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May 2019
Filming Revolution: Archive, Taxonomy, Design
Filming Revolution is a database meta-documentary that investigates documentary and independent filmmaking in Egypt since the Egyptian Revolution began in 2011. It brings together the collective wisdom and creative strategies of thirty filmmakers, artists, activists, and archivists who share their thoughts and experiences of filmmaking in those heady times. Rather than merely building an archive of video interviews, Alisa Lebow constructs a collaborative project, joining her interviewees in conversation to investigate questions about the evolving forms of political filmmaking. Alisa…
Find out more »New Waves: Red Sorghum
Directed by celebrated Chinese auteur Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, Hero) and based on Nobel Prize-winning author Mo Yan’s novel, Red Sorghum is a landmark in contemporary Chinese cinema and culture. The film blends the stories of three generations of a family with their region’s journey through feudalism, war, and revolution. After several years as a cinematographer, Zhang Yimou chose Mo Yan’s novel for his directorial debut. In the film, he crafts an evocative rural landscape, and lead actors…
Find out more »New Waves: Memories of Underdevelopment
Based on Edmundo Desnoes’ novel and presented here in a new 4k restoration, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) is a fictional meditation on disillusionment in post-revolutionary Cuba. Left behind by his wife and family, the protagonist Sergio elects to remain in Havana following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, an historical moment that the film chooses to reflect on through Sergio’s unmoored, flâneur-like lifestyle and anomie. The Cuban capital engulfs Sergio and simmers beneath the social and political…
Find out more »Black Like Moi: Performing Race with Rouch & Cassavettes
This paper analyzes interactions between blacks and whites depicted between 1957 and 1961 in Jean Rouch’s I, a Black Man, The Human Pyramide, and Chronicle of a Summer. It concludes with remarks on Shadows, a 1958-59 feature film by John Cassavetes often credited as a breakthrough in U.S. independent filmmaking. In so doing, I mean to explore what Rouch and Cassavetes were trying to accomplish through production practices that bordered on the experimental. Major topics to be raised include: (1)…
Find out more »New Waves: This is Not a Film
In 2010, after Jafar Panahi was arrested and charged with making propaganda against the Iranian government, he was banned from making films or operating a camera for twenty years. In 2011 he made This is Not a Film, which was shot entirely in Panahi’s home, using the help of his friends, a camcorder, an iPhone, and the legal loopholes in his ban. The film debuted at Cannes after being smuggled there in a cake. With a playful charm, This is…
Find out more »June 2019
Wish List, Wonder Weapon or Web Series 4.0? – “Wishlist” as a New Type of German Web Series or Public Television’s (Vain) Attempt to Attract Younger Audiences
Among the broad range of new players in the market for audiovisual content on the Internet, the German content-network funk has a special position. As it is run by Germany’s public broadcasters ARD and ZDF and, thus, financed by mandatory television license fees, the platform is, on the one hand, bound to rigid production guidelines. On the other hand, funk’s success is highly dependent on its ability to appeal to its target audience of young viewers and, therefore, its capacity…
Find out more »Graduation 2019
UCSB Film and Media Studies Graduation Recognition Ceremony Sunday, June 16, 2019 Starting at noon in the Pollock Courtyard Reserve a space now! RSVP joepalladino@ucsb.edu by June 1st.
Find out more »October 2019
Special Effects: Mad Max: Fury Road
With Kristen Whissel (Film and Media, UC Berkeley) The Carsey-Wolf Center is delighted to kick off its Special Effects series with George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Winner of major awards for art direction, visual effects, costumes, stunts, and makeup, Fury Road pulses with stunning design elements and unforgettable action set pieces. Set in a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland where fuel and water are scarce commodities, the film follows Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), who is captured and enslaved by the tyrannical Immortan Joe…
Find out more »Parallax Effects: Postwar Modernity and the Uncanny Optics of 3D Cinema
This paper argues that the uncanny optics of stereoscopic 3D cinema made it an ideal format for the Hollywood’s investigation of the culture and experience of technological modernity in the postwar era. Focusing on the 3D versions of House of Wax (André de Toth, 1953) and Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), I analyze how the 3D format allowed filmmakers to exploit a range of “stereo-effects” in pursuit of an “aesthetic of dispossession” grounded in 3D’s ability to violate…
Find out more »Special Effects: The Wizard of Oz
With Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (English and Film Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) When a tornado rips through Kansas, Dorothy (Judy Garland), her house, and her dog Toto are whisked to the magical land of Oz. At the advice of a chorus of locals, they follow the Yellow Brick Road toward the Emerald City in search of the infamous Wizard. En route they are joined by a Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) that needs a brain, a Tin Man (Jack Haley) missing a heart, and…
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