Humanities Division FSC

Critical Mass: The Legacy of Hollis Frampton

06 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Film Studies Center
5811 S. Ellis
Friday, February 5, 6pm – Sunday, February 7, 2010, 3pm

Building/Room: Cobb 307
Primary Sponsor: Film Studies Center
Other Sponsor(s): Committee on Cinema & Media Studies, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Conference Title: Critical Mass: The Legacy of Hollis Frampton
Open to the Public: Yes
Contact Name: Matt Hauske
Contact E-mail: hauske@uchicago.edu
Contact Phone: 773-702-8596
Campus Map: maps.uchicago.edu
Event Description: Friday evening’s performance and screening is SOLD OUT and the FSC is no longer taking reservations. Registration for the conference is not required. The work of Hollis Frampton—films, photography and essays — has long been recognized as a major contribution of the avant-garde culture of the seventies and eighties: with such photographic series as Vegetable Locomotion (undertaken in collaboration with Marion Fallon), films such as Zorns Lemma, Hapax Legomena and the films intended to be part of his Magellan cycle, and his essays collected in the volume Circles of Confusion. However Frampton’s untimely death in 1984 left his Magellan cycle unfinished, while Circles of Confusion went out of print (and became one of the volumes most frequently stolen from University libraries). Although projects for the preservation of Frampton’s work are ongoing, the critical reevaluation has begun, as his work inspires a new generation of filmmakers and scholars, and continues to excite the generation that knew him. The publication of an expanded collection of his essays, new critical and historical works dealing with his films and a number of dissertations in progress by young scholars that target Frampton’s work demonstrate the need to rediscover this major artist, filmmaker and media theorist., This conference gathers both generations of scholars to contribute to and discuss this project. Picking up from the symposium on Frampton held at Princeton University in 2004, we want to discuss the significance of Frampton’s work in a new technological and intellectual environment.
Disability Clause: Please contact the event sponsor(s) if you require assistance to fully participate in this event.
More info: filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu

Experimental Film Club presents FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…

13 Feb 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Film Studies Center
5811 S. Ellis
Friday, February 12, 2010, 7pm

Building/Room: Cobb 307
Primary Sponsor: Film Studies Center
Contact Name: Film Studies Center
Contact Phone: 773-702-8596
Campus Map: maps.uchicago.edu
Event Description: A central figure in dance and performance of the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer's transition to the cinema in the early 1970s quickly earned her a place as the single most important avant-garde filmmaker of her generation. Rainer inaugurated a major feminist tradition in the cinema that blends theory with autobiography, deconstructed narratives, dance-inspired performances and rigorous but playful formal experimentation. FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO..., a landmark film that is still considered by many to be her masterpiece, is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger. (Yvonne Rainer, 1974, 16mm, B&W, 105 min), Co-sponsored by the Student Activity Fee.
Disability Clause: Please contact the event sponsor(s) if you require assistance to fully participate in this event.
More info: filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu

Quilombo and Utopia: The Aesthetic of Labor in Brazilian Documentary: Lecture by Salomé Skvirsky

19 Feb 2010 23:00:00 GMT

Film Studies Center
5811 S. Ellis
Friday, February 19, 2010, 5pm

Building/Room: Cobb 307
Primary Sponsor: Film Studies Center
Other Sponsor(s): Committee on Cinema & Media Studies
Presenter: Salomé Skvirsky, postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies
Lecture Title: Quilombo and Utopia: The Aesthetic of Labor in Brazilian Documentary
Contact Name: Film Studies Center
Contact Phone: 773-702-8596
Campus Map: maps.uchicago.edu
Event Description: This talk focuses on one of the privileged spaces of the Cinema Novo filmscape: the quilombo or maroon settlement. Though neglected by film scholars, the quilombo has imposed itself thematically on political filmmakers; it became the preferred site for bringing together two preoccupations of these filmmakers—Brazilian national identity and utopian politics. The presentation examines the short documentary that inaugurated this tradition. ARUANDA (Noronha, 1960), a classic Cinema Novo antecedent about a rural community of descendents of escaped slaves, locates the utopian element of the quilombo in the unalienated life-activity of its members, rather than in a peculiarly African or Afro-Brazilian culture. This film represents an anti-culturalist approach to the quilombo that was soon superceded by the culturalist appropriation of the quilombo by the Brazilian black movement, by other filmmakers, and later, by the Brazilian state., Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. In September 2010, she will begin as Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in English from the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include an essay about racial melodrama in Cinema Journal and an article about Anand Patwardhan's 1992 political documentary, RAM KE NAAM, in 24 Frames: The Cinema of India.
Disability Clause: Please contact the event sponsor(s) if you require assistance to fully participate in this event.
More info: filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu

WHPK presents Pictures and Sounds

21 Feb 2010 02:00:00 GMT

Film Studies Center
5811 S. Ellis
Saturday, February 20, 2010, 8pm

Building/Room: Cobb 307
Primary Sponsor: Film Studies Center
Other Sponsor(s): Committee on Cinema & Media Studies
Performance Title: Pictures and Sounds
Performer(s): TBA
Cost: free
Contact Name: Film Studies Center
Contact Phone: 773-702-8596
Campus Map: maps.uchicago.edu
Event Description: Pictures and Sounds, the annual multimedia showcase hosted by WHPK and the Film Studies Center, presents re-imagined and improvised soundtracks to new video work and classics of silent, experimental, and outsider film. Live performances from across the spectrum of Midwestern avant noise and free playing.
Disability Clause: Please contact the event sponsor(s) if you require assistance to fully participate in this event.
More info: filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu

Experimental Film Club presents THE CONNECTION

13 Mar 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Film Studies Center
5811 S. Ellis
Friday, March 12, 2010, 7pm

Building/Room: Cobb 307
Primary Sponsor: Film Studies Center
Other Sponsor(s): Committee on Cinema & Media Studies, Experimental Film Club
Contact Name: Film Studies Center
Contact Phone: 773-702-8596
Campus Map: maps.uchicago.edu
Event Description: A dancer and choreographer turned filmmaker, Shirley Clarke's first feature-length film established her as a major figure in the burgeoning New American Cinema that also included John Cassavetes' Shadows and Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy. An adaptation of Jack Gelber's acclaimed Beat play about junkies, musicians and other assorted figures waiting for a fix, The Connection uses cinema verité methods to perfectly capture a subculture. Unfortunately neglected in film history, Clarke's film is truly a milestone of independent cinema. (Shirley Clarke, 1961, 35mm, B&W, 110 min), Co-sponsored by the Student Activity Fee.
Disability Clause: Please contact the event sponsor(s) if you require assistance to fully participate in this event.
More info: filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu

The Last Happy Day: An Evening with Filmmaker Lynne Sachs

14 Mar 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Film Studies Center
5811 S. Ellis
Saturday, March 13, 2010, 7pm

Building/Room: Cobb 307
Primary Sponsor: Film Studies Center
Other Sponsor(s): Departments of Cinema & Media Studies, Classics, Rhetoric and Poetics, and Jewish Studies
Contact Name: Film Studies Center
Contact Phone: 773-702-8596
Campus Map: maps.uchicago.edu
Event Description: New York filmmaker Lynne Sachs presents THE LAST HAPPY DAY, an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and Sachs' distant cousin. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones— small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin. Sachs' essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children's performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war. In conversation with Classics Professor Michèle Lowrie (who acted as an adviser on the film), Sachs will discuss making this portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran. From Lucretius’ sublime but wise “On the Nature of the Universe” to Euripides’ lurid Bacchae to Michael Ondaattje’s harrowing vision of Billy the Kid, Sachs will review the range of literature that fed her creative process. In the same spirit of experimentation, she will screen her companion piece, COSMETIC SURGERY FOR CORPSES (10 min., 2010) which witnesses a group of Latin scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin., (Lynne Sachs, 37 min, DVD, 2009)
Disability Clause: Please contact the event sponsor(s) if you require assistance to fully participate in this event.
More info: filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu