May 7: Justus Nieland, Michigan State University

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar on Thursday May 7^th at 6:30 to welcome Justus Nieland(Michigan State University) for his talk “Management Cinema: Film, Design and Communication in Aspen.” Nieland’s primary research includes modernism, film and media studies, and contemporary fiction. Additional interests include avant-garde and experimental cinemas, the film noir, film and media theory, theories of the affects and emotions, and modern architecture and design. He is the author of Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (U of Illinois Press, 2008), and David Lynch (Illinois, 2012), and co-author (with Jennifer Fay) of Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (Routledge, 2010). He is currently co-editor of the Contemporary Film Directors series at the University of Illinois Press. He is working on a book titled Happiness by Design, which explores midcentury designers' interest in moving-image technologies and their role in remaking the sensorium for the conditions of Cold War modernity. 

Nieland describes his talk as follows:

This paper explore the contours of a filmic modernism shaped at the International Design Conference at Aspen, a crucial institution for the midcentury merger of the corporation, the industrial designer, and a late-Bauhaus aesthetic retooled for American-style democratic liberalism. Founded in 1951 by visionary Chicago-based industrialist Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container Corporation of American, the IDCA would quickly establish itself as one of the world’s most important design conferences, assembling a roster of famous designers (Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Herbert Bayer, Eliot Noyes, Paul Rand, and Saul Bass, among others), artists, educators, corporate executives, and scholars from a diverse range of disciplines for an annual, week-long series of conversations around a predetermined theme. In many ways, the conference was symptomatic of the new professional legitimacy and cultural prestige of the designer at midcentury, and what architectural critic and historian Reyner Banham once referred to as “the problem of affluent democracy” incarnated by the design profession and its expansive liberal optimism. But IDCA also emerged from its founder’s interest in broad-based, humane inquiry into the most pressing problems of the Cold War world “to-be-designed.” This world’s challenges would only be met by open-minded individuals who understood “design as communication,” and thus, thought beyond the limits of their disciplinary training and expertise.

Situating the IDCA as an institution within the Cold War pedagogical reforms with which Paepcke was also involved (both in his Institute for Humanistic study at Aspen and in his patronage of László Moholy-Nagy’s Institute of Design in Chicago), I turn specifically to the 1959 conference “The Image Speaks,” the first at Aspen devoted to the role of film as medium of communication. I demonstrate how the design profession’s increasingly prominent claims on the administration of culture at midcentury is evident in the apportioning of cultural expertise at IDCA, and in the conference’s growing investment in film and the moving-image as management technologies.  The paper describes a brand of designer film theory, and assesses its instrumental modernist vision—at once managerial and democratic, pedagogical and humanist.

The Chicago Film Seminar is 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.

April 2: Adam Ochonicky, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 on Thursday, April 2nd to welcome Adam Ochonicky (University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh) for his talk "Nostalgic Frontiers" Spatiality, Violence and the Midwest in Badlands  and A History of Violence." Ochonicky received his PhD from University Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Zoran Samardzija (Columbia College) will provide the response. 

Ochonicky describes his talk as follows:

As a region, the Midwest is situated uniquely within the American popular imagination. Often labeled as being “flyover country,” this space and its inhabitants are considered to be both “authentically” American and a cultureless mass. In response to such regional perceptions, this talk examines two intertwined areas of focus: the cultural formation of the Midwest in film and the ever-shifting spatial and violent dimensions of nostalgia. From the closing of the Western frontier to the development of virtual environments online, the distinctive temporal properties of nostalgia have continually complicated and transformed how the Midwest’s place-identity is configured. Using Badlands (1973) and A History of Violence (2005) as case studies, I show how my concepts of “nostalgic spatiality” and “nostalgic violence” operate within cinematic depictions of the Midwest. Nostalgic spatiality refers to nostalgia being projected onto a physical landscape, thereby changing how that space is perceived, understood, or experienced. Nostalgic violence functions as a cultural force that regulates the behaviors and identities of both individuals and communities so that the present might appear as the nostalgic subject desires the past to be. Both Badlands and A History of Violence reimagine the Midwest’s physical territory as a realm in which the nostalgic desire for simultaneity is realized through a violent collapse of the past and present. Within these two films, the Midwest’s identity in American culture thus comes into focus as one of fluctuating meanings that are shaped by the inescapable pull of nostalgic longing.

