Events
Past Events
October 2018
Frankenstein Afterlives: Bride of Frankenstein
James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is the sequel to his 1931 original Frankenstein. After recovering from injuries sustained in the mob attack upon himself and his creation, Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) falls under the control of his former mentor, Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), who insists that the now-chastened doctor should resume his experiments in creating new life. Meanwhile, the Monster (Boris Karloff) remains on the run from those who wish to destroy him and longs for a mate of…
Find out more »Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm
In the twentieth century, U.S. filmmakers generated tens of thousands of hours of newsfilm that was screened in movie theaters or viewed on television sets across the country. This vast output of news coverage, covering the period from the 1910s to the 1970s, has not been matched by a scholarly effort to understand it. To address this persistent oversight, this symposium will, for the first time in the United States, bring together many of the nation’s leading newsfilm scholars and…
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 »Sound of Music
The Carsey-Wolf Center is proud to present beloved musical The Sound of Music (1965) in stunning digital projection. The film was adapted from a 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical, and based on a memoir by Maria von Trapp. The story of aspiring nun Maria (Julie Andrews) and her appointment as governess to the seven von Trapp children, her romance with the widowed Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer), and their flight from Austria in the wake of the rise of…
Find out more »RBG
At the age of 85, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has developed a lengthy legal legacy while becoming an unexpected pop culture icon. But the unique personal journey of her rise to the nation’s highest court has been largely unknown, even to some of her biggest fans – until now. RBG (2018) explores Ginsburg’s life and career through interviews, public appearances and archival material. Betsy West and Julie Cohen (co-directors) will join moderator Jeannine DeLombard (English, UCSB) for…
Find out more »Frankenstein Afterlives: Spirit of the Beehive
A masterpiece of Spanish cinema, Víctor Erice’s 1973 directorial debut The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena) offers an allegory of life after General Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. The film tells the story of Ana, a young girl in a remote village whose experience at a traveling film presentation of Frankenstein sends her into the Castilian countryside in search of her own monster. Released near the end of the Franco era, the film offers…
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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Through and Beyond the Politics of Carbon
This panel presentation is part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective.
Find out more »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…
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