The first of our yearly colloquia features Professor Tasha Oren from the University of Wisconsin.
Through its institutional structures, textual production, and points of reception, television has taken part in articulations of cultural and national identity all over the globe. How is this sense of "the local" changing as media grows increasingly mobile and new global television forms (like the reality format) dominate worldwide programming?
Over the past fifteen years, CG hordes, swarms, armies, armadas, flocks and crowds have appeared in popular films with the aid of motion capture technologies and software programs such as MASSIVE, Render Man, and Stadium Guy.
A remarkable and unexpected achievement of Iranian postrevolutionary cinema is the significant and signifying role of women both behind and in front of the camera.
To see Still Life as social documentary that shows us the ‘other China’ that most of us do not know is to largely miss the point. While the film for the most part adheres to a documentary style, it can also introduce at crucial moments bizarre, anti-realist, details. If the film documents a social space, it is a space that has undergone a twist, just as socialism in China has been twisted into 'the socialist market economy.' Such a space cannot be approached directly through straight documentary, but only deduced through the bizarre effects that it produces; effects
Episodes of anti-state insurgency are marked by an obsession with maps: cartographic narrations of rebel-occupied territories, ruins, and reclaimed land. In 1857, in the north Indian city of Lucknow, colonial, social, and spatial relations were violently reordered by anti-British revolts. This talk discusses tensions between a visual prose of counter-insurgency confronted everywhere by a splintering investment in land for the proliferating public of photography and early cinema. At the heart of this discussion is an effort to theorize the
This talk considers a key moment in the consolidation of the studio system and proposes that Hollywood public relations of the early 1920s legitimated corporate authority by successfully establishing the terms in which the history of the American motion-picture industry could be written.
In 1917 the aptly named Colonial Films produced a religious drama, Tepeyac, that retold the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe's miraculous appearance to the Indian Juan Diego. The film offers viewers multiple opportunities to read Mexico's history as part of its modern identity. This talk will examine Mexican film producers' attempts to address national subject matter in the cosmopolitan idiom of narrative cinema, and the connections between the politics of gender proposed by the film and Mexican national production during the late 1930s and 1940s, the Golden Age of Mexican
This talk approaches a pivotal moment of queer television history, the appearance of the first openly gay man on American television (in 1973, An American Family), through some reflection on the convergence of queer and televisual times. Looking backward from the last episode of An American Family, occasioned by the death of Lance in 2001, I explore the repeated action of coming out in relation to television seriality. Talk sponsored by the Film & Digital Media Department and supported by Porter College Visiting Artists and Lecturers.
This two-part talk consists of Professor Everett's recent work on digital and new media that includes her participation in the MacArthur Foundation's "field-building" endeavor conceptualized as the Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Professor Everett will discuss her involvement in this multi-year, multi-million dollar initiative, particularly her work on youth experiences with digital media technologies and computer games. This aspect of her work focuses on the racialized meaning-encryption-decryption feedback loop at work in contemporary popular computer games. Her inte