February 12: Graduate Student Panel

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, February 12 to welcome Mary Adekoya (University of Chicago) for her talk, "Narrating Nollywood, Narrating Nigerian Modernity: Observations on the Restless Lives and Reckless Lovers in Nollywood Narratives," and Laura LaPlaca, (Northwestern) for her talk, "Mapping Mayberry: A Re-Appraisal of the Sitcom Mise-en-Scene."  Jake Smith (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, February 12 at 6:30pm

Mary Adekoya, Ph.D. Candidate, U.Chicago
"Narrating Nollywood, Narrating Nigerian Modernity: Observations on the Restless Lives and Reckless Lovers in Nollyood Narratives,"
Laura LaPlaca, Ph.D Student, Northwestern
“Mapping Mayberry: A Re-Appraisal of the Sitcom Mise-en-Scene"
Respondent: Jake Smith, Northwestern

Adekoya describes her talk as follows:

In this second chapter, from my dissertation “Shadows of Film: Nollywood and the Vernacular Revolution in African Cinema,” I argue that beyond its relation to homegrown modes of artistic expression, Nollywood cinema presents itself as vernacular through, one, – its reflection of what many scholars and cultural critics have identified as the often perplexing nature of everyday life in urban Africa, and two, – its mirroring of the way in which morality has become central to the questions surrounding Nigeria’s potential for full emergence into the world of neoliberal modernity. In essence, this chapter focuses on how Nollywood cinema offers a potent reflection of the everyday discontent and popular discourse on African modernity currently taking place in Nigeria. Its final argument is that this mirroring helps us to understand the “Nollywood revolution” more exactly as a revolution in which the links between cinema, everyday experience, and popular consciousness in Africa have become more solidified and been made remarkably more clear.

LaPlaca describes her talk as follows:

This talk treats the sitcom mise-en-scene as an architectural environment that can be animated by our perceptual play inside it. Sitcom storyworlds are not merely backgrounds for narratives, but generators of rich material and aesthetic resources that audiences can draw on as they navigate their everyday domestic experience. At the most extreme, these spaces can serve as detailed blueprints for viewers engaged in sitcom home re-creation – a practice that is much more prevalent than might be imagined. Using televised domestic storyworlds as models, fans engage in elaborate spatial exercises through dollhouse play, miniature making, virtual world building, and even full-scale custom home construction. However, sitcom home re-creation does not begin with a fan’s devotion, but with the very possibility that these televised spaces might be accurately measured and mapped. This possibility is not inherent to all televised spaces, but is particular to the ways in which the sitcom genre stylistically and discursively presents its storyworlds as accessible and inhabitable. That sitcom architectures are electronically transmitted makes them no less “real,” and certainly no less significant, than other historical structures; following Baudrillard, the “real” becomes that of which it is possible to give an accurate reproduction. Focused on one fan’s remarkable re-creation of The Andy Griffith Show’s mise-en-scene, I will explore some of the ways that sitcom storyworlds have historically been designed to not only represent domestic spaces, but to be domestic spaces.

May 22: Panel Discussion on Theorizing the Politics of Cinema (2014)

Please join us for the final Chicago Film Seminar of the year at 6:30 pm on Thursday, May 22 to welcome a panel discussion, held in conjunction with the Latin American Studies Association, on "Theorizing the Politics of Cinema (2014)."  Panelists include:  Kathleen Newman (Iowa), Cristina Venegas (UC-Santa Barbara), Marvin D'Lugo (Clark University), Jens Andermann (University of Zurich), Luisela Alvaray (DePaul), and Laura Podalsky (Ohio State).  Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky (UIC) is the organizer/moderator. The CFS will return to our usual location 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, May 22 at 6:30pm
Kathleen Newman, Iowa
Cristina Venegas, UC-Santa Barbara
Marvin D'Lugo, Clark University
Jens Andermann, University of Zurich
Luisela Alvaray, DePaul
Laura Podalsky,Ohio State 
"Theorizing the Politics of Cinema (2014)"
Moderator: Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, UIC

The panel is described as follows:

In conjunction with the annual conference of the Latin American Studies Association, which returns to Chicago after ten years, this roundtable brings together Latin American film and media scholars from around the world.  Using the "politics of cinema"—a topic with which the sub-field has long been associated—as an entry point, this roundtable will address new trends and debates in Latin American Cinema and Media Studies with an eye toward establishing a dialogue about context, method, and globalization across regional/national specializations.  Historically, politics has been central to scholarship on Latin America cinema.  Moreover, the disciplinarization of the sub-field was integrally linked to the analytic category of the "New Latin American Cinema."  Latin America became one of the privileged sites for thinking about politics in and of cinema more broadly.  The recent revival of Latin American cinema production and the traction of several Latin American films at international film festivals as well as the growth and methodological diversity of current scholarship make this an auspicious time to reflect on the trajectory of the sub-field and its relation to "world cinema."  Scholars—including those participating on this panel—are rethinking sclerotic historical periodizations and theorizing the cosmopolitanism of recent (and past production) in the context of global film culture and transnational (and national) funding schemes. 

Participants:

KATHLEEN NEWMAN (Associate Professor of Cinema & Spanish at the University of Iowa) specializes in Latin American cinema.  Her research focuses on theoretical questions regarding the relation between cinema and globalization.  She co-edited World Cinemas, Transnational Practices (2009) with Natasa Durovicova; this anthology examines the conceptual frameworks that would allow international film history to be understood as a transnational practice.

CRISTINA VENEGAS is Associate Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Digital Dilemmas: The State, the Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba (Rutgers 2010) deals with digital media in Cuba. She has also written about film and political culture, revolutionary imagination in the Americas, telenovelas, contemporary Latin American cinema, co-productions. She has curated numerous film programs on Latin American and Indigenous film in the US and Canada, and is Co-founder and Artistic Director (since 2004) of the Latino CineMedia International Film Festival in Santa Barbara.

MARVIN D’LUGO is Research Professor of Spanish and Screen Studies at Clark University (Worcester Massachusetts). His primary areas of film research include theories of authorship and the aesthetics of transnational cinema. He is author of The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing (Princeton 1991); Guide to the Cinema of Spain (Greenwood 1997); Pedro Almodóvar (Illinois 2006) and co-editor of Companion to Pedro Almodóvar’s Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell 2013). Since 2008 he has been principal editor of Studies in Hispanic Cinema. His current research involves auditory culture in the development of transnational Hispanic films.

JENS ANDERMANN is Professor of Latin American Studies at University of Zurich and adjunct professor at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina). Publications include New Argentine Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2011), The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (Pittsburgh UP, 2007) and Mapas de poder: una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (Beatriz Viterbo, 2000). As editor, he has published New Argentine and Brazilian Cinema: Reality Effects (Palgrave, 2013), Galerías del progreso: museos, exposiciones y cultura visual en América Latina (Beatriz Viterbo, 2006) and Images of Power: Iconography, Culture and the State (Berghahn, 2005). He is an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Current research topics: landscape and modernity in 20th-century Latin America, material and intangible forms of postdictatorial memory, post-mimetic aesthetics of the real in contemporary Brazilian and Argentine cinema.

LUISELA ALVARAY is Assistant Professor in Media and Cinema Studies at DePaul University. She specializes in Latin American cinema, transnational cinemas, media and cultural studies and film historiography. Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal; Studies in Hispanic Cinemas; Transnational Cinemas; Cultural Dynamics; Communication Teacher and Film & History, among other journals. She is a contributor to the book Latin American Melodrama (ed. Darlene Sadlier, 2009) and has published two books in Spanish – A la luz del proyector: Itinerario de una espectadora (2002) and Las versiones fílmicas: los discursos que se miran (1994).

LAURA PODALSKY teaches Latin American film and cultural studies at The Ohio State University.  She has published essays on a wide variety of topics, including Guillermo del Toro’s English-language films; landscapes of masculinity in contemporary Mexican cinema, telenovelas and globalization, cosmopolitanism in tango films, and pre-revolutionary Cuban cinema.  She is the author of Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955-1973 (2004) on Argentine film and urban culture and The Politics of Affect and Emotion in the Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Organizer/Moderator:

SALOMÉ AGUILERA SKVIRSKY is Assistant Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include Latin American cinema, documentary film, film theory, ethnographic film, race and representation, and melodrama. Her work has appeared in Cinema Journal, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Social Identities. Currently, she is working on a book-length manuscript titled “The Aesthetic of Labor: Work, Toil, and Utopia in Latin American Political Cinema” about the aesthetics and politics of, what might be called, the “process film” genre in Latin American and world film history.

