Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:45 pm on Thursday, December 1 to welcome Catherine Clepper (Ph.D. Candidate at Northwestern) for her talk, "Death by Fright: Risk, Consent, and Sensation in the House of William Castle," and Adam Hart (Ph.D. Candidate at U.Chicago) for his talk, "Something to Be Scared Of: Fear, Anxiety and Phobia in the Horror Film." James Lastra (U.Chicago) and Jeffrey Sconce (Northwestern) will both 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, December 1 at 6:45pm
Catherine Clepper, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern
"Death by Fright: Risk, Consent, and Sensation in the House of William Castle"
Adam Hart, Ph.D. Candidate, U.Chicago
"Something to Be Scared Of: Fear, Anxiety and Phobia in the Horror Film"
Respondents: James Lastra, U.Chicago, and Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern
Clepper describes her talk as follows:
From the onset of what Kevin Heffernan has called William Castle’s "middle-career" (beginning with 1958’s Macabre and ending, roughly, with Mr. Sardonicus in 1961) the independent director deftly conflated notions of cinematic suspense and spectatorial fun with those of physical risk and safety. Macabre's now famous Lloyd's of London insurance gimmick, guaranteeing $1000 to beneficiaries should any patron die of fright during the film's initial run, established a prescient agenda for Castle features to follow. In addition to emphasizing the outlandish rituals of promotional ballyhoo that distinguished Castle's career amongst other mid-century showmen, the insurance scheme importantly reminded audiences of the sensations felt within the cinema, namely fear, anxiety, morbid fascination, and (particularly, in the case of later Castle productions) physical shocks and vibrations. In this way, the process of insuring oneself against “death by fright” impressed upon Castle’s audiences the critical relationship between risk and consent as part of the interactive moviegoing experience. Risking unpleasantness (if not death) and consenting to disorientation, Macabre’s viewers were, as Linda Williams has argued, simultaneously more attuned to and distracted by the cinema’s sensorial spectrum; or, in other words, moviegoers anticipated and consented to their own bodily shocks. This talk explores how Macabre’s complex promotional strategies dovetailed with later campaigns for Castle’s House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler (both 1959). As Castle productions became more outlandish both on and off the screen, I argue that emphases on risk, consent, and sensation became even more foregrounded as part of Castle’s non-diegetic prologues as well as his extracinematic gags and installations. I also contend that as Castle’s films integrated excessive amounts of hullaballoo, viewers responded by adjusting their preconceptions about proper viewing habits and initiating an alternative shock-centric mode of spectatorship.
Hart describes his talk as follows:
In the two decades after Psycho, the horror genre underwent major changes. Where the genre was once characterized principally by the display of fearsome supernatural creatures, in the 1970s more human threats became commonplace. Along with this much-discussed transition from exotic monsters (often in foreign lands and older eras) to contemporary scenes familiar to Western middle-class audiences was a significant stylistic shift. The privileged object of display shifted from the extraordinary bodies of monsters to the abjected bodies of victims, with monsters - supernatural or not - kept off screen for much of the movie, sometimes never fully visualized until a climactic final sequence. This talk attempts to provide an understanding of the monster's function within the horror film given its somewhat marginalized position in the post-Psycho genre. Using accounts of anxiety and phobia as models, I posit a conception of the monster as an objectification of abject or undefined threats, a locus within which unspecified signals of danger can be contained.
Film Strip image from Wikimedia Commons
Monday, November 21, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
November 17: Eivind Røssaak on "The Performative Archive"
Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:45 pm on Thursday, November 17 to welcome Eivind Røssaak (U.Chicago-visiting) for his talk, "The Performative Archive: The Archival Turn in Film, Art and New Media Practices." Domietta Torlasco (Northwestern) 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, November 17 at 6:45pm
Eivind Røssaak, Associate Professor at the National Library of Norway and visiting professor at U.Chicago
"The Performative Archive: The Archival Turn in Film, Art and New Media Practices"
Respondent: Domietta Torlasco, Northwestern
Røssaak describes his talk as follows:
Paradoxically the archival turn in question happens as notions of the archive expand beyond the sphere of the archives proper, to philosophy, art, film and new media practices. This paper will present two interlinked aspects of the archival turn. On the one hand, inspired by the archival theories of Foucault and Derrida, research projects in Chicago, New York, Paris, Berlin and Oslo use notions of the archive as a key for understanding media history and the humanities. On the other hand, filmmakers, artists and new media wizards refashion old archival techniques to transform collections, memories and systemic structures into new arguments and sensible utterances. This is what I call performative archives. Key film and art works by Richter, Gordon, Godard, Jacobs, Müller and Farocki demonstrate this.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
October 13: Hamid Naficy on Early Iranian Cinema
Note: If you will be attending the reception immediately following the talk, please RSVP by Thursday, October 6 to the new CFS Coordinator, Nova Smith, at nova@uchicago.edu.
