March 21: Luisela Alvaray on Venezuelan Historical Films

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, March 21 to welcome Luisela Alvaray (DePaul) for her talk, "Claiming the Past: Venezuelan Historical Films and Public Politics." Gilberto Blasini (UW-Milwaukee) 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, March 21 at 6:30pm
Luisela Alvaray, DePaul 
"Claiming the Past: Venezuelan Historical Films and Public Politics"
Respondent: Gilberto Blasini, UW-Milwaukee

Alvaray describes her talk as follows:

In 2000, the most financially successful film in Venezuela was Diego Risquez’ Manuela Saenz: La libertadora del Libertador, a revision of the life of Simon Bolívar’s best known lover. In 2012, famous Venezuelan performer Edgar Ramírez depicts Bolívar himself—a guiding force in the Latin American struggle for independence from the Spanish empire—in the epic Libertador (dir. Alberto Arvelo).  Between the release of these two films, at least nine more historical revisionist features and many other short films have come out that take us back to different stages of Venezuelan history—the independence period, the dictatorship of the 1950s, and events of a more recent history in the 1990s.

Without a doubt, this trend reflects a society persistently exploring its past and has to do with the fact that the Venezuelan government has had reconstruction of historical events as an overt policy for its cinematic institutions. This trend is consonant with the wider official discourse evoking history at every level of society to justify present regulations and policies. In example, during the last decade, a national standard for history textbooks was mandated for the elementary school system. Nowadays, there continues to be tremendous public attention to how historical events should be related and transmitted. The group of historical films that have come out is, therefore, part of a swarm of printed and audiovisual representations that organize and are continually weaving Venezuelans collective consciousness of history and strengthening particular visions of the present.

By focusing on the historical film Taita Boves (Luis Alberto Lamata, 2010), I will trace some of the ideological currents that traverse Venezuelan society.  As George Lipsitz has asserted, the circulation of ideas through mass media has a crucial role in the constitution of a collective memory and, therefore, in the formation of individual and group identity in the modern world. Following this line of thought, it seems important to formulate questions as to the role of popular culture—and in our case, of popular discourse conveyed through film—in social and political life.  Ultimately, my goal is to contribute to the theoretical debate around the constitution of national historical consciousness by stressing history as an articulation contingent upon narratives and social discourses.

February 7: Thomas Elsaesser on Reevaluating 3D

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, February 7 to welcome Thomas Elsaesser (University of Amsterdam) for his talk, "Reevaluating 3D." Tom Gunning (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, February 7 at 6:30pm
Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam 
"Reevaluating 3D"
Respondent: Tom Gunning, U.Chicago

Elsaesser's talk will tease out the implications of two of his recent articles, "Avatar- Access for All" (New Review of Film and Television) and "The Return of 3D" (Critical Inquiry), to ask if, in light of what we know about a hundred years of Hollywood, we can finally evaluate whether or not 3D has been a force for good (progressive, liberal, emancipatory, utopian) or bad (reactionary, ideological, spearhead not only of capitalism but also of the military-entertainment complex)-- or if this very question is wrongly posed to begin with.

January 17: Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece and Matt Hauske on Horizontality and Monumentality

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, January 17 to welcome Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (Ph.D. Candidate at Northwestern) for her talk, "The Monumental Screen: Perfect Vision, Disembodiment, and American Theatrical Architecture in the Era of Widescreen," and Matt Hauske (Ph.D. Candidate at U.Chicago) for his talk, "The Western's New Horizons: Wide Screens, Big Canvases, and the Great Outdoors in the 1950s." Don Crafton (Notre Dame) 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, January 17 at 6:30pm
Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern 
"The Monumental Screen: Perfect Vision, Disembodiment, and American Theatrical Architecture in the Era of Widescreen"
Matt Hauske, Ph.D. Candidate, U.Chicago
"The Western's New Horizons: Wide Screens, Big Canvases, and the Great Outdoors in the 1950s"
Respondent: Don Crafton, Notre Dame

Szczepaniak-Gillece describes her talk as follows:

