Events
Past Events
November 2022
Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World – Ross Melnick, UCSB
Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by major U.S. film companies. In his new book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as “cultural embassies” and examines the operation of U.S.-owned and operated cinemas in nearly three dozen countries on four continents between 1923-2013. A truly global account, Hollywood’s Embassies…
Find out more »Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World by Ross Melnick
Join us for a dialogue between Ross Melnick (Film and Media Studies) and Charles Wolfe (Film and Media Studies) about Melnick’s new book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World. Refreshments will be served. Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted…
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January 2023
Technics Improvised in Global Media Art – Timothy Murray, Cornell University
Timothy Murray explores how global media art resists and rewires the political and economic structures that govern technology. In dialogue with his most recent book, Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art, he explores the intersections of philosophies of touch and technology in dialogue with historical and contemporary practices of tactical media. In view of the combined risks of digital sovereignty and the Anthropocene, he will discuss how a wide range of critical texts, from Verena Andermatt Conley to…
Find out more »February 2023
The Medium is the Message, Revisited: Media and Black Epistemologies – Armond R. Towns, Carleton University
This talk will examine the political-economic context that informed the theoretical position of mid-twentieth century Canadian media theory, particularly the work of Marshall McLuhan. It will open up new ways to think about this context in relation to not just media, but also race, humanity, and black radical politics. Armond R. Towns is an Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa Join Zoom Meeting https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82975281731 Meeting ID: 829 7528 1731 Join…
Find out more »Beijing Olympiad: First Time as Mass Spectacle, Second Time as Digital Ornament – Cassandra Xin Guan, The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology
The opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics was notable for its spectacular deployment of the mass human ornament. In 2022, a second Olympic opening ceremony took place amidst a global pandemic and rising geopolitical tension between China and the US. This time around the hot and noisy masses that thrilled American television viewers with their coordinated precision have vanished from the scene of representation. In documentations of the two events: one hot, one cold; one crowded, one empty; one…
Find out more »Theory Now
The organizing principle of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2023 annual conference is to explore the critical and ongoing work of theory in our field. Film Studies emerged as a discipline in the late 1960s and 1970s in the wake of an explosive interest in theory. This interest prompted robust discussion and debate about politics and textual analysis; spectatorship and psychoanalysis; feminist film theory; and fundamental questions regarding gender, race, and sexuality. More than fifty years later, how do we understand theory…
Find out more »March 2023
Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals – Beth Tsai, Visiting Assistant Professor, EALCS, UCSB
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…
Find out more »April 2023
A Tale of Three Brothers: Ezra, Me’ir, and Hayyawi Sawda’i and a History of Cinema in Iraq – Pelle Valentin Olsen, University of Oslo, Norway
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…
Find out more »AGENTS OF ISHQ and the Radical Possibilities of Love – Paromita Vohra, Freelance Media Artist and Writer based in Mumbai
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…
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