March 8: Jim Collins on Portable Media Devices and Playlist Culture

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, March 8 to welcome Jim Collins (Notre Dame) for his talk, "Portable Media Devices and Playlist Culture." Max Dawson (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 8 at 6:30pm
Jim Collins, Notre Dame
"Portable Media Devices and Playlist Culture"
Respondent: Max Dawson, Northwestern

Collins describes his talk as follows:

My paper will reflect on some of the issues raised by Professor Eivind Røssaak raised in the insightful paper he presented to the Chicago Film seminar this past November("The Performative Archive: The Archival Turn in Film, Art and New Media Practices”) but I will be talking about how portable media devices-- iPods, smart tablets, and ereaders --function as personal digital archives. What kind of “performativity” do we as amateur curators engage in on a regular basis? Pursuing the ramifications of archivability -- rather than just accessibility-- involves a complicated mix of technology, consumerism, and individual identity formation. Now that these devices allow us to surf the net as well as watch films, consume television, read novels, and listen to music, all on the same screens, with various file libraries “behind” those screens, how has playlisting become not just a matter of assembling song lists but a mindset that has come to define how we make digital culture our own?

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.

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.