December 12: Meenasarani Linde Murugan and Hannah Frank on Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, December 12 to welcome Meenasarani Linde Murugan (Ph.D. Candidate at Northwestern) for her talk, "Offbeat: Afro-Orientalism in Postwar Music on Television," and Hannah Frank (Ph.D. Candidate at U.Chicago) for her talk, "What Happens Between Each Frame: Or, The Photographic Reproduction of Documents."  Nick Davis (Northwestern) will provide the response. The CFS will be 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.

Thursday, December 12 at 6:30pm
Meenasarani Linde Murugan, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern 
"Offbeat: Afro-Orientalism in Postwar Music on Television"
Hannah Frank, Ph.D. Candidate, U.Chicago
"What Happens Between Each Frame: Or, The Photographic Reproduction of Documents"
Respondent: Nick Davis, Northwestern

Murugan describes her talk as follows:

Scholarship on popular music often emphasizes the 1960s youth counterculture in fostering Indian music in the US.  Yet before this, classical Indian musicians, Ali Akbar Khan on sarod and Chatur Lal on tabla, were sponsored by the Ford Foundation to come to the US and perform on Omnibus (CBS, April 10, 1955). Lal made another appearance on the program with jazz drummer Jo Jones (CBS, December 2, 1956). In a moment of musical conversation and collaboration they improvised riffs on Juan Tizol's "Caravan." Two performers of color visualize this musical meeting of "East" and "West." In contrast to the commonplace white appropriation of Indian culture in the 1960s, I recover postwar music's engagements with India to reveal an Afro-Orientalism. While I draw from the popular press, LPs, film, and radio broadcasts, I want to emphasize the importance of television as an emerging institution in representing, mobilizing, and/or limiting this intermingling. I argue that postwar music on television performed Orientalism in a manner that resonated with a transnational Afro-Asian solidarity. Yet, as Afro-Orientalism in art and politics often consisted of messy translations and false equivalencies of oppression, I demonstrate how television's musical representations of India trafficked in various contradictions in regards to the sonic and visual expressions of race, nationality, and ethnicity.

Frank describes her talk as follows:

This talk is adapted from my dissertation, "The Traces of Production: Art, Labor, and the American Animated Cartoon, 1928-1961," which proposes an aesthetics of celluloid animation that engages critically with labor practices at the major U.S. studios (e.g., Walt Disney, Warner Bros., Walter Lantz, United Productions of America, etc.). Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Allan Sekula, I argue that animated cartoons double as photographic records of historical documents. If read frame-by-frame, animated cartoons can yield evidence of a production process that would otherwise be obscured. My talk seeks to demonstrate this claim through the close examination of two shorts from 1941, Bob Clampett's Meet John Doughboy and Walter Lantz's $21 a Day (Once a Month).

November 7: James Hodge on Lateral Time

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, November 7 to welcome James Hodge (Northwestern) for his talk, "Lateral Time."  Daniel Morgan (UChicago) will provide the response. The CFS will be 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.

Thursday, November 7 at 6:30pm
James Hodge, Northwestern 
"Lateral Time"
Respondent: Daniel Morgan, UChicago

Hodge describes his talk as follows:

This talk comes from the second chapter of my book project, Animate Archaeology: Digital Media and the Aesthetics of History.  In the book I argue for the novel significance of animation for the aesthetic expression of historical temporality in the age of new media.  This talk examines the concept of lateral time, which I define as the temporal regime native to processes operating beyond the threshold of human experience.  Building upon Paul Ricoeur, I argue for the centrality of lateral time for the task of articulating historical temporality in the context of digital networks. Moving beyond the primacy Ricoeur accords the written trace, I also argue that animation plays a crucial role in opening up encounters with the lateral time of networks.  In the latter sections of the talk I pursue these arguments through the analysis of two long duration experimental, digital art works: John F. Simon Jr.'s Every Icon and Barbara Lattanzi's Optical De-dramatization Engine.  The stakes for this argument rest (1) with the contemporary specification of historical temporality and (2) with the elucidation of the critical role played by digital moving image aesthetics in that endeavor. 