Please join us for the opening night of the 2011-2012 Chicago Film Seminar on Thursday, October 13 at 6:30 PM. Hamid Naficy, Professor of Radio-Television-Film and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University, will give a talk entitled, "Early Iranian Cinema's Production Mode." Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Professor of Film and Video at Columbia College, will deliver the response. This presentation coincides with the 22nd Annual Festival of Films from Iran at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
The talk will be held in Rubloff 180 (375 Chicago Avenue) at the Northwestern University Law School, between East Chicago Avenue and East Superior Street, just west of Lake Shore Drive. A reception with light fare will follow in Levy Mayer 117 Lowden Hall (357 Chicago Avenue). A map can be found here.
Hamid Naficy, a leading authority on cinema and television in the Middle East, has produced many educational films and experimental videos and has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas. His many publications include An Accented Cinema, The Making of Exile Cultures, Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged, Iran Media Index, and the AFI anthology, Home, Exile, Homeland. His recent honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. 2011 marks the publication of Volumes 1 and 2 of his monumental 4-volume Social History of Iranian Cinema, published by Duke University Press.
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa has an M.F.A. from University of Illinois at Chicago. She has been teaching as a full time faculty at the Film and Video Department since 1989. Her areas of expertise are cinema studies (international cinema, Middle Eastern cinema, Exilic cinema, women, gender, race in cinema), documentary film theory and production and alternative forms. She has lectured and written extensively on Iranian cinema. Her book on Abbas Kiarostami, co-written with Jonathan Rosenbaum, was published by the University of Illinois Press in March 2003, and her films A Tajik Woman, Saless far from Home, and Ruins Within have been shown in many international film festivals. Her recent film A Different Moon was shown in several European film festivals in 2009 and has been picked up for distribution by European Spiritual Film Festival in France. She is currently working a on a personal documentary film about her relationship with Jerry Lewis’s cinema.
On behalf of the Chicago Film Seminar Organizing Committee, we look forward to seeing you there.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
May 12: Jacqueline Stewart on "Discovering Black Cinema"
Please join the Chicago Film Seminar on Thursday, May 12 for our final meeting of the year, a talk by Jacqueline Stewart (Northwestern) on "Discovering Black Film History: Tracing the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection." Michael Martin of the The Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University will respond. The meeting will take place at the University of Chicago's Film Studies Center, Cobb Hall Room 307, at 5811 S. Ellis Ave.
Thursday, May 12 at 6:30pm
5811 S. Ellis Ave, Chicago IL
Cobb Hall Room 307 - University of Chicago Film Studies Center
Jacqueline Stewart (Northwestern)
"Discovering Black Film History: Tracing the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection"
Respondent: Michael Martin (Indiana)
Stewart describes her talk as follows:
My paper revisits the “discovery” of the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection in 1983, the most highly publicized effort to preserve African American films to date. I explore the appeals and dangers of framing these early Black-cast films, or any films, within a lost-then-found narrative template, in which their acquisition by an archive provides a satisfying sense of closure. I argue that the racial politics that inform the development of the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection -- from neglected nitrate elements to new safety prints, then videotapes, DVDs and streaming digital video -- heighten our awareness of how historical preservation is always a historically contingent and ongoing set of processes. When we locate the preservation of these films in time (the Reagan era through the “post-racial” digital age) and place (a regional repository in the southwestern U.S.), we see how their status as “authentic” records of a lost Black film culture has been produced by many factors, including debates about what Black cinema is, concerns about how African American artifacts should be presented and interpreted, and changes in the U.S. film preservation landscape.
Our great thanks to Tom Gunning at the University of Chicago and to Julia Gibbs at the UC's Film Studies Center for making the arrangements for the location of this event.
Thursday, May 12 at 6:30pm
5811 S. Ellis Ave, Chicago IL
Cobb Hall Room 307 - University of Chicago Film Studies Center
Jacqueline Stewart (Northwestern)
"Discovering Black Film History: Tracing the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection"
Respondent: Michael Martin (Indiana)
Stewart describes her talk as follows:
My paper revisits the “discovery” of the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection in 1983, the most highly publicized effort to preserve African American films to date. I explore the appeals and dangers of framing these early Black-cast films, or any films, within a lost-then-found narrative template, in which their acquisition by an archive provides a satisfying sense of closure. I argue that the racial politics that inform the development of the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection -- from neglected nitrate elements to new safety prints, then videotapes, DVDs and streaming digital video -- heighten our awareness of how historical preservation is always a historically contingent and ongoing set of processes. When we locate the preservation of these films in time (the Reagan era through the “post-racial” digital age) and place (a regional repository in the southwestern U.S.), we see how their status as “authentic” records of a lost Black film culture has been produced by many factors, including debates about what Black cinema is, concerns about how African American artifacts should be presented and interpreted, and changes in the U.S. film preservation landscape.
Our great thanks to Tom Gunning at the University of Chicago and to Julia Gibbs at the UC's Film Studies Center for making the arrangements for the location of this event.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
April 7: Michelle Citron on Narrative and the Digital
On Thursday, April 7 at 6:30pm, Michelle Citron (Columbia College) will present "Is This Cinema? Narrative and the Digital," a talk and screening of her short films. Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago) will provide the response. The meeting will take place, as always, in the Flaxman Theater, Room 1307, of the School of the Art Institute's building at 112 S. Michigan Ave.
