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Archive for March, 2011

4/1-4/2 at the Film Studies Center: “The Powers of Display” Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference

March 28th, 2011 No comments
The Powers of Display: Cinemas of Investigation, Demonstration, and Illusion
Department of Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Conference, April 1 and 2, 2011

The Department of Cinema and Media studies presents a two-day graduate conference on the subject of cinema’s enduring struggle with truth and fakery, spectacle and deception. The Powers of Display: Cinemas of Investigation, Demonstration and Illusion will engage cinema’s enduring affinity for certain genres, subjects, and aesthetics that are dominated by the idea of display, particularly as this idea informs modes of spectatorship that pivot on curiosity, skepticism, detection, and a will to know how things work.

Attached is a conference program. Complete details available at the conference blog.

Keynote speaker Alison Griffiths (Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York) will give a talk on “Edison, Houdini, and the Electric Chair.” Griffiths is the author of Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) and Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn of the Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)

Day one of the conference will conclude with an April Fools Day screening of Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973, 35mm, 89 min).

As part of her visit, Alison Griffiths will also be presenting on Friday, April 1st at the Mass Culture Workshop (10:30 AM – 12:30 PM).  For more information, and to download pre-circulated materials, visit here.

Co-sponsored by the Franke Institute, the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, the Film Studies Center, the Mass Culture Workshop, and the New Media Workshop.

Film Studies Center: 5811 South Ellis Ave, Cobb Hall 306, Chicago, IL

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3/11: Lisa Zaher

March 6th, 2011 No comments

On Friday, March 11th, Lisa Zaher, PhD candidate in the department of Art History, will present and discuss “Stroboscopophila, Circa 1968,” a chapter from her dissertation, By Mind and Hand: Hollis Frampton’s Photographic Modernism.

This presentation turns to a series of projects that Hollis Frampton completed around 1968 that interrogate the relationship between the actions of the human body and photographic processes. By using the technology of the stroboscope as the logic linking these projects, this chapter maps out the ways in which perception and photographic media could equally be manipulated. The projects  under discussion use photographic means to demonstrate the co-extensibility of human thought and bodily action.

In so far as this presentation is oriented around old media—that of the stroboscope—it will make evident its dependence on coincidences linked via new  media technology.  One of the questions to be discussed concerns the status of coincidence and chance within the context of new media archives.  To what extent does matchmaking and meaning-making grounded in new media archives model the same kind of infra-linguistic exercises elaborated by Frampton’s projects connected by the stroboscope?

There are no pre-circulated materials for this presentation.

The New Media Workshop meets from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Cobb 310.

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