February 2: Noa Steimatsky on Barthes, Warhol and the Face

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, February 2 to welcome Noa Steimatsky (UChicago) for her talk, "Death at Work: Barthes and Warhol Look at the Face." Scott Durham (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, February 2 at 6:30pm
Noa Steimatsky, UChicago
"Death at Work: Barthes and Warhol Look at the Face"
Respondent: Scott Durham, Northwestern

Steimatsky describes her talk as follows:

Enframed in a consideration of Andy Warhol’s mid-1960s film portraiture, my talk for the Chicago Film Seminar will dwell on Roland Barthes’s “modern anthropology” of the cinematic face. A deep ambivalence, involving de-mythifying and re-mythifying maneuvers, haunts Barthes’s reflection on the facial image, and foreshadows some of the deepest concerns of Pop in the following decade. Especially in the almost forgotten essay, “Visages et figures,” Barthes diagnoses a fallacy of “expressivity” of the contemporary movie star juxtaposed with a vision of lost plenitude (real or imagined) invested in an earlier moment of film history. The up-front material artifice of late-silent and Classical cinema is predicated on a layering and masking that endow it with cultic, auratic charge. Yet the archaic functions of the mask might still be operative in Warhol’s deployment of multiplicity and temporality in his great film portraits.

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.

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.

Session #3: Andrew Johnston on Early Digital Animation (Nov 4)

It's that time again! This Thursday, November 4, the Chicago Film Seminar welcomes Andrew Johnston, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago to present his talk "Coding Patterns: The Algorithmic Mechanisms of John Whitney, Larry Cuba and Early Digital Animation." Jon Cates, Associate Professor of Film, Video, New Media & Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will provide the formal response before opening Q&A to the whole group.

Here is the brief abstract Johnston has submitted in advance of his talk:

This paper examines the development of digital filmmaking and animation technologies in the 1960s and 1970s through an analysis of John Whitney and Larry Cuba’s films. Whitney made some of the first digital animations while an artist in residence at IBM from 1966-1969 and later worked with a variety of programmers through the 1970s, including Larry Cuba on "Arabesque" (1975). Through an analysis of the materials employed in the construction of Whitney and Cuba’s films, my paper attempts to make an intervention into contemporary discourses that highlight the ephemeral nature of digital film or that neglect the importance of how specific platforms and programming languages affect both visual aesthetics and notions of digital technology. I show how these filmmakers were each deeply invested in working through a negotiation with digital technology that attempts to reveal both the mechanism’s expressive logic and its limitations while simultaneously exploring the nature of animation.

Location: This session will meet in our usual space, at the School of the Art Institute, 112 S. Michigan Ave, Room 1307, starting promptly at 6:30pm.