Citron describes her talk as follows:
"My reading of Andrew’s What Cinema Is! raises the question: How far can you push the medium (be it film, video, or digital) and still call it cinema? I will show two works, Leftovers (2010) and Mixed Greens (2004). Leftovers, a linear narrative created from photographs, 16mm film, and cameraless digital images, raises issues about the camera and the real (in Bazin's sense). Mixed Greens, an interactive non-linear narrative created from photographs, 16mm film, video, and cameraless digital images, foregrounds issues about editing/ellipsis and audience. I will argue that Bazin's ideas of what constitutes cinema (as explicated by Andrew) can be applied to Leftovers. But can it also be applied to Mixed Greens? And is Andrew's theoretical paradigm even a useful way to talk about such non-linear works?"
Citron describes her talk as follows:
"My reading of Andrew’s What Cinema Is! raises the question: How far can you push the medium (be it film, video, or digital) and still call it cinema? I will show two works, Leftovers (2010) and Mixed Greens (2004). Leftovers, a linear narrative created from photographs, 16mm film, and cameraless digital images, raises issues about the camera and the real (in Bazin's sense). Mixed Greens, an interactive non-linear narrative created from photographs, 16mm film, video, and cameraless digital images, foregrounds issues about editing/ellipsis and audience. I will argue that Bazin's ideas of what constitutes cinema (as explicated by Andrew) can be applied to Leftovers. But can it also be applied to Mixed Greens? And is Andrew's theoretical paradigm even a useful way to talk about such non-linear works?"
Summary: Elena Gorfinkel on Sexploitation of the 1960s
On Thursday, March 3, Elena Gorfinkel (University of Wisconsin – Madison) presented her talk, “’The Gawker in the Text’: Allegories of Reception in 1960s Sexploitation Film” at the Chicago Film Seminar. Jeffrey Sconce of Northwestern provided the response. In this talk, Gorfinkel discusses the reflexive, self-referential nature of sexploitation films, particularly around the generic problem of ‘consuming sex’, to better understand the specific conditions of reception of adult films and sexualized media in the public culture of the 1960s. Gorfinkel notes that sexploitation films of the 1960s, refracting the era’s contentious sexual politics, frequently retained a dystopian tenor, in which sexual activity and exchange often came at a grave narrative cost. The paradox of sexploitation films, she argues, is the that the expanding sexual marketplace is both exploited economically and aesthetically and disdained rhetorically, negotiating the tensions between strategies of display and denial.
To resolve these contradictory aims, sexploitation films incorporate the figure of the voyeur, the gawker, into their narratives, thematizing the process and ramifications of erotic looking, and, more broadly, sex as an object of consumption and exchange, as both a diegetic and extra-diegetic ‘problem.’ These figures and other devices that narrativize the act of looking enable erotic looking while simultaneously exploring that figure and the looking that he performs. Gorfinkel quotes critic Leslie Fiedler on The Immoral Mr. Teas: “It is not merely like the strip-tease, the candy-box cover, the girlie calendar and the foldout nude; it is about them.”
Gorfinkel provides several case studies, including Teas and Barry Mahon’s 1965 film This Picture is Censore (aka Censored), which she asserts to be indicative, in its extremity, of a tendency that takes many forms in sexploitation film practice of the 1960s. Censored presents itself as a compilation of scenes that have been excised by censors. Actor Sid Berry serves as an onscreen narrator, directly addressing the camera with such commentary as: “Why was this censored? What do you think?” In trying to make the extra-diegetic conditions of regulation into a diegetic narrative, Gorfinkel notes, the film becomes about its own conditions of possibility. By addressing the spectator in this manner, the film conflates the offense-seeking censor and the sensation-seeking gawker, and articulates the conflicts and layers of dissimulation at work between sexploitation filmmakers, their audiences and the censors. Sexploitation films’ mode of address, their consistent allegorization of their own mode of spectatorship, creates a fissure between the textually designated, imagined and actual audience.
To resolve these contradictory aims, sexploitation films incorporate the figure of the voyeur, the gawker, into their narratives, thematizing the process and ramifications of erotic looking, and, more broadly, sex as an object of consumption and exchange, as both a diegetic and extra-diegetic ‘problem.’ These figures and other devices that narrativize the act of looking enable erotic looking while simultaneously exploring that figure and the looking that he performs. Gorfinkel quotes critic Leslie Fiedler on The Immoral Mr. Teas: “It is not merely like the strip-tease, the candy-box cover, the girlie calendar and the foldout nude; it is about them.”