Most histories of widescreen theorize that the expansive screens of the 1950s ushered in a moment of bodily immersion, where the spectator's entire physical form along with her eyes seemed swept up in the picture.  This lecture will focus on other discourses of widescreen exhibition, where theatrical space and enormous screen were understood to work together to promote perfect disembodied vision.  While a majority of exhibitors and promoters engaged primarily with sensation, others that I will focus on understood the gigantic screen as potentially empathically and psychically rather than bodily liberating.  In this way, the architecture of widescreen in the American movie theater can be understood as material expressions of theories of the body's and the mind's proper place in aesthetic experience.  By eliminating peripheral theatrical detail and moving the screen farther and farther into the space of reception, some screen and cinema designers sought to freeze spectators into their seats, struck dumb by the monumentality of the images filling the entirety of their line of sight.

Hauske describes his talk as follows:

This paper addresses at the appeal of widescreen cinema processes in the early 1950s via the western, a genre whose emphasis on landscape and action was thought to especially suit it to the new screen dimensions.  Mainly discussed as a reaction to the economic and aesthetic threat of television, processes like CinemaScope and VistaVision also tapped into, and reacted against, other leisure practices that were increasingly popular among the growing, income-disposing middle class.  In the context of the western, these practices included a host of "outdoor" activities, including camping, hiking, fishing, and water sports.  The immersive horizontality of widescreen westerns stood in for outdoor experiences while simultaneously serving as promotions for them.  This dual emphasis on immersion and horizontality is indicative of a larger cultural environment during the postwar years, one that focused on a break from the mundane reality of the "organization man" and suburban conformity and that also includes the loose program of Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism.

November 29: Volker Pantenburg on Scanning Landscape and the Horizontal Pan

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, November 29 to welcome Volker Pantenburg (UIC-visiting) for his talk, "Scanning Landscape: Notes on the Politics and Economy of the Pan." Daniel Eisenberg (SAIC) 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 29 at 6:30pm
Volker Pantenburg, UIC-visiting, Bauhaus University Weimar 
"Scanning Landscape: Notes on the Pilitics and Economy of the Pan"
Respondent: Daniel Eisenberg, SAIC

Pantenburg describes his talk as follows:

Compared to the abundant research done on montage, Film and Media Studies have paid relatively little attention to the study of camera movement.  Focusing on the horizontal pan, my paper investigates some of the implications of this specific operation.  Which historical constellations of the gaze does the pan pick up?  How does it modify the spatial and temporal parameters of the profilmic world?   And what are we to make of the affinities between panning and historiographic investigation? My discussion of these questions concentrates on the Austrian filmmaker Gerhard Friedl's film Did Wolff Von Amerongen Commit Bankruptcy Offences? (2005) and relates it to earlier works that make extensive use of horizontal panning, such as Too Early, Too Late (1982), by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.

October 25: Haidee Wasson on Protocols of Portability and Projection

Note: If you will be attending the reception immediately following the talk, please RSVP by Thursday, October 18 to the CFS Coordinator, Nova Smith, at nova@uchicago.edu.

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Please save the date for the opening of the 2012-13 Chicago Film Seminar. We are pleased to announce that on Thursday, October 25th at 6:30pm Haidee Wasson, associate professor of film studies and associate dean of research and graduate studies at Concordia University in Montreal, will give a talk entitled "Protocols of Portability and Projection: Technologies of the Small Screen at Mid-Century."  Jacob Smith, assistant professor of radio, television and film at Northwestern working on the cultural history of media with a focus on sound and performance, will deliver the response. 

We will convene in our new location at DePaul's Loop Campus in the Daley Building at 14 E. Jackson Blvd. (at State St.), Room LL 102.  **We ask that you use the State St. entrance to the building, located at 247 S. State.**  Maps can be found here and here.  A reception will follow.

Wasson describes her talk as follows:

The history of portable film projectors offers us a very different view of what cinema has been -- not big but small, not only moving but also still, permanent but just as often provisional. Through the lens of the portable projector and its small screen, cinema’s apparatus has long been less a singular ideal and more an iterative process, serving a range of aesthetic ideals, epistemological projects, corporate and governmental mandates. This presentation will provide a framework for thinking about what it means to integrate portability into our assumptions about cinema’s past, using a cluster of case studies beginning in 1939 and ending in 1959. Particular attention will be paid to the role of the American military in developing film projectors during the war and well beyond.

