Fall 2009
Colloquium Schedule - Film and Media Studies Department

*Colloquia are held from 1:00-2:30pm.

Friday, October 2
Emily Carman, Ph.D., Dept. of Film, Television and Digital Media, UCLA
“Independent Stardom in Hollywood: Uncovering Female Agency in Film History”

Friday, October 16
Department discussion of a film, TBA

Friday, October 30
Invited Speaker, TBA

Friday, November 13
Graduate student presentations, TBA

Spring 2009
Colloquium Schedule - Film and Media Studies Department

Thurs-Fri April 9-10
Media Fields 2: Infrastructures Conference – www.mediafields.wordpress.com

April 9 5:30 McCune Conference Room
Keynote, Brian Larkin, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

April 10 – Conference - Mosher Alumni Building

Fri April 24, 1pm, 1714 Ellison Hall
David Hesmondhalgh – CANCELED – TO BE RESCHEDULED

Fri May 8, 1pm, 1714 Ellison Hall
Emily Carman, Ph.D., Dept. of Film, Television and Digital Media, UCLA
“Independent Stardom in Hollywood: Uncovering Female Agency in Film History”

Fri May 15, 11am, 1714 Ellison Hall
Berteke Waaldijk, Visiting Scholar, University of Utrecht
“Use and Abuse of Citizenship: Why Use Theories of Citizenship in Media History?”

Fri May 29, 1pm, 1714 Ellison Hall
Suk-Young Kim, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Theater and Dance, UCSB
“Korean Wave or Cold Wave? Hanryu and the Globalization of Korean Media"

Fri June 5, 11am, 1714 Ellison Hall
Jim Schwoch, Professor of Communication, Northwestern University in Doha, Qatar
“The Curious Encounter of Telstar and STARFISH PRIME, July 1962”

Friday March 6, 11am
Chuck Wolfe, California Slapstick
Where: Ellison 1714

“California slapstick,” Jay Leyda’s label for screen comedy that emerged with the migration of the American film industry to the West Coast in the 1910s and 20s, succinctly evokes the distinctive topography and open-air, freewheeling quality of many silent comedies filmed in Los Angeles and Orange counties during an era of rapid and variegated urban growth. Drawing on histories of the development of Southern California, as well as recent efforts to document the precise locations where slapstick comedies were filmed, this talk explores the critical utility of the term, “California slapstick,” both as short hand for a subgenre of silent film comedy and as an invitation to more systematic thinking about the role of social geography in the development of early film forms.

Professor Wolfe's areas of research and teaching interest include international film history and criticism; American film and cultural history; historiography; documentary film, photography and new media; comedy; film sound; and adaptation. He is the author of two books on the films of director Frank Capra and has published widely on various aspects of the history of commercial, independent, and documentary filmmaking in the U.S. A former Rockefeller Fellow, he also has served as a consulting scholar for the New York Center for Visual History's American Cinema Project and as a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the American Film Institute. Together with colleague Edward Branigan, he is series co-editor of the American Film Institute's Film Reader Series, which to date has published nineteen volumes of new critical essays on topics of contemporary concern in film, television, and new media studies. He is a past recipient of a UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award and a past chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies.

Feb 27, Friday, 1 pm

Jan Anders Diesen, "Silent Films from Expeditions to the North and South Poles"
Where: 1714 Ellison Hall

Jan Anders Diesen has his doctorate in Film Studies from the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway with a thesis on film used in education. He worked as a teacher and a historian before joining the Lillehammer University College in 1990. He has directed/ produced a lot of videograms and TV programs on historical and film historical topics (e.g. the film series "Norwegian Film History 1-8" in 1997/98 together with colleague Tore Helseth and reconstructed the silent "The Bridal Party in Hardanger" (Breistein 1926) for the Norwegian Film Institute and Norwegian Broadcasting in 2006).

He has written several books and articles on historical and film historical topics ( e.g. "Authentic impressions" about Scandinavian documentary film together with colleague Soren Birkvad, and "Film as National Public Educator" about the National Film Central. He has edited books on the Norwegian film pioneers Ottar Gladtvedt and Rasmus Breistein. In 2005 he published the book "Changing Facts" - about the development of the documentary film in Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK). He has also developed an internet course in Norwegian Film History (together with Tore Helseth). Diesen is currently working on polar expedition films.
Professor Diesen teaches documentary film history and theory and film and television history.

Friday, February 27, at 4:00 in the English Department seminar room (South Hall 2635).

There is a talk that we are co-sponsoring by

Marie-Laure Ryan

"What has the Computer done to the Word" or "The Problem of Interpersonal Relations in Interactive Narrative" - she will do one of these talks

Ryan is a scholar of ferocious intelligence whose books have had an immense impact in the field of narrative theory and media studies. Her landmark 1991 volume, Possible Worlds, helped introduce a paradigm-altering take on narrative, which is still being vigorously extended in narrative theory. That book won the year's MLA Independent Scholars Award. Her next authored book, Narrative as Virtual Reality, brilliantly expanded the new field of electronic narrative, and in its turn won the MLA's Jeanne Scaglione Prize for 2001. She's also published Avatars of Story: Narrative Modes in Old and New Media (2006) and has edited at least two other volumes: Cyberspace Textuality (1999) and Narrative across Media (2004)

Jan-Christopher Horak, "Saul Bass, Vernacular Modernism and Movie Publicity"
Where: Sociology Seminar Room - 2nd Floor, Ellison Hall

Saul Bass defined an era.  As a designer of movie posters, studio publicity, credits sequences to films, and corporate logos, as well as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker from the 1950s to the 1980s, Bass changed the look of film advertising. Bass’s poster designs and his pre-credits sequences were both innovative and visually exciting, incorporating concepts of modernist art into forms that had remained relatively stagnant for decades.

Jan-Christopher Horak is Director, UCLA Film & Television Archive, Professor UCLA, Moving Image Archive Studies and Critical Studies. Formerly Director, Archives & Collections, Universal Studios; Director, Munich Filmmuseum; Senior Curator, George Eastman House; Professor, University of Rochester; Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, Munich; University of Salzburg. PhD. Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet, Muenster, Germany. M.S. Boston University. Publications include: Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (1997), Lovers of Cinema. The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919-1945 (1995), The Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood's Golden Age (1989), Anti-Nazifilme der deutschsprachigen Emigration von Hollywood (1985), Fiklm und Foto der 20er Jahre (1979). Over 250 articles and reviews in English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Hebrew publications.