April 10: Allyson Nadia Field on Fixing "The Birth of a Nation" --NEW LOCATION!

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, April 10 to welcome Allyson Nadia Field (UCLA) for her talk, "Fixing The Birth of a Nation: Hampton Institute, The New Era, and the Ambiguities of Uplift."  Cynthia Blair (UIC) will provide the response. The CFS will be held at a new location--Notre Dame's Loop Campus at 224 S. Michigan Ave. (the room number and entrance instructions will be forthcoming).  

Thursday, April 10 at 6:30pm
Allyson Nadia Field, UCLA 
"Fixing The Birth of a Nation: Hampton Institute, The New Era, and the Ambiguities of Uplift"
Respondent: Cynthia Blair, UIC

Field describes her talk as follows:

This talk considers the intersection of African American uplift cinema and The Birth of a Nation.  In April 1915, when The Birth of a Nation had its Boston premiere, it was met with strong protest from African Americans and those supportive of the "Negro cause."  To appease protestors (and the censors), the Griffith camp not only made several cuts but, more importantly, two additions: first inserting a "screen record" in the form of educational slides in the film, and later appending an epilogue, The New Era, made from a Hampton Institute publicity film titled Making Negro Lives Count.  Though the film is now lost, the debate over The New Era marks an unlikely turning point in questions of the cinematic promotion of African American modernization in the 1910s, and a key move away from the legacy of uplift that Hampton exemplified.  While Griffith's reasons for being interested in the additional footage are fairly straightforward, what is less obvious is why Hampton--one of the leading agricultural and industrial colleges for African Americans--would have wanted to be associated with such a controversial and virulently racist film like The Birth of a Nation.  Indeed, Hampton's participation in this project, and their seeming complicity with Griffith's work, was quickly met with withering and long-lasting criticism from African American leaders, women's groups, and the press.  This talk explores the reasons behind Hampton's decision, arguing that the placement of The New Era at the end of The Birth of a Nation fit into a broader logic of cinematic practices associated with uplift.  At the same time, the episode exposed deep fissures in those practices, displaying the power and limits of uplift as a political and aesthetic strategy.  Excavating this seemingly lost history reveals forces and tensions that would come to shape twentieth century Black cinema--a legacy that has never wholly escaped the complex impact of America's first blockbuster.

March 13: Michael DeAngelis on Reading the Bromance

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, March 13 to welcome Michael DeAngelis (DePaul) for his talk, "Reading the Bromance."  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, March 13 at 6:30pm
Michael DeAngelis, DePaul 
"Reading the Bromance"
Respondent: Nick Davis, Northwestern

DeAngelis describes his talk as follows:

“Bromance” has come to denote an emotionally intense bond between presumably straight males who demonstrate an openness to intimacy that they neither regard, acknowledge, avow, nor express sexually.  This paper attempts to account for the widespread cultural popularity of the bromance phenomenon in popular media during the past decade, discerning what is thematically and formally unique about bromance, as well as its historical connections with a number of traditions in American culture.  After noting antecedents within and beyond the realm of cinema, I proceed with a close analysis of the similarities and differences between bromance and the buddy film that emerged in American cinema at the end of the 1960s into the early 1970s, examining the very different ways in which these two genres configure intimacy between men, and focusing upon the role of the women and the domestic sphere in inter-male relationships.  The paper concludes by discussing the critical usefulness of configuring “bromance” as both a generic “product” and a discursive “process.”  Ultimately, I attempt to illuminate some of the paradoxical constructions of heteronormative masculinity that have emerged in a culture that finds homosexuality to be more increasingly visible, and that has accommodated this visibility by developing open, reflective, and introspective discourses of male bonding.