We look forward to seeing you all there. 

May 10: Jane Gaines on the Melodrama Theory of Feminist Film

Please join us for the final Chicago Film Seminar of the year at 6:30 pm on Thursday, May 10 to welcome Jane Gaines (Columbia University) for her talk, "A Melodrama Theory of Feminist Film Historiography." Christine Gledhill (New York University) 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, May 10 at 6:30pm
Jane Gaines, Columbia University
"A Melodrama Theory of Feminist Film Historiography"
Respondent: Christine Gledhill, New York University


Gaines describes her talk as follows:


This paper is the end of a book that begins with the problem of what we should do with the evidence that so many women made significant behind-the-scenes contributions to building national film industries in the silent era. While the book begins with the chapter “Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?” the end considers the difficulty of how to say “what happened” but poses it as a problem of how to locate ourselves in historical time. This calls for a theory that is companion to the “historical turn” and that takes its inspiration from the tradition of melodrama theory already established within the field.

            The argument is that melodrama as a mode tells us something about how we  negotiate the paradoxes of historical time—the time in which the past and the future are irreconcilable. One wonders how melodrama can be both  resigned to “here today, gone tomorrow” and show us that  there is “always a tomorrow.” We do know that melodrama invents ever more complex devices with which to represent the impossibility of living in a present that is also a “former future,” one of which is the startling coincidence. This coincidence  leads to that other problem in disjunction-- our historical coincidence (or non-coincidence) with events in the historical past. 

April 12: Cinema and Experience- Commemorating the Life and Work of Miriam Hansen

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar, in a joint event with the University of Chicago, at 7:00 pm on Thursday, April 12 to commemorate the life and work of the late Miriam Hansen. The CFS will be held at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, Cobb Hall Room 307, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. A map can be found here.


Thursday, April 12 at 7:00pm
Commemorating the Life and Work of Miriam Hansen
University of Chicago Film Studies Center, Cobb Hall Room 307, 5811 S. Ellis Ave.

The evening will feature a short screening followed by a roundtable discussion with Hansen's colleagues and former students and a reception celebrating the launch of her recently published work Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno.

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?

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.

January 19: Miriam Petty on African American Children's Spectatorship

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, January 19 to welcome Miriam Petty (Northwestern) for her talk, "A Dance with Uncle Billy: Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson and African American Children's Spectatorship." Karen Bowdre (Indiana) 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, January 19 at 6:30pm
Miriam Petty, Northwestern
"A Dance with Uncle Billy: Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson and African American Children's Spectatorship"
Respondent: Karen Bowdre, Indiana

Petty describes her talk as follows:

My paper uses celebrated tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and his cinematic relationship with child star Shirley Temple as the springboard for an examination of African American children’s spectatorship in the 1930s and early 40s. Relying on a variety of autobiography, memoir and personal essay as the work’s source material, I argue that the stories of the authors’ childhood moviegoing experiences complicate accepted theories of the African American viewer as "resistant" and "oppositional." These personal accounts challenge and dimensionalize such theorizing in important ways. In them, we find Black children spectators who are willing to identify and fantasize across the boundaries of race in addition to, or even instead of a "resistant" posture. The viewing and identificatory practices of Black children revealed in these accounts also emphasize the importance of context, and point toward the impact that segregated venues made upon the African American viewing experience in the classical cinema era.

Summary: Hamid Naficy on Early Iranian Cinema's Production Mode

On Thursday, October 13, the Chicago Film Seminar commenced its 2011-2012 season at Northwestern Law School by welcoming Hamid Naficy of Northwestern to deliver a talk on “Early Iranian Cinema’s Production Mode.” Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa of Columbia College provided the response.