Gorfinkel provides several case studies, including Teas and Barry Mahon’s 1965 film This Picture is Censore (aka Censored), which she asserts to be indicative, in its extremity, of a tendency that takes many forms in sexploitation film practice of the 1960s. Censored presents itself as a compilation of scenes that have been excised by censors. Actor Sid Berry serves as an onscreen narrator, directly addressing the camera with such commentary as: “Why was this censored? What do you think?” In trying to make the extra-diegetic conditions of regulation into a diegetic narrative, Gorfinkel notes, the film becomes about its own conditions of possibility. By addressing the spectator in this manner, the film conflates the offense-seeking censor and the sensation-seeking gawker, and articulates the conflicts and layers of dissimulation at work between sexploitation filmmakers, their audiences and the censors. Sexploitation films’ mode of address, their consistent allegorization of their own mode of spectatorship, creates a fissure between the textually designated, imagined and actual audience.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Summary: Gregory Waller on Non-Theatrical Cinema in 1915
On Feb 10, 2011 (rescheduled from the blizzard-plagued previous week), Gregory Waller of Indiana University presented his talk "Tracking the Non-Theatrical: The American Cinema in 1915." The response was provided by Northwestern's Scott Curtis.
In this talk, Waller takes a thorough, wide-ranging look at American non-theatrical film production and exhibition in the year 1915 to argue for a re-orientation of our conception of film history in which commercially-released films are but one aspect of “the cinema” among several. Waller focused on the circulation and exhibition of moving pictures outside of what we normally think of as the film industry and the traditional movie theater, as well as the production of educational or industrial film.
Waller argues that designations such as “non-theatrical” and “educational” must be understood in a not-so-stable dialectic with “theatrical” and “entertainment,” terms that were perpetually evolving. Particular attention was paid to the role of sponsorship (including that of corporations, government, religious organizations and other philanthropic institutions), the practice of mixed or multiple-media programming, the targeting of specific audiences, and the recirculation and repurposing of “used” motion pictures. He looks at exhibition practices in the US military (and the related, targeted advertisement of exhibition equipment), the sponsored, motion picture-reliant exhibits at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the importance of lecturers to exhibition even in more traditional cinema venues. In the PPIE, for example, films were screened as part of an exhibit in a permanent venue called a “theater” that charged no admission, were screened several times daily with a lecture, pitched as informative and education, and were promotional in intent and clearly identified as sponsored by a company or a public institution such as a local chamber of commerce.
Waller looked closely at the Maxwell Industrial Company’s FROM MOLTEN STEEL TO AUTOMOBILE industrial film, advertised as a “$40,000 5 Reel Feature Film Sensation.” Originally presented in theaters by local merchants who distributed free tickets as a sort of entertainment despite its educational, promotional origins, the film moved to being used in more obviously non-theatrical venues such as college lecture halls and churches. By 1916, the film was made available to local YMCA’s across the country by the YMCA’s national Motion Picture Bureau. He then followed with other case studies, including that of films of Sir Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition. The films were presented around the United States along with an illustrated lecture by Mawson and, frequently, an extremely varied program of other educational films (such as films on tuberculosis or the Montessori educational system). Soon, they were being shown around the country with intertitles or with another lecturer standing in for Mawson for additional theatrical runs and then for university screenings. They ended up as an attraction in the late ‘teens on the summertime Chatauqua circuits of small towns across the country.
This picture of what Waller calls “multi-sited” cinema is, Waller notes, one that barely even mention important venues such as prisons, hospitals, churches and schools. Although comprehensiveness may not even be possible, the instances he presented do exemplify and also complicate some of his propositions about sponsorship, programming, targeted audiences, and patterns of circulation. These instances, Waller asserts, point us toward a more expansive sense of the terrain of multi-sited cinema, hinting at the intertwined possibilities, parameters, and trajectories of the non-theatrical and educational in 1915, the moment which arguably marks the coalescence of motion pictures into the Movies.
In this talk, Waller takes a thorough, wide-ranging look at American non-theatrical film production and exhibition in the year 1915 to argue for a re-orientation of our conception of film history in which commercially-released films are but one aspect of “the cinema” among several. Waller focused on the circulation and exhibition of moving pictures outside of what we normally think of as the film industry and the traditional movie theater, as well as the production of educational or industrial film.
Waller argues that designations such as “non-theatrical” and “educational” must be understood in a not-so-stable dialectic with “theatrical” and “entertainment,” terms that were perpetually evolving. Particular attention was paid to the role of sponsorship (including that of corporations, government, religious organizations and other philanthropic institutions), the practice of mixed or multiple-media programming, the targeting of specific audiences, and the recirculation and repurposing of “used” motion pictures. He looks at exhibition practices in the US military (and the related, targeted advertisement of exhibition equipment), the sponsored, motion picture-reliant exhibits at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the importance of lecturers to exhibition even in more traditional cinema venues. In the PPIE, for example, films were screened as part of an exhibit in a permanent venue called a “theater” that charged no admission, were screened several times daily with a lecture, pitched as informative and education, and were promotional in intent and clearly identified as sponsored by a company or a public institution such as a local chamber of commerce.
