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. 

October 3: D.N. Rodowick on Christian Metz and the Invention of Theory

Note: If you will be attending the reception immediately following the talk, please RSVP by Friday, September 27 to the official event Evite.

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Please save the date for the opening of the 2013-14 Chicago Film Seminar. We are pleased to announce that on Thursday, October 3rd at 6:30pm D.N. Rodowick, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Cinema and Media Studies and the College at University of Chicago, will give a talk entitled "After the Long Eclipse: Christian Metz and the Invention of Theory."  Domietta Torlasco, associate professor of Italian and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern, will deliver the response. 

We will convene 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.

Rodowick describes his talk as follows:

In this paper, I will argue that the early work of Christian Metz inaugurates a discourse of "theory." In a group of texts published between 1964 and 1972, Christian Metz inaugurates a theretofore unknown discourse of "theory." Metz is one of the first figures to make present and perspicuous a new concept of theory by constructing theory as an object, examining its history, and testing its present and potential claims to generate knowledge. In these seven short years, for film studies at least, Metz becomes "discursive" in Foucault's sense. Not just the author of film theories but the focal point of a new system of address, which emits from a new institutional context with its own rhetorical style and sense of place in history, setting out a new conceptual framework defined by precise principles of pertinence and implicit criteria of inclusion and exclusion for the practice of theory.

We look forward to seeing you there. 

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.

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.