Events
Past Events
October 2019
Mouth Harp in Minor Keys – Hamid Naficy
Professor Hamid Naficy will present Mouth Harp in Minor Key with an extended discussion to follow: In this film, Iranian filmmaker Maryam Sepehry follows the eminent film scholar Hamid Naficy in the United States and his family in Iran. It is a documentary portrait that elucidates the complexities of personal identity in a globalized world, where individual, national, and transnational forces interact. A timely documentary film about exiles in America and the families they left behind, MOUTH HARP IN MINOR…
Find out more »February 2023
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 »April 2024
Luca Caminati, “RR Does Dams” & Masha Salazkina, “Romancing Yesenia: The Global-Popular in the Soviet Union”
Luca Caminati, “RR Does Dams” N. S. Thapa’s Films Division of India (FDI) documentary Bhakra Nangal (1958) celebrates the building of the eponymous dam on the Sutlej River. Towards the end of this 20-minute film, a group of workers is allowed to introduce themselves in their native tongues, and in a gesture of unity for a common cause, the diversity in physical features, dress, and languages is channeled towards the common cause of Indian modernity. As the late Fifties saw…
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