Waller looked closely at the Maxwell Industrial Company’s FROM MOLTEN STEEL TO AUTOMOBILE industrial film, advertised as a “$40,000 5 Reel Feature Film Sensation.” Originally presented in theaters by local merchants who distributed free tickets as a sort of entertainment despite its educational, promotional origins, the film moved to being used in more obviously non-theatrical venues such as college lecture halls and churches. By 1916, the film was made available to local YMCA’s across the country by the YMCA’s national Motion Picture Bureau. He then followed with other case studies, including that of films of Sir Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition. The films were presented around the United States along with an illustrated lecture by Mawson and, frequently, an extremely varied program of other educational films (such as films on tuberculosis or the Montessori educational system). Soon, they were being shown around the country with intertitles or with another lecturer standing in for Mawson for additional theatrical runs and then for university screenings. They ended up as an attraction in the late ‘teens on the summertime Chatauqua circuits of small towns across the country.
This picture of what Waller calls “multi-sited” cinema is, Waller notes, one that barely even mention important venues such as prisons, hospitals, churches and schools. Although comprehensiveness may not even be possible, the instances he presented do exemplify and also complicate some of his propositions about sponsorship, programming, targeted audiences, and patterns of circulation. These instances, Waller asserts, point us toward a more expansive sense of the terrain of multi-sited cinema, hinting at the intertwined possibilities, parameters, and trajectories of the non-theatrical and educational in 1915, the moment which arguably marks the coalescence of motion pictures into the Movies.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
March 3: Elena Gorfinkel on Sexploitation
Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, March 3 to welcome Elena Gorfinkel (UW-Milwaukee) for her talk, "The Gawker in the Text: Allegories of Reception in 1960s Sexploitation Cinema." Jeffrey Sconce (Northwestern) 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, March 3 at 6:30pm
Elena Gorfinkel, Assistant Professor, Art History and Film Studies, UW-Milwaukee
"The Gawker in the Text: Allegories of Reception in 1960s Sexploitation Cinema"
Respondent: Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern
Gorfinkel describes her talk as follows:
"This talk treats the historical aesthetics of 1960s sexploitation films through the lens of reflexivity. It argues that American sexploitation films, in their style, modes of address, narrative preoccupations and thematic tropes, consistently refer outwards towards their conditions of reception. Sexploitation films were "impoverished" low-cultural texts that were produced in an era of changing codes of sexual permissiveness. Their "circumstantial reflexivity" allows us to make sense of their place in film history and their address to the transitory contexts of erotic consumption in this tumultous era of independent film production. Describing the paradoxical nature of sexploitation films as one that vacillates between strategies of display and denial, and between disdaining and exploiting the promise of sexual spectacle, this talk points to the use value of sexploitation films as seen through an historiographic frame."
Jeffrey Sconce, Associate Professor of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, will respond.
Thursday, March 3 at 6:30pm
Elena Gorfinkel, Assistant Professor, Art History and Film Studies, UW-Milwaukee
"The Gawker in the Text: Allegories of Reception in 1960s Sexploitation Cinema"
Respondent: Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern
Gorfinkel describes her talk as follows:
"This talk treats the historical aesthetics of 1960s sexploitation films through the lens of reflexivity. It argues that American sexploitation films, in their style, modes of address, narrative preoccupations and thematic tropes, consistently refer outwards towards their conditions of reception. Sexploitation films were "impoverished" low-cultural texts that were produced in an era of changing codes of sexual permissiveness. Their "circumstantial reflexivity" allows us to make sense of their place in film history and their address to the transitory contexts of erotic consumption in this tumultous era of independent film production. Describing the paradoxical nature of sexploitation films as one that vacillates between strategies of display and denial, and between disdaining and exploiting the promise of sexual spectacle, this talk points to the use value of sexploitation films as seen through an historiographic frame."
Jeffrey Sconce, Associate Professor of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, will respond.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Summary: Dan Bashara on UPA Cartoons and Prewar Modernism
On Thursday, Jan 13, 2011, Dan Bashara, PhD student at Northwestern University, gave a talk entitled "Useful in the Abstract: UPA Cartoons and Prewar Modernism." Bruce Jenkins of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago provided the response.
In his talk, Bashara focused on postwar animation’s relationship to Precisionism, an often overlooked strand of American modernist painting that first appeared in the late teens and proliferated in the 1920s, going into decline thereafter until the rise of Abstract Expressionism supplanted it on the national radar. The practitioners of this modernist animation style, among which the most prominent was the United Productions of America, were rooted in artistic sources that were concerned with developing a distinctly homegrown modernism that operated outside the orbit of Abstract Expressionism (the privileged example in most histories of American modernist painting).
Precisionism, and the period in which it flourished, was marked by a search for a uniquely American art, one that could be modernist without being European, and that could address changes in the experience of space and time without merely copying Cubism or resorting to an outmoded, pastoral brand of realism. The loosely-grouped Precisionist painters adapted European modernism to the American landscape, seeking a way to make it relevant their own geography, history and culture, often turning their attention to industrial and architectural imagery. “The essence of the Precisionist aesthetic,” one art historian writes, “was an objectivist synthesis of abstraction and realism, manifested by hard-edged, static, smoothly-brushed, simplified forms rendered in unmodulated colors.” Concepts of order and organization, also hugely prominent in industrial and scientific culture and discourse of the time, were often understood to be the pervasive underlying idea in Precisionist works.
