Session #4: Mark Williams on Minority Report (Dec 2)

The Chicago Film Seminar welcomes Dartmouth's Mark Williams to deliver his talk "Closely Belated? Thoughts on Real-Time Media Publics and Minority Report." Williams describes his talk as follows:

Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002) is renowned as an exemplary instance of the cyber-noir thriller. Even in an age of media convergence and consolidation, motion pictures can function as key sites of interlocution for the structuring of desires and anxieties about political and socio-economic dynamics and effects. Minority Report is rather rich in such opportunities for analysis, although despite the assuredness of its conceit and dramatic structure, I find more compelling what the film cannot resolve quite so neatly--what we might call its belated thematics. Via methods that derive from television studies, I will consider the film in relation to what I call "real-time" desires that condition its configurations of digital culture, the techno-future, and personal/social trauma.

Mark Williams is an Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at Dartmouth College. He has published widely on film and television and is the founding editor of The Journal of e-Media Studies.

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.

Session #2: Christian Quendler on Descartes and Vertov (Oct 14)

This Thursday, October 14, the Chicago Film Seminar begins its regular season meetings with Christian Quendler of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and currently a visitor to the Radio/TV/Film Department of Northwestern University. He will present his talk "Camera-Eye and Dispositif: René Descartes vs. Dziga Vertov." The response will be provided by Yuri Tsivian of the University of Chicago.

What follows is a brief abstract Quendler has submitted for this talk:

Metaphors of the camera eye are among the oldest and most powerful tropes to depict human vision and subjectivity. As a proto-cybernetic metaphor that lends itself both to anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic readings, the camera eye has become a double agent of subjectivity. It has served as midwife for a modern philosophy of the subject in René Descartes's discourse on Optics and as a gravedigger for classical notions of subjectivity in Dziga Vertov's radically constructivist aesthetics of the kino-eye. By looking at Descartes's early modern and Vertov's modernist notions of the camera eye as two paradigmatic case studies, this paper examines the intricate relation between subjectivity and mediality. It examines figures of the camera eye as conceptual metaphors that construct subjective relations to orders of discourse and media spaces. Drawing on Joachim Paech's reflections on the dispositif for a theory of the order(ing) of media, Quendler will review the concept of the dispositif as a strategic place in the alignment of medium, discourse and genre.

Location: Unlike our kickoff, 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.

Session #1: Responding to What Cinema Is! (Sept 23)

(Note: read to bottom of message for important info about unusual location for this session and follow-up meal!)

The Chicago Film Seminar kicks off its annual season of formal presentations on Thursday, September 23 at 6:30pm with a moderated workshop of short responses to Dudley Andrew's What Cinema Is!: Bazin's Quest and Its Charge, the cornerstone text for this year's CFS programming. Hometown all-stars James Lastra (U.Chicago), Lynn Spigel (Northwestern), Virginia Wright Wexman (UIC), and Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Notre Dame) will commence the session with a series of 10-minute reactions to Andrew's book, including the claims it ventures and the larger questions it prompts, all of which will ramify—in spirit, thought not always to the letter—across the rest of this year's presentations.

After our series of invited responses, the workshop session will open outward to a general discussion of the book and the speakers' points, as moderated by Scott Curtis of Northwestern. We encourage you to read what you can of Andrew's book before next Thursday, to facilitate the most substantial possible exchanges. However, both the book and the workshop format are structured to solicit commentary from a wide range of perspectives, relating to issues of key pertinence for anyone in the field. Indeed, the subtitle for our workshop is "The State of Film & Media Studies Today," in which we all have strong investments. So come one, and come all!

Location: This session will not meet in our usual Michigan Avenue location, but in Room 150 of the Arthur Rubloff Building at the Northwestern University School of Law (375 E. Chicago Ave). Suggestions for parking are here and here. The Red Line Chicago/State stop is also a great option, as are a dozen CTA bus lines and, for those with access, the Northwestern Intercampus Shuttle.

Dinner: An on-site dinner reception to celebrate the new year of CFS will immediately follow the seminar. If you plan on attending the reception, please RSVP using this link to our new CFS coordinator, Adam Hart, by Monday, Sept. 20th.

Links: Check in with our previous blog entry to read more about What Cinema Is! and its role in this year's programming for CFS, including links where you can buy the book. Click on the names of all four of our speakers in the right-hand sidebar to access their faculty bios.

In the Comments: Have you already read Andrew's book? Do you have specific thoughts or questions you'll be bringing to Thursday's session, or that you hope our speakers might engage?

What Cinema Is: The 2010-11 Theme

The coordinators of the Chicago Film Seminar have taken the unusual step this year of organizing its yearly slate of speakers around a unified theme, taking Dudley Andrew's recent book What Cinema Is! as either a direct or an indirect point of departure. Here is a copy of the prompt distributed to the invited presenters:

"In What Cinema Is! Bazin's Quest and Its Charge (Blackwell, 2010), Dudley Andrew posits classical cinema—fictional feature films made between 1938-1968—as the norm, not as a way of defending the canon for its own sake, but for the sake of defending 'an instinct of looking and listening' that developed out of long, critical engagement with that form of cinema. For Andrew, 'the legacy surrounding the feature film has caused the most heated and robust debates in film theory,' and if we are to cherish anything in a time of disciplinary upheaval, we should treasure the energy and focus behind those debates. Indeed, 'such debates...have made cinema studies among the liveliest sites in the humanities for the past half-century. The prospect of the decline of those debates is more worrisome than the putative mutation of their topic.'

"For Andrew, then, it all starts and returns to the feature film and 'the intensity and the focus that films invite and sometimes demand.' As long as we define cinema in multiple ways, according to Andrew, we risk losing the focus that created and defined our field. We invite you to present your latest work as an explicit or implicit response to this idea."

Please join us this year for a series of talks that, in their own ways, will take up some of Andrew's concerns, implicitly or explicitly suggesting some direct replies to his claims.

Links: Buy What Cinema Is! from Wiley-Blackwell or from Amazon

In the Comments: Any thoughts already on Andrew's book, or the CFS theme? Any questions you hope we might consider over the course of the year in relation to 'What Cinema Is,' either during our evening sessions or here on the blog?