April 18: Susan Ohmer on Animation and Cultural Geography

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, April 18 to welcome Susan Ohmer (Notre Dame) for her talk, "Animation and Cultural Geography: Disney and Standard Oil Remap the U.S." Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (Loyola) will provide the response. The CFS will be 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.

Thursday, April 18 at 6:30pm
Susan Ohmer, Notre Dame 
"Animation and Cultural Geography: Disney and Standard Oil Remap the U.S."
Respondent: Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Loyola

Ohmer describes her talk as follows:

In May 1939, the Walt Disney Studio, in collaboration with Standard Oil of California, launched a national marketing campaign designed to promote travel to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. For the promotion, the studio ran ads featuring well-known Disney characters that traveled across the country to attend the exhibition, stopping at Standard Oil stations along the way. “Cries Sleepy: ‘Standard saves the day!’” as one proclaimed. In their travels, the seven dwarfs, Mickey, Donald and Goofy stopped at various historic landmarks, from Puget Sound to Carlsbad Caverns and Yosemite, on their way to the exhibition, which the studio called “Treasure Island”. Children were encouraged to follow these trips by tracking the characters across a large map of the United States and by collecting coupons from Disney comic books that they could paste onto the map. In newspapers, magazines, and comic books, the Disney studio remapped the U.S. as a series of tourist destinations visited by its fictional animated creatures.

Julianne Burton, Lisa Cartwright, Eric Smoodin and others have analyzed Disney’s construction of a touristic gaze in Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, films the studio produced as part of the “Good Neighbor” project for Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs. Even before these films, however, the studio constructed a new cultural geography for the U.S., mapping its characters across a landscape defined as a combination of historic monuments and natural attractions. The Standard Oil promotion developed a car culture for U.S. children who would go on to become the adult drivers of the 1950s and mapped U.S. history and geography as destinations for family leisure fifteen years before the opening of Disneyland.

This presentation draws on methods from cultural geography, critical studies of the west in fiction and film, studies of car culture and road movies, and analyses of Disney’s films about Latin America to understand the development and significance of the Disney-Standard Oil collaboration. My talk will include slides of ads, the treasure map, comic books and other artifacts that have been collected over several years. Only a few items from this campaign exist in archives; thus, the presentation offers material unavailable anywhere else that can shed new light on the shifting representations of U.S. history, space, and culture in Disney productions.

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.

Summary: Andrew Johnston, “Coding Patterns: The Algorithmic Mechanisms of John Whitney, Larry Cuba and Early Digital Animation”

On Thursday, Nov 4, Andrew Johnston of the University of Chicago delivered his talk “Coding Patterns: The Algorithmic Mechanisms of John Whitney, Larry Cuba and Early Digital Animation,” from a chapter of his dissertation. Jon Cates, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, provided the response.

Johnston proposed an understanding of digitality based in what he likes to call the “stuff of the digital” – its materials, the processes by which it works and is made, its hardware and its software. To do this he explored the techniques used by abstract animators John Whitney and Larry Cuba to create digital films in the 1960s and 1970s. Using research from interviews he conducted with the filmmakers and programmers as well as from a study of the Whitney archives, Johnston described the complex and time-consuming (as well as time-delayed) methods by which Whitney and Cuba developed computer animation from what might be understood as the aesthetics of the algorithm. Whitney’s animation signaled an attempt to produce an abstract visual art of motion structured in time which has a perceptual impact that is akin to the one music can generate. Unlike other forms of animation, his films are not meant to transport the viewer into a transcendent state or otherly world of abstraction. Rather, it is meant to generate an aesthetic pleasure rooted in the eye, one based in pattern recognition.

Addressing the uneasy placement of animation in the discipline of film studies, and the even more uneasy understanding of abstract digital animation within studies of animation, Johnston argues that animation is the technological programming and projection of movement, a definition that highlights the way in which animation is born from a technological articulation and ordering of artifacts – a definition that can encompass traditional animation of sequentially-ordered photographs, direct animation on celluloid frames, or the inputting of code to render images. Each process, Johnston notes, is dependent upon a technologically mediated process of selection that results in the projection of an arrangement of images in moving succession. Whitney, for one, recognized the similarities between these different procedures and likened the inputting of code to the manipulation of discrete frames of film.

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.