By the early 1950s, the work of UPA was at the forefront of American animation. Its aesthetic was characterized by a basic set of visual stylistic options: hard-edged, simplified forms; bold, unmodulated colors; evacuation of detail; a minimalist environmental surround often reduced to bare-bones geometric lines, regular patterns or flat color planes; the abolition of rounded, centerline character design; and a relaxed – to put it mildly – implementation of Renaissance perspective. The look of the UPA cartoons, along with the aesthetic discourse of their animators, was often strikingly similar to that of the Precisionists, representing a significant engagement with modernity rather than the fashionable appropriation of modernist style by the popular arts that is frequently described in animation histories. The “cubistic” style of the UPA cartoons that resulted, were, like Precisionist painting, based in cubistic forms found in the American cityscape: skyscrapers, bridges, turbines, etc. It is, Bashara, argues, a variation on Precionism’s modernism, the meticulous and ordered engagement with vision and the outer world.
In his response, Bruce Jenkins strongly endorsed Bashara’s account of UPA’s aesthetic origins. He disagreed somewhat with the common characterization of Walt Disney, whose style served as a strong contrast for both Bashara’s argument and for the UPA animators themselves. Disney’s style, Jenkins observed, should not be understood as photographic realism (which is, of course, distinct from UPA’s quasi-abstracted style), but rather as an adaptation of painterly traditions from the 18th and 19th centuries. Jenkins also noted that photography actually played a huge role in Precisionist painting: painter Charles Sheeler was a prominent, prolific photographer (and an early avant-garde filmmaker), but, also, it was photography that actually permitted the aerial perspectives on which key Precisionist cityscapes were modeled. Jenkins additionally noted the importance of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus school of design, as well as the influence of animator Oskar Fischinger, on the UPA animators and their sources.
In his talk, Bashara focused on postwar animation’s relationship to Precisionism, an often overlooked strand of American modernist painting that first appeared in the late teens and proliferated in the 1920s, going into decline thereafter until the rise of Abstract Expressionism supplanted it on the national radar. The practitioners of this modernist animation style, among which the most prominent was the United Productions of America, were rooted in artistic sources that were concerned with developing a distinctly homegrown modernism that operated outside the orbit of Abstract Expressionism (the privileged example in most histories of American modernist painting).
Precisionism, and the period in which it flourished, was marked by a search for a uniquely American art, one that could be modernist without being European, and that could address changes in the experience of space and time without merely copying Cubism or resorting to an outmoded, pastoral brand of realism. The loosely-grouped Precisionist painters adapted European modernism to the American landscape, seeking a way to make it relevant their own geography, history and culture, often turning their attention to industrial and architectural imagery. “The essence of the Precisionist aesthetic,” one art historian writes, “was an objectivist synthesis of abstraction and realism, manifested by hard-edged, static, smoothly-brushed, simplified forms rendered in unmodulated colors.” Concepts of order and organization, also hugely prominent in industrial and scientific culture and discourse of the time, were often understood to be the pervasive underlying idea in Precisionist works.
By the early 1950s, the work of UPA was at the forefront of American animation. Its aesthetic was characterized by a basic set of visual stylistic options: hard-edged, simplified forms; bold, unmodulated colors; evacuation of detail; a minimalist environmental surround often reduced to bare-bones geometric lines, regular patterns or flat color planes; the abolition of rounded, centerline character design; and a relaxed – to put it mildly – implementation of Renaissance perspective. The look of the UPA cartoons, along with the aesthetic discourse of their animators, was often strikingly similar to that of the Precisionists, representing a significant engagement with modernity rather than the fashionable appropriation of modernist style by the popular arts that is frequently described in animation histories. The “cubistic” style of the UPA cartoons that resulted, were, like Precisionist painting, based in cubistic forms found in the American cityscape: skyscrapers, bridges, turbines, etc. It is, Bashara, argues, a variation on Precionism’s modernism, the meticulous and ordered engagement with vision and the outer world.
