Events
Past Events
March 2021
Backyard Theory Meeting in March, 2021
Professor Bhaskar Sarkar will facilitate a group discussion of Sandro Messadra and Brett Neilson's book, Border as Method: Or the Multiplication of Labor (Duke UP, 2013). If you are interested in participating in this discussion, please contact Tinghao Zhou at: tinghaozhou@ucsb.edu
Find out more »Transworlding (III): Hongyuan Jin (Economics), “The Influence of Foreign-born Directors on the US Film Industry”
This chapter is the quantitative analysis on whether foreign-born directors show higher film yields than native-born directors in terms of the domestic and international box office, and the number of awards (e.g. Oscars) and award nominations. The study is conducted on a data set that I collected from multiple sources, and the data set includes about 27 thousand US-produced films released between 1925 and 2018.
Find out more »April 2021
“Perhaps Eartha Kitt is the Instrument…:” How a Supernova Defied Stardom – Dr. Philana Payton (Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA)
In this talk, I consider the multiple ways Eartha Kitt commanded narrative ownership through her engagement with autobiography, as well as her performative practices. In 1956, she published her first autobiography (of four) at the age of twenty-nine entitled Thursday’s Child. In it, she revealed how performance was not simply reserved for the stage and screen, but that it was the very essence that was Eartha Kitt. Her recognition of Eartha Kitt as an entity separate from her true self…
Find out more »May 2021
Unmanning: A Roundtable – Katherine Chandler
Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare studies drone aircraft built and adopted by the United States military from 1936 to 1992, examining the prehistory of contemporary drone vision. It intervenes in media studies to show how the platform—long before the contemporary war on terror—used television, aerial photography and video to create a field of war. Detailing this prehistory, what emerges is a story of failure, the impossibility of seeing and the orchestrated performances that create an objective…
Find out more »Backyard Theory Meeting in May, 2021
Professor Greg Siegel will facilitate a group discussion of Jonathan P. Eburne's book, Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). If you are interested in participating in this discussion, please contact Tinghao Zhou at tinghaozhou@ucsb.edu
Find out more »Reel Loud 2021
Gates open at 6:30 and the film screening starts at 8! Now in its 30th year, REEL LOUD Film and Arts Festival is an annual student-organized event at UC Santa Barbara that celebrates student films, art, music, dance, performance, and more. In light of the pandemic, we are committed to reimagining the festival to preserve the spirit of collaboration, community and accessibility. This year, our theme is “reimagine connection,” as we invite you to reimagine the ways you connect with…
Find out more »June 2021
2021 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 13, 2021 Wishing You Success in the Future Welcoming Remarks Peter Bloom Department Chair Mary Hancock Acting Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, Director of Curricular Initiatives Departmental Address Peter Bloom Film & Media Studies Senior Projects and Memory Highlights Compiled by…
Find out more »November 2021
Notes toward an Environmental Film Aesthetics
This paper presents some preliminary thoughts on environmental moving images, that is, moving images that only make sense if we read them as environments, or as provoking thought about environmentality as condition. Moving through conceptions of environmentality such as milieu, Umwelt, ecology, mood, and resonance, I turn to various examples from recent and not-so recent films, from Antonioni to drone footage to German art cinema, to discuss the role of moving images for reflecting on historically specific environmental condition(ing)s in…
Find out more »Digital Image as Material Object: Archaeologies of Computer Graphics – Jacob Gaboury, Dept. of Film & Media, University of California at Berkeley
The computer is not a visual medium. And yet computation as we know it today has been fundamentally shaped by computer graphics. It was the desire to make computation legible and accessible to human users that drove researchers to develop systems for graphical human-machine communication, and while visual representation is in no way essential to the theory of computing or the practice of procedural calculation, computer graphics played a significant role in the development of the computer as a technical…
Find out more »Film History and the Poetics of Dark Patrimony – Jennifer Wild
In a study of films from the 1930s belonging to what French filmmaker Jean Vigo called “social cinema,” this talk examines the concept of “dark patrimony” and some of its cinematic objects. Unlike traditional patrimonial objects, such as works of literature or art, those associated with dark patrimony do not bestow glory upon the French nation. They are nevertheless collected in museums, archives, and they also appear across French film history and arise visibly in Vigo’s classic work of Poetic…
Find out more »