February 13: Jonathan Crylen and Dimitrios Latsis On Histories of the Moving Image at the Intersection of Place and Style

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, February 13 to welcome Jonathan Crylen (Ph.D. Candidate at UIowa) for his talk "Expanding Oceans, Expanded Screens: Deep-Sea Exploration and the IMAX Experience" and Dimitrios Latsis (Ph.D. Candidate at UIowa) for his talk "Canaletto, Promio, Greenaway:  An Eternal Landscape Braid"  Matt Hauske (Ph.D. Candidate at 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 13 at 6:30pm
Jonathan Crylen, Ph.D Candidate, UIowa
"Expanding Oceans, Expanded Screens: Deep-Sea Exploration and the IMAX Experience"
Dimitrios Latsis, Ph.D. Candidate, UIowa
"Canaletto, Promio, Greenaway: An Eternal Landscape Braid"
Respondent: Matt Hauske, Ph.D. Candidate, UChicago

Crylen describes his talk as follows:

This paper explores the question of scale as regards the deep-sea, the technologies that explore it, and immersive, large-format cinematic experience (IMAX).  Though much of the ocean remains unexplored, submersible technologies have in the past few decades greatly expanded the scale of the known ocean for researchers.  Similarly, IMAX movies of the deep ocean--such as Volcanoes of the Deep (2003) and Aliens of the Deep (2005), this paper's two key examples--have put these new discoveries on display for a curious public on a visual scale that mirrors the scope of "inner space."  First, this paper examines scale on an aesthetic register, drawing on classic/contemporary ideas of the sublime.  It considers the relationship between the technological sublime and the nature-oriented Romantic sublime, arguing that large-format images of the abyss inextricably fuse nature and technology--so that the natural and technological sublimes become mutually constituting.  In these films, spectacular nature always testifies to the advanced technologies (cinematic and oceanographic) that reveal it.  Secondly, my paper addresses scale on a rationalist register, drawing on Bruno Latour's arguments about scientific inscriptions.  For Latour, science aims to produce combinable and superimposable figures and diagrams that render a great many things "presentable all at once."  I argue that IMAX deep-sea documentaries function as Latourian inscriptions in motion, bringing together a diverse range of phenomena--macroscopic and microscopic, oceanic and cosmic, human and nonhuman--in one enormous frame, asking viewers to engage rationally with what also overwhelms them--to redefine disparate and opposed phenomena in relation to one another.

Latsis describes his talk as follows:

What moves cinema? What moves in cinema?  How has movement, its spatial, geographical and aesthetic articulations influenced the development of the medium's artistic vocabulary and catalyzed its cross-pollination with the visual arts?  The great eighteenth-century Venetian landscapist Canaletto first developed the vocabulary of the urban veduta in the 1720s, by 'freezing' the desired view and 'projecting' it onto his canvas, while retaining--in his gestural, architectural and atmospheric renderings--an implicit dynamism that preserves while transforming natural movement.  In 1896 the cameraman Alexandre Promio, working for the Lumières brothers, addressed the need for spatial and temporal compression in out-of-door actualitès, by inventing the technique of the travelling shot to record his views of Venice.  Three quarters of a century later, Peter Greenaway conducted some of his early structuralist experiments in the same locales, honing an analytical style that would inform his later oeuvre.  Using first-hand accounts from these three artists and close analysis of their work derived from and inspired by the very same Venice landscapes (Grand Canal, alleyways and palazzi), my paper surveys the ways that movement, its conceptualization and artistic rendering has shaped the elaboration of filmic style throughout cinema's history.  Through interdisciplinary and transhistorical comparisons, the locus of location is revealed to be just as crucial for cinema as it has been for fine art at large for centuries.

January 16: Pamela Robertson Wojcik on Shirley Temple as Streetwalker

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, January 16 to welcome Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Notre Dame) for her talk, "Shirley Temple as Streetwalker."  Miriam Petty (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, January 16 at 6:30pm
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Notre Dame 
"Shirley Temple as Streetwalker"
Respondent: Miriam Petty, Northwestern

Wojcik describes her talk as follows:

My talk is called "Shirley Temple as Streetwalker," which I mean literally - she walks in streets - and metaphorically - her mobility in urban space seems to conjure prostitution and narratives of fallen women.  Temple's films of the 1930s yoke together seemingly contradictory narratives of the fallen woman and the "new girl."  They show Temple being unmoored from home - orphaned or displaced - and then finding herself on streets where she encounters men.  Their encounters, however, do not lead to "degradation" or victimization.  Instead, they emphasize the girl's mobility and freedom and ascribe to her significant agency to transform and improve not only her situation, but also that of the men.  In this way, these films offer a vision of the urban as largely benign, and of girlhood as powerful.  This talk comes from my current book, Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child.

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.