Events

Taiwan New Cinema (first wave, 1982–1989; second wave, 1990 onward) has its unique history regarding film festivals, particularly in the way that these films are circulated in major European film festivals. On one hand, Taiwan New Cinema shares a common formalist concern about cinematic modernism with its Western counterparts, departing from previous modes of filmmaking that were preoccupied with nostalgically romanticizing China’s image. On the other hand, Taiwan New Cinema represents a struggling configuration of the "nation," brought forth by…

This talk investigates the historical entanglement of capital, culture, and leisure by mapping the local Iraqi capitalist and entrepreneurial elites, many of whom were upper-class Iraqi Jews with international outlooks, who invested in exhibition and production technology. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the Iraqi Jewish Sawda’i family pioneered the construction of cinemas, import of films, and established Iraq’s first film studio, Studio Baghdad. Examining the history of Iraqi cinema and film production and distribution through the Sawda’i family brings…

A presentation about the experience of co-creating a digital space about sex and desire in India.   Paromita Vohra is a media artist and writer who works with a range of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art, and writing, to explore themes of feminism, desire, urban life and popular culture. Her films as director include the documentaries Partners in Crime (to be screened on April 27, 7 pm, Pollock Theater), Unlimited Girls, Q2P, and Morality TV and the…

In this presentation, Ricardo Cedeño Montaña will describe some of the particular principles, mechanisms, and techniques by which color film functioned in its formative years and the coding schemes for (re)producing, storing, and transmitting color information in electronic and digital media. Using a media archaeological approach to technical media, Cedeño Montaña will show that color in technical media is anything but stable and such instability implies different contexts of sensory data processing and storage. Dr. Ricardo Cedeño Montaña is professor,…

On April 15, 2020, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) released 19 wrestlers (and furloughed approximately 25 employees) just days after being designated an essential business by the state of Florida. While this designation allowed the WWE to continue to produce live televised shows and PPVS during the COVID-19 shutdown, these firings were only the beginning as they continued to release wrestlers on regular intervals until the summer of 2022. Following the story of a Black male wrestler who was released but…

Lucas Hilderbrand is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of the books The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After; Paris is Burning: A Queer Film Classic; and Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ+ public life in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay…