Please join the Chicago Film Seminar
on Thursday, October 29th, at 6:30 PM, to welcome Professor Scott Curtis (Northwestern University) for his talk, "Experts
and Their Images: Vision, Form, and the Historiography of Media Use." A
response will be provided by Oliver Gaycken (University of Maryland).
Reception to follow!
Reception to follow!
Scott Curtis is associate professor of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, director of the Communication Program at Northwestern University in Qatar, and president of Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema. He has written extensively on scientific and medical uses of motion pictures, and his book on film and expert vision, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany, has just been published by Columbia University Press.
Professor Curtis describes his talk as follows:
Expert filmmakers--including scientists, physicians, psychologists, educators, and others who use motion picture technology for their own purposes--have populated the history of film since the beginning; only recently, under the rubric of "useful cinema" or nontheatrical media, have film historians paid them much attention. But this domain brings special demands--including much greater interdisciplinarity—that challenge our usual historiographic methods, especially concerning the function of individual films in our understanding of cinema history. So this presentation will explore the role of the expert in film history, using case studies from The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (Columbia, 2015), while offering a potentially new model of media historiography, particularly for the nontheatrical realm.
The Chicago Film Seminar is held at DePaul’s Loop Campus in the Daley Building at 14 E. Jackson Blvd., Room LL 102, using the State St. entrance located at 247 S. State.
