Film Strip image from Wikimedia Commons

Film Strip image from Wikimedia Commons

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.

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