This talk centered on Iranian cinema’s silent and early sound period, which Naficy describes as the pre-industrial “artisanal era.” In examining the historical circumstances that gave rise to early Iranian film, Naficy focuses on the unique production circumstances of this national cinema while also situating it alongside other contemporaneous Iranian arts and social structures. From the artisanal era’s outset in 1897, Iranian cinema was distinct from Western national cinemas in its close association with elites and royals rather than the masses, a connection that would grow via the Shah’s interest in and official sanctioning of the new medium. Beyond just this support of the privileged class, Naficy further provides an in-depth framework of the specific societal conditions that contributed to the artisanal, rather than formally industrial, aspects of Iranian cinema. Among the many roots of this production mode were a focus on foreign film imports and exhibition over local production, a cottage industry based on workshops and ateliers rather than studios, and a predominant system of patronage that was highly unstable and heavily present in other media of the period as well. This infrastructural arbitrariness, part of what Homa Katouzian calls a “rickety” society, was notable throughout Iran and was characterized by decentralized power, social volatility and the unaccountability of the state, all of which required a particular flexibility and ingenuity on the part of filmmakers and other artists in order to successfully navigate the unsteady social structures.

While this rickety society provided the artisanal mode of production’s socio-historical roots, Naficy further develops its specific manifestations within the early Iranian film industry into a detailed exploration of what he calls a “rickety cinema.” The twelve specific elements of this rickety cinema are not, however, solely linked to early Iranian film, as Naficy asserts that many of these traits are likely present within numerous non-Western national cinemas. Among the chief components of the silent and early sound period’s artisanal mode of production was the multifunctional craftsmanship of its filmmakers operating as part of horizontally and vertically integrated film workshops, as well as the presence of liminal middleman filmmakers who were often positioned between foreign, secular modernity and traditional, pre-modern Iran. Additional characteristics include the multiculturalism and deep diasporic connections of these often minority filmmakers, the hybrid self-fashioning of film workers to shape non-traditional cultural identities, and the interstitiality of operating outside of established dualisms of East/West or colonized/colonizer. Improvisation in the face of unreliable legal and technological structures, the instability of exhibition due to the paucity of established venues, and the indirectness of foreign film imports (then the majority of films shown) as negotiated by intermediaries without regard for local tastes were also key to Naficy’s examination of the rickety, artisanal structure that would so define the period.

To best exemplify these various components, Naficy highlights pioneering filmmaker Ovanes Gregory Ohanians, a multiethnic and transnational immigrant who founded Tehran’s first film studio and Iran’s first acting school, as well as directed the nation’s first feature length commercial silent film, a self-reflexive movie about a traditional man’s gradual acceptance of, and incorporation into, the film industry titled Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor (1933). As a figure, Ohanians embodied the multicultural, improvisational, entrepreneurial and structurally rickety nature that shaped early Iranian cinema’s artisanal era even into the present moment.

December 1: Catherine Clepper and Adam Hart

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:45 pm on Thursday, December 1 to welcome Catherine Clepper (Ph.D. Candidate at Northwestern) for her talk, "Death by Fright: Risk, Consent, and Sensation in the House of William Castle," and Adam Hart (Ph.D. Candidate at U.Chicago) for his talk, "Something to Be Scared Of: Fear, Anxiety and Phobia in the Horror Film." James Lastra (U.Chicago) and Jeffrey Sconce (Northwestern) will both 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, December 1 at 6:45pm
Catherine Clepper, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern
"Death by Fright: Risk, Consent, and Sensation in the House of William Castle"
Adam Hart, Ph.D. Candidate, U.Chicago
"Something to Be Scared Of: Fear, Anxiety and Phobia in the Horror Film"
Respondents: James Lastra, U.Chicago, and Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern

Clepper describes her talk as follows:

