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Film & Digital Media and History of Art and Visual Culture Spring Colloquium - David Pendleton

Mon, May 2, 2011, 7:00 am
Location: 
Porter D-245

Date: May 2, 2011

Time: 6:00-8:00 PM

Location: Porter College, D245

 

David Pendleton: Reasons to Believe in This World, or Responsibilities of a Film Programmer

 

As the numbers of both film festivals and film scholars have risen, programming is more and more seen as possible career path for some of those scholars.  At the same time, programmers are a pragmatic lot, by and large. A lot of what we do is conditions by what we can afford, what equipment we have, what we can do to show. So what are the links between film studies as an academic discipline and programming? In my case, it was the study of film aesthetics and theories of spectatorship that had the most profound impact on my practice as a programmer.  Programming requires an attachment to the notion of the cinematic experience as one that is both public and private at the same time; the spectator is both absorbed into the image but also a body in a seat in a darkened room with other bodies seated nearby.  And both aspects of watching films, the aesthetic and the social, are profoundly political.  It is in relation to these aspects of film spectatorship, and film programming, that I will be considering the following statement (from Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time Image): "Restoring our belief in the world - this power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad)." In a world saturated with both images and cynical reasoning, is it worth believing in cinema? 

 

David Pendleton is the Programmer of the Harvard Film Archive, overseeing its weekly cinematheque screenings for the public.  He received his doctorate in film studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.  His dissertation is entitled "The Eye of Desire": Exoticism, Homoeroticism, Cinema.  He has also taught courses on film history and gender in cinema at the University of Southern California and has had writing published in Jump Cut and Cineaste.  

 

For more information about this event or the series overall, please contact Derek Murray dcmurray@ucsc.edu, or Irene Gustafson ireneg@ucsc.edu.