Dan Bashara on UPA Cartoons and Pre-War Modernism

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar on Thursday, Jan 13 (please note new date) at 6:30 pm to welcome Dan Bashara for his talk "Useful in the Abstract: UPA Cartoons and Pre-War Modernism." Bashara is a PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University. Bruce Jenkins from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will provide the response. The CFS will be held, as always, in the Flaxman Theater, Room 1307 of the School of the Art Institute's building at 112 S. Michigan Ave.

Thursday, Jan 13 at 6:30pm
Dan Bashara, "Useful in the Abstract: UPA Cartoons and Pre-War Modernism"
Respondent: Bruce Jenkins (SAIC)
For more information on this and other CFS events, please visit our website at http://chicagofilmseminar.blogspot.com/

Bashara describes his talk as follows:

In histories of animation, the fabled "modern" style of the post-WWII American cartoon, perhaps best exemplified by the film studio United Productions of America and its Oscar-winning characters Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing, is often treated as an outgrowth of mid-century modernism. With their simplified, geometric shapes and flat planes of bold colors, UPA cartoons appear during the postwar proliferation of Abstract Expressionism and minimalist design, supposedly adapting these innovations to the medium of animation. This paper aims to resituate UPA animation within the historical context of Precisionism, a form of modernist painting that developed in America in the 1920s. I argue that 1950s animation did not emerge fully formed from the mid-century design boom, but rather is a resurgence of this earlier modernism and its attendant concerns of order and the establishment of a new, more efficient mode of vision. In so doing, I aim to expand our idea of the cultural work the postwar cartoon was presumed to do, and to highlight its more "serious" engagements with an often overlooked iteration of American modernism.

Session #4: Mark Williams on Minority Report (Dec 2)

The Chicago Film Seminar welcomes Dartmouth's Mark Williams to deliver his talk "Closely Belated? Thoughts on Real-Time Media Publics and Minority Report." Williams describes his talk as follows:

Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002) is renowned as an exemplary instance of the cyber-noir thriller. Even in an age of media convergence and consolidation, motion pictures can function as key sites of interlocution for the structuring of desires and anxieties about political and socio-economic dynamics and effects. Minority Report is rather rich in such opportunities for analysis, although despite the assuredness of its conceit and dramatic structure, I find more compelling what the film cannot resolve quite so neatly--what we might call its belated thematics. Via methods that derive from television studies, I will consider the film in relation to what I call "real-time" desires that condition its configurations of digital culture, the techno-future, and personal/social trauma.

Mark Williams is an Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at Dartmouth College. He has published widely on film and television and is the founding editor of The Journal of e-Media Studies.