From the onset of what Kevin Heffernan has called William Castle’s "middle-career" (beginning with 1958’s Macabre and ending, roughly, with Mr. Sardonicus in 1961) the independent director deftly conflated notions of cinematic suspense and spectatorial fun with those of physical risk and safety. Macabre's now famous Lloyd's of London insurance gimmick, guaranteeing $1000 to beneficiaries should any patron die of fright during the film's initial run, established a prescient agenda for Castle features to follow. In addition to emphasizing the outlandish rituals of promotional ballyhoo that distinguished Castle's career amongst other mid-century showmen, the insurance scheme importantly reminded audiences of the sensations felt within the cinema, namely fear, anxiety, morbid fascination, and (particularly, in the case of later Castle productions) physical shocks and vibrations. In this way, the process of insuring oneself against “death by fright” impressed upon Castle’s audiences the critical relationship between risk and consent as part of the interactive moviegoing experience. Risking unpleasantness (if not death) and consenting to disorientation, Macabre’s viewers were, as Linda Williams has argued, simultaneously more attuned to and distracted by the cinema’s sensorial spectrum; or, in other words, moviegoers anticipated and consented to their own bodily shocks. This talk explores how Macabre’s complex promotional strategies dovetailed with later campaigns for Castle’s House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler (both 1959). As Castle productions became more outlandish both on and off the screen, I argue that emphases on risk, consent, and sensation became even more foregrounded as part of Castle’s non-diegetic prologues as well as his extracinematic gags and installations. I also contend that as Castle’s films integrated excessive amounts of hullaballoo, viewers responded by adjusting their preconceptions about proper viewing habits and initiating an alternative shock-centric mode of spectatorship.

Hart describes his talk as follows:

In the two decades after Psycho, the horror genre underwent major changes. Where the genre was once characterized principally by the display of fearsome supernatural creatures, in the 1970s more human threats became commonplace. Along with this much-discussed transition from exotic monsters (often in foreign lands and older eras) to contemporary scenes familiar to Western middle-class audiences was a significant stylistic shift. The privileged object of display shifted from the extraordinary bodies of monsters to the abjected bodies of victims, with monsters - supernatural or not - kept off screen for much of the movie, sometimes never fully visualized until a climactic final sequence. This talk attempts to provide an understanding of the monster's function within the horror film given its somewhat marginalized position in the post-Psycho genre. Using accounts of anxiety and phobia as models, I posit a conception of the monster as an objectification of abject or undefined threats, a locus within which unspecified signals of danger can be contained.

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.

October 13: Hamid Naficy on Early Iranian Cinema

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Note: If you will be attending the reception immediately following the talk, please RSVP by Thursday, October 6 to the new CFS Coordinator, Nova Smith, at nova@uchicago.edu.

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Please join us for the opening night of the 2011-2012 Chicago Film Seminar on Thursday, October 13 at 6:30 PM. Hamid Naficy, Professor of Radio-Television-Film and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University, will give a talk entitled, "Early Iranian Cinema's Production Mode." Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Professor of Film and Video at Columbia College, will deliver the response. This presentation coincides with the 22nd Annual Festival of Films from Iran at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

The talk will be held in Rubloff 180 (375 Chicago Avenue) at the Northwestern University Law School, between East Chicago Avenue and East Superior Street, just west of Lake Shore Drive. A reception with light fare will follow in Levy Mayer 117 Lowden Hall (357 Chicago Avenue). A map can be found here.

Hamid Naficy, a leading authority on cinema and television in the Middle East, has produced many educational films and experimental videos and has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas. His many publications include An Accented Cinema, The Making of Exile Cultures, Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged, Iran Media Index, and the AFI anthology, Home, Exile, Homeland. His recent honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. 2011 marks the publication of Volumes 1 and 2 of his monumental 4-volume Social History of Iranian Cinema, published by Duke University Press.

Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa has an M.F.A. from University of Illinois at Chicago. She has been teaching as a full time faculty at the Film and Video Department since 1989. Her areas of expertise are cinema studies (international cinema, Middle Eastern cinema, Exilic cinema, women, gender, race in cinema), documentary film theory and production and alternative forms. She has lectured and written extensively on Iranian cinema. Her book on Abbas Kiarostami, co-written with Jonathan Rosenbaum, was published by the University of Illinois Press in March 2003, and her films A Tajik Woman, Saless far from Home, and Ruins Within have been shown in many international film festivals. Her recent film A Different Moon was shown in several European film festivals in 2009 and has been picked up for distribution by European Spiritual Film Festival in France. She is currently working a on a personal documentary film about her relationship with Jerry Lewis’s cinema.

On behalf of the Chicago Film Seminar Organizing Committee, we look forward to seeing you there.

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.