In his response, Bruce Jenkins strongly endorsed Bashara’s account of UPA’s aesthetic origins. He disagreed somewhat with the common characterization of Walt Disney, whose style served as a strong contrast for both Bashara’s argument and for the UPA animators themselves. Disney’s style, Jenkins observed, should not be understood as photographic realism (which is, of course, distinct from UPA’s quasi-abstracted style), but rather as an adaptation of painterly traditions from the 18th and 19th centuries. Jenkins also noted that photography actually played a huge role in Precisionist painting: painter Charles Sheeler was a prominent, prolific photographer (and an early avant-garde filmmaker), but, also, it was photography that actually permitted the aerial perspectives on which key Precisionist cityscapes were modeled. Jenkins additionally noted the importance of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus school of design, as well as the influence of animator Oskar Fischinger, on the UPA animators and their sources.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
NEW DATE: Gregory Waller on Thurs, Feb 10
Last week's weather-plagued Chicago Film Seminar has been rescheduled for this Thursday, Feb 10 at 6:30. Please join the CFS to welcome Gregory Waller for his talk "Tracking the Nontheatrical: The American Cinema in 1915." Gregory Waller is a professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Scott Curtis (Northwestern) will respond. 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, Feb 10 at 6:30pm
Gregory A. Waller (Indiana University), "Tracking the Nontheatrical: The American Cinema in 1915"
Respondent: Scott Curtis (Northwestern)
Waller describes his talk as follows:
Instead of asking "what is cinema?" I propose reframing this question: what was cinema in a specific time and place-say, in the United States in 1915, the year of the Mutual Decision and The Birth of a Nation, Chaplin’s The Tramp and the continuing consolidation of Hollywood? And, further, how was this historically specific cinema constituted and constructed not only though films, production practices, and industry-driven discourses, but also though the circulation and exhibition of moving pictures outside as well as inside of what we think of as the film industry and the commercial movie theater? Framed in this way, the nontheatrical figures as an essential aspect of the history of cinema. Like the often-related notion of educational film, the nontheatrical has no singular or constant meaning, for it is historically grounded, always subject to redefinition and realignment. Focusing on the traces left in local newspapers, trade magazines, and other publications, I'll track, in a preliminary way, how certain versions of the non-theatrical and the educational--separately or in tandem--were understood, promoted, and put into practice in 1915.
Links
Gregory Waller: http://www.indiana.edu/~cmcl/faculty/waller.shtml
Scott Curtis: http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/?PID=ScottCurtis
Thursday, Feb 10 at 6:30pm
Gregory A. Waller (Indiana University), "Tracking the Nontheatrical: The American Cinema in 1915"
Respondent: Scott Curtis (Northwestern)
Waller describes his talk as follows:
Instead of asking "what is cinema?" I propose reframing this question: what was cinema in a specific time and place-say, in the United States in 1915, the year of the Mutual Decision and The Birth of a Nation, Chaplin’s The Tramp and the continuing consolidation of Hollywood? And, further, how was this historically specific cinema constituted and constructed not only though films, production practices, and industry-driven discourses, but also though the circulation and exhibition of moving pictures outside as well as inside of what we think of as the film industry and the commercial movie theater? Framed in this way, the nontheatrical figures as an essential aspect of the history of cinema. Like the often-related notion of educational film, the nontheatrical has no singular or constant meaning, for it is historically grounded, always subject to redefinition and realignment. Focusing on the traces left in local newspapers, trade magazines, and other publications, I'll track, in a preliminary way, how certain versions of the non-theatrical and the educational--separately or in tandem--were understood, promoted, and put into practice in 1915.
Links
Gregory Waller: http://www.indiana.edu/~cmcl/faculty/waller.shtml
Scott Curtis: http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/?PID=ScottCurtis
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Summary: Mark Williams on MINORITY REPORT
On Thursday, Dec 2, 2010, Mark Williams (Dartmouth) presented a talk entitled “Closely Belated? Thoughts on Real-Time Media Publics and Minority Report” at the Chicago Film Seminar. James Lastra (University of Chicago) provided the response.
This talk considered the “relationship between issues of citizenship, temporality, and media culture through an address to particular configurations of the techno-future” in Steven Spielberg’s 2003 science fiction film, Minority Report. Set in a future in which crime is prevented before it happens, the film builds its premise around the issue of human choice, and how this important principle, and its technological mediation, can define the actions of the state. Building on previous work of his, in which he discussed how the significant relationship between what are termed televisual “liveness” and computer-mediated “real time” form an electronic culture dispositif.
The term “liveness”, Williams asserts, has shifted in meaning from a broadcast that is taking place simultaneous to its electronic transmission to any description of what an electronic medium is representing at this moment, what it is showing now. The transmission of electronic media become less “live” (in the original sense of the term) and as the temporality of its consumption grows more complex with the development of surfing, zipping and time-shifting devices (first VCR’s and now DVR’s). In this way, it is helpful to understand “liveness” as a mutable, historically situational effect. Computer-related electronic media, in contrast, are characterized by the properties and desires of “real time,” as evidenced by demand for ever-faster data processing and downloading capabilities.
Taken together, “liveness” and “real time” can be understood to possess the synergistic capacity for a frenzy of the temporal, such that reference to time as a traditional anchor for certainty achieves a fluidity that questions the relationship of the present to what might have and what will occur. Williams introduces the phrase “real-time subjunctive” to describe these creative dynamics within cyber-culture. The rise of digital culture, and its attendant pressure to render and actualize the near future, can thus be seen to have produced evidence of a pressure toward different states of belief as regards our relationships to media, typically taken for granted, and the complexities of which we disavow. Minority Report addresses subjectivity through these terms of mediated belief, temporality and disavowal. In particular, the film utilizes a DVR-like device that then allows the possibility not just of replay and pausing the image, but of representing what is to come in the near future. This premise of “subjunctive temporal fluidity” is situated within two temporalities in the film: the mobile, interactive consumerist public sphere in which each person is bombarded with a persistent “now” of advertisements responding to his individual history and movement, and the temporality of trauma, represented here through one protagonist grieving the loss of his child and another the murder of her mother. Traumatic traces, in the form of moving images of deceased loved ones, complicate a provocative possible relationship between the tropes of mediated temporal frenzy and those of the temporal dynamics of societal trauma, especially as regards the politics of media and public memory.
