. (Reception to follow)

Carpenter 21

Bryn Mawr College

Since the late eighties, American audiences have been witnessing a quite literal expansion of the very dimensions of movie and television melodrama. The movie screen has expanded spatially. Where it once grew wider in competition with television, it now grows deeper--as 3D becomes more popular but also through a new dynamization of the vertical. In contrast, the television has expanded "horizontally" in time as serial melodramas go on and on. Both of these expansions suggest that we need to rethink the very nature of the melodramatic space and time of the moving image in contrast to assumed norms of the "classical."

Sponsored by Class of 1902 Lecture Fund, Department of English, Program in Film Studies, Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Center for Social Sciences

Penn Colloquium: Xiaojue Wang

Xiaojue Wang (Univ. of Pennsylvania)
"Building Leisure and Everyday Life in Socialist Shanghai"

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall

University of Pennsylvania

Abstract:
My talk considers socialist urban imaginations and reconstructions of Shanghai as represented in a small group of low-budget films in the late 1950s focusing on the everyday life of early socialist China among the vast bulk of war films and Cold War conspiracy films. It examines how ideological hegemony of the fledgling socialist state is projected onto the reconfiguration of urban space and urban landscape, and how the construction of socialist new person, and the conceptualization of work and leisure, and the production of new socialist spaces are tightly intricated in the cinema of the Seventeen Years Period.

March 2011: Fabienne Darling-Wolf

This Friday is the next talk in the PCMS series.

"When Candy met Asterix: Japanese animation’s voyage to France and the shaping of global culture"

Fabienne Darling-Wolf (Temple University)

Respondent: William Gardner (Swarthmore College)

Temple University Center City campus (TUCC)
Room 420
(bring ID to show front desk)
Friday, March 18, 5:30 pm





Abstract:
Based on a translocal comparative analysis informed by qualitative interviews with Japanese and French media consumers, this paper considers what the long history of Japanese animation and manga’s presence in France can tell us about the nature of contemporary globalized cultural forms and their local negotiation, particularly when considering the wide variety of cultural environments these texts—often originally based on European or American literary works—propose to represent (including France’s “native” culture). Pointing to significant differences in the nature of the genres’ influence in the French and American contexts, it concludes with a discussion of the dangers of assuming that the United States can be taken as representative of an essentialized “West,” often opposed, in turn, to an equally essentialized and exoticized “non-Western Other.”

Bios:

Dr. Fabienne Darling-Wolf is Associate Professor of Journalism in the School of the Journalism and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia. She also teaches and supervises graduate students in the school’s Mass Media and Communication Doctoral Program.

Dr. Darling-Wolf’s research focuses on processes of mediated cultural influence and negotiation in a global context, paying particular attention to how such processes intersect with gendered, racial and ethnic identity formation. Her work has been published in Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journalism and Communication Monographs, New Media and Society, Popular Music and Society, Feminist Media Studies, Popular Communication, Journalism, Journalism Studies, Communication Review, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Visual Communication Quarterly and Journal of Communication Inquiry.

William Gardner is an associate professor of Japanese at Swarthmore College. He is author of Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006) and “Literature as Life-form: Media and Modernism in the Literary Theory of Okuma Nobuyuki,” Monumenta Nipponica (2008). His current research is on science fiction and on media and virtuality in contemporary fiction.