Events
Past Events › Talks
April 2018
Script To Screen: GET OUT
In Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out (2017), a young African-American man visits his white girlfriend’s family estate and becomes ensnared in a series of terrifying events. Photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) travel upstate to visit her parents Missy (Catherine Keener) and Dean (Bradley Whitford). At first, Chris reads the family’s overly-accommodating behavior as a nervous attempt to respond to their daughter’s interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries lead Chris…
Find out more »September 2018
Shakespeare on Film: Hamlet
Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) is celebrated for dramatizing the turmoil of its central character through means of expression unique to cinema. Borrowing conventions both from German cinema of the 1920s and from contemporaneous classical Hollywood cinema, the film streamlines the play in order to foreground Hamlet’s subjectivity, written largely in the gloomy recesses of Elsinore. Adapted and directed by its star, Olivier’s film remains a touchstone both in the cinematic treatment of Hamlet and in the history of Shakespeare on film. Mark Rose (English, UCSB)…
Find out more »October 2018
Harlan County, USA
This film screening is part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective. In this documentary about labor tension in the coal-mining industry, director Barbara Kopple films a strike in rural Kentucky. After the coal miners at the Brookside Mine join a union, the owners refuse the labor contract. Once the miners start to strike, the owners of the mine respond by hiring scabs to fill the jobs of the regular employees. The strike, which lasts more…
Find out more »November 2018
Mediating Extraction
Join us for a panel and discussion about the ways that film, photography and new media inform how industrial extraction and its environmental and social consequences are witnessed, documented, and memorialized. The panel includes presentations by: Sharon Daniel (Film + Media, UC Santa Cruz) on her interactive documentary work-in-progress about social and environmental challenges in the isolated Inupiaq village of Kivalina, Alaska. Mona Damluji (Film and Media Studies) on the cultural infrastructure of corporate media sponsorship and oil extraction in Iraq.…
Find out more »Media Hot and Cold
All matter emits heat and is transformed by it. These are ubiquitous communications, heat-signals often relayed without intentionality and registered without cognition. An attunement to such affective emissions is critical in the current moment, which is marked both by climate change and by intensifying forms of atmospheric communication, manipulation, and control. This talk articulates a media theory of heat that encompasses the cultural and ideological work of thermal technologies, the thermoceptive reproduction of racialized, gendered, sexualized forms of power, and the ways that the infrared spectrum…
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December 2018
Anthropocene Chemistry: Residual Media after Deepwater Horizon
This talk develops a theory of the “fluid cut” based on the materiality of surfactants used to disperse oil during the Deepwater Horizon spill. Whereas photography theory tends to think of the “cut” as the click of a camera shutter that slices through moments in time, “fluid cuts” of surfactants like Corexit relate more to processes of diffusion in the medium of seawater. Through readings of photographic images by Daniel Beltrá and ads by the dish soap company Dawn, I…
Find out more »January 2019
Beyond the Spill: The History and Politics of Oil in California (Day 1/2)
The Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective presents a two-day symposium to commemorate the 1969 Santa Barbara oil disaster and its aftermaths: BEYOND THE SPILL: THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF OIL IN CALIFORNIA Thursday and Friday, January 24-25, 2019 THURSDAY, JANUARY 24 5:00pm - 8:00pm Digital Arts and Humanities Commons + Wireframe Studio (Music 1410) Opening Reception and Exhibition Featured speakers: Brenda Longfellow (Filmmaker, Cinema and Media Studies, York University) Mellon Sawyer Seminar Artist in Residence Emily Roehl (Mellon…
Find out more »Beatles Revolutions: Let It Be
Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary Let It Be (1970) was originally intended to showcase the band’s creative process and to represent a return to form during a time when creative and interpersonal disagreement weighed heavily on the group. Instead, the film stands as an elegy for the Beatles, immortalizing the tensions between them, as well as the virtuosity of their iconic final rooftop performance. Musician and producer Alan Parsons will join moderator David Novak (Music, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion.
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