Events
Past Events
April 2022
A Roundtable Discussion with Filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako
Please join us for a 90-minute roundtable discussion with the renowned filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, who was born in Mauritania, raised in Mali, and currently resides in France. He is the director and writer of a number of award winning films including Life on Earth (1999), Waiting for Happiness (2002), Bamako (2006), and Timbuktu (2014). He recently staged his first opera, Le Vol du Boli that is currently being staged in Paris at the Théâtre de la Ville, and is in…
Find out more »May 2022
Policing Blackness and Black Bodies: On Bert Williams’s A Natural Born Gambler (1916) – Althea Wasow, Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz
This talk explores the production of racial difference and the policing of black men in the US through A Natural Born Gambler (1916), a predominantly black-cast silent film featuring Caribbean American star Bert Williams. By paying particular attention to film form and archival evidence, I reclaim the importance of Williams’s first Biograph comedy. I argue that through its attention to modes of policing and strategies of avoiding detection, A Natural Born Gambler interrogates the discursive production of black masculinity, illuminates…
Find out more »June 2022
2022 UCSB FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES GRADUATION RECOGNITION CEREMONY
Edited by Keith Boynton, and Chris Jenkins, graphics Dana Welch Special Thanks to Acting Dean Mary Hancock, Tom Lazarus and Michael Siegel download a pdf of the program Graduation Recognition Ceremony June 12, 2022 Wishing You Success in the Future Welcoming Remarks & Departmental Address Peter Bloom Department Chair Student Address Magan Tran Presentation of Awards: The Alexander Sesonske Prize: Presented by Charles Wolfe Recognizes writing and research capacity for student essays about film, television, and…
Find out more »2023 UCSB FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES GRADUATION RECOGNITION CEREMONY
download a pdf of the program Graduation Recognition Ceremony June 18, 2023 Wishing You Success in the Future Welcoming Remarks & Departmental Address Peter Bloom Department Chair Student Address Alejandro Flores Presentation of Awards: The Alexander Sesonske Prize: Presented by Charles Wolfe Recognizes writing and research capacity for student essays about film, television, and digital history, theory and criticism. The award is named after one of the founders of our department. First Place: Amy Hansa, “The…
Find out more »September 2022
Film and Media Studies Orientation
During Orientation, you will hear from different staff and faculty in the Film and Media Studies department. They will go over what to expect in the major and opportunities that will arise during your time here. FAMST club leaders will also be in attendance at Orientation, so this is a great opportunity to hear what students with similar interests are doing and how you can get involved. Attending orientation will allow you to meet the professors you will have classes with…
Find out more »106 Pitches
This challenging course offers students the opportunity to work together to produce a short film over 2 consecutive quarters. Four films are created, selected by a tribunal of industry professionals after scripts are delivered and projects have been pitched. Students who are keen to participate are then “hired” to fulfill a Core Role in one of the projects before crews “hit the ground running”. Unlike most classes, 106 provides 2 instructors who help crews through Pre-production, Production and Post before…
Find out more »October 2022
Navigating the Archives in Film and Media Studies Research – Regina Longo, Brown University
Led by Brown University Media Archivist Regina Longo, this workshop will introduce graduate students to a range of archival resources and approaches utilized throughout film and media studies research. Following this overview, participants will be encouraged to share their own research interests and any archive-related queries. Longo will provide research advice, answer questions, and assist participants in locating archival support pertinent to their dissertation work. Regina M. Longo is an archivist, historian, and producer. She manages the MCM Media Archives…
Find out more »Satyajit Ray and the Sense of Wonder
This three-day conference and attendant film series have been organized to celebrate the birth centenary of the renowned Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1921-1992). Most critical evaluations of Ray, which tend to focus on his films while overlooking his considerable literary and design outputs, have consecrated him as a modernist master or a postcolonial auteur. Such discussions are often couched in terms of modernity and tradition, Orientalism and nativism, objectivity and irrationality, skepticism and enchantment, art cinema and popular cinema. Instead,…
Find out more »The Code of Presence: Protest Embroideries and Digital Media from Belarus – Dr. Sasha Razor, UCLA
In the wake of the women-led uprising of 2020, women artists from Belarus have responded to the ongoing challenges of the past year and a half with a substantial corpus of protest embroidery and ornamental digital artworks, drawing their inspiration from recent trends in Western contemporary art but also grounding their practices in the region’s rich folk heritage. The talk by Sasha Razor will explore these artworks' connection to digital activism, feminism, collective labor, memory, and trauma. An emphasis will…
Find out more »November 2022
Media of Extraction and Abstraction – Hanna Rose Shell
“Media of Extraction and Abstraction” begins with a discussion of the medium of clothing, more specifically of textile waste; its industrial reprocessing shaped forms of meaning and media making in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. The talk then turns to the nexus of industrial mining and solar astrophysics, excavating the space – literal and figurative, aesthetic and technological – of the so-called Climax High Altitude Observatory. Built on the Continental Divide at 11,500 feet above sea level, on…
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