Events
Past Events
February 2019
The Lady Eve
Preston Sturges’ daring and sexy romantic comedy The Lady Eve (1941) opens as a naturalist (Henry Fonda) emerges from the jungle after a year up the Amazon studying snakes. On board a ship, he is targeted by a female cardsharp (Barbara Stanwyck). When the two begin to fall in love, complications arise for both the con woman and the mark. Widely lauded as one of the best screwball films of all time, this film was a favorite of both Stanwyck…
Find out more »The Milan Protocol (Das Milan-Protokoll)
In Peter Ott’s 2017 film The Milan Protocol (Das Milan-Protokoll), Martina (Catrin Striebeck), a German doctor working and living in Iraqi Kurdistan, is kidnapped while traveling through ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. When news of her capture breaks, a range of global players try to take advantage of the hostage situation, including intelligence agencies in Germany, Turkey, and Iraq. Unsure of whom to trust, Martina starts to lose her ability to distinguish friend from foe. Director Peter Ott will join moderator…
Find out more »Upstream
Upstream (1927) strays far from director John Ford’s classic Western landscapes. Centered on an eclectic mix of stage actors, knife-throwers, and vaudevillians, Upstream is a backstage comedy set in a busy New York boardinghouse. Tensions arise after a member of the household, a pretentious thespian named Eric Brashingham (Earle Fox), is summoned to London to perform Hamlet. Upon his return, he meets with rejection from his former friends. Less than twenty percent of Ford’s silents survive, and for decades Upstream…
Find out more »2019 Annual Conference: Uncanny Histories
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2019 conference will explore the uncanny twists and turns that are often occluded in larger narratives of Film and Media Studies. Specifically, we hope to examine the unexpected trajectories of foundational movements, thinkers, and practitioners, often taken for granted within our field. Talks will focus on individuals, texts, movements, theories, or policies to probe the seemingly familiar in an effort to discover uncanny narratives of unglamorous work, improvisational politics, and surprising legacies that yield unfamiliar insights. The…
Find out more »Across the Universe
With the hallucinatory visual style of Revolver, the poppy sentiment of A Hard Day’s Night, and a songbook that spans the Beatles’ discography, Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007) reimagines the Beatles music as the soundscape for art, revolution, and love in the 1960s. British dockworker Jude (Jim Sturgess) travels from Liverpool to the US in search of his father, but ends up falling in love with a young upper-class American, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). The film pays tribute to…
Find out more »March 2019
Beatles Revolutions: Yellow Submarine
Set in the psychedelic paradise of Pepperland, Yellow Submarine (1968) pits Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band against the Blue Meanies, enemies of fun and music. Director George Dunning and art director Heinz Eidelmann employ a constantly-shifting array of ’60s pop art settings in this revolutionary animated feature, which has inspired directors ranging from Terry Gilliam to John Lasseter. On its 50th anniversary, the film retains its ability to dazzle from its opening scene to the sing-a-long final credits. Artist…
Find out more »Palestine in Black and White: Race, Media, and Transnational Solidarity
In 2014, many in the United States were indulging in viral media campaigns like the Ice Bucket Challenge and the Hands Up, Don’t Shoot movement. Both eventually went global, even reaching the Middle East, and while some Israelis took part in the Ice Bucket Challenge, a number of Palestinians held up signs of solidarity with the Black protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. Both groups were constructing global racial imaginaries, and if the Israelis were making a claim to whiteness, the Palestinians…
Find out more »Floyd Norman: An Animated Life
Invoking the energetic and defiant spirit of its main subject, Floyd Norman: An Animated Life offers a captivating tour of the sixty-year career of its eponymous animator and writer. Dubbed by peers as “animation’s Forrest Gump,” Norman had a remarkable professional journey that included time at Disney (from Sleeping Beauty to Mulan), Hanna-Barbera (The Smurfs), and Pixar (Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.). Floyd Norman will join moderator Vilna Bashi Treitler (Black Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion.
Find out more »April 2019
Shakedown
Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown (2018) chronicles the “high-femme performances” in the Los Angeles-based underground black-lesbian strip club Shakedown. The New Yorker claims that “Shakedown is neither an experimental art film nor an anthropology of gay, black femme performance in L.A. Rather, Weinraub sought to capture a moment and turn it into cinema.”The film chronicles the explicit performances and personal relationships of the party’s dancers and organizers in the early 2000s, revealing that Shakedown was more than a strip club; as one…
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