This talk considered the “relationship between issues of citizenship, temporality, and media culture through an address to particular configurations of the techno-future” in Steven Spielberg’s 2003 science fiction film, Minority Report. Set in a future in which crime is prevented before it happens, the film builds its premise around the issue of human choice, and how this important principle, and its technological mediation, can define the actions of the state. Building on previous work of his, in which he discussed how the significant relationship between what are termed televisual “liveness” and computer-mediated “real time” form an electronic culture dispositif.
The term “liveness”, Williams asserts, has shifted in meaning from a broadcast that is taking place simultaneous to its electronic transmission to any description of what an electronic medium is representing at this moment, what it is showing now. The transmission of electronic media become less “live” (in the original sense of the term) and as the temporality of its consumption grows more complex with the development of surfing, zipping and time-shifting devices (first VCR’s and now DVR’s). In this way, it is helpful to understand “liveness” as a mutable, historically situational effect. Computer-related electronic media, in contrast, are characterized by the properties and desires of “real time,” as evidenced by demand for ever-faster data processing and downloading capabilities.
Taken together, “liveness” and “real time” can be understood to possess the synergistic capacity for a frenzy of the temporal, such that reference to time as a traditional anchor for certainty achieves a fluidity that questions the relationship of the present to what might have and what will occur. Williams introduces the phrase “real-time subjunctive” to describe these creative dynamics within cyber-culture. The rise of digital culture, and its attendant pressure to render and actualize the near future, can thus be seen to have produced evidence of a pressure toward different states of belief as regards our relationships to media, typically taken for granted, and the complexities of which we disavow. Minority Report addresses subjectivity through these terms of mediated belief, temporality and disavowal. In particular, the film utilizes a DVR-like device that then allows the possibility not just of replay and pausing the image, but of representing what is to come in the near future. This premise of “subjunctive temporal fluidity” is situated within two temporalities in the film: the mobile, interactive consumerist public sphere in which each person is bombarded with a persistent “now” of advertisements responding to his individual history and movement, and the temporality of trauma, represented here through one protagonist grieving the loss of his child and another the murder of her mother. Traumatic traces, in the form of moving images of deceased loved ones, complicate a provocative possible relationship between the tropes of mediated temporal frenzy and those of the temporal dynamics of societal trauma, especially as regards the politics of media and public memory.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Feb 3: Gregory Waller on Nontheatrical Cinema
Please join the Chicago Film Seminar on Thursday, Feb 3 at 6:30pm to welcome Gregory Waller for his talk "Tracking the Nontheatrical: The American Cinema in 1915." Gregory Waller is a professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Scott Curtis (Northwestern) will respond. 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, Feb 3 at 6:30pm
Gregory A. Waller (Indiana University), "Tracking the Nontheatrical: The American Cinema in 1915"
Respondent: Scott Curtis (Northwestern)
Waller describes his talk as follows:
Instead of asking "what is cinema?" I propose reframing this question: what was cinema in a specific time and place-say, in the United States in 1915, the year of the Mutual Decision and The Birth of a Nation, Chaplin’s The Tramp and the continuing consolidation of Hollywood? And, further, how was this historically specific cinema constituted and constructed not only though films, production practices, and industry-driven discourses, but also though the circulation and exhibition of moving pictures outside as well as inside of what we think of as the film industry and the commercial movie theater? Framed in this way, the nontheatrical figures as an essential aspect of the history of cinema. Like the often-related notion of educational film, the nontheatrical has no singular or constant meaning, for it is historically grounded, always subject to redefinition and realignment. Focusing on the traces left in local newspapers, trade magazines, and other publications, I'll track, in a preliminary way, how certain versions of the non-theatrical and the educational--separately or in tandem--were understood, promoted, and put into practice in 1915.
Thursday, Feb 3 at 6:30pm
Gregory A. Waller (Indiana University), "Tracking the Nontheatrical: The American Cinema in 1915"
Respondent: Scott Curtis (Northwestern)
Waller describes his talk as follows:
Instead of asking "what is cinema?" I propose reframing this question: what was cinema in a specific time and place-say, in the United States in 1915, the year of the Mutual Decision and The Birth of a Nation, Chaplin’s The Tramp and the continuing consolidation of Hollywood? And, further, how was this historically specific cinema constituted and constructed not only though films, production practices, and industry-driven discourses, but also though the circulation and exhibition of moving pictures outside as well as inside of what we think of as the film industry and the commercial movie theater? Framed in this way, the nontheatrical figures as an essential aspect of the history of cinema. Like the often-related notion of educational film, the nontheatrical has no singular or constant meaning, for it is historically grounded, always subject to redefinition and realignment. Focusing on the traces left in local newspapers, trade magazines, and other publications, I'll track, in a preliminary way, how certain versions of the non-theatrical and the educational--separately or in tandem--were understood, promoted, and put into practice in 1915.
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