Events
Past Events
September 2020
Department of Film and Media Studies Undergraduate Orientation
University of California, Santa Barbara | Department of Film and Media Studies Undergraduate Orientation | Fall 2020 Tuesday, September 29, 1:00pm – 2:30pm, On Line Part I: 40 minutes: 1:00 pm zoom link here Cristina Venegas: Welcome and Quick Introduction of Faculty and Staff (Faculty to BRIEFLY mention what courses they will be teaching in 2020-2021) Peter Bloom: What is Film and Media Studies? Chuck Wolfe: Learning as Discovery Joe Palladino: A Sense of Structure to the…
Find out more »October 2020
TV News & Racial Justice in the U.S.: Critical Reflections on a 2020 Letter-writing Campaign
With Anna Everett, Brandy Monk-Payton, Lisa Parks, Jade Petermon In this timely one-hour webinar, Professors Anna Everett and Lisa Parks discuss a letter-writing campaign they initiated in the summer of 2020 to address the topic of black employees in TV news networks and the coverage of U.S. race relations in TV news. They will discuss the campaign’s origins and the responses it elicited, offering critical reflections about the process. Everett and Parks will be joined by two scholars who participated…
Find out more »December 2020
The Carceral Techno-Imaginary: Between Technological Seeing and Punishment in Black Mirror’s “White Bear” – Wendy Sung
Using the Sandra Bland arrest as a dialogical space, this talk analyzes season 2's episode of Black Mirror, the British anthology TV series, known as “White Bear” (2013). By reference to this televisual media context, I seek to illuminate the failures of the technological rescue narrative by putting this show into conversation with the techno-dystopian carceral imagination alongside the realities of US post-slavery Blackness, technology, and racialized surveillance. The visual capture of racial violence by emerging visual technologies has often been praised as a…
Find out more »February 2021
Hieroglyphics of the Film: Stuplimity and Static in the Films of Ja’Tovia Gary – Kelli Moore (MCC-Steinhardt, NYU)
This talk examines the film and video oeuvre of Ja’Tovia Gary. It focuses on the strategies she employs to address blackness as both sociopolitical narrative and a material quality of film. Gary’s interaction with the staging of her experimental films and film as matter are historical and technical. By reference to the Giverny Suite film series, I recount how the filmmaker encouraged her audience to move about the screening space by thematizing the notion of “stuplimity,” following the writing of…
Find out more »Transworlding (II): Jahan Z Ahmed (Global Studies), “Infrastructures of Islamism in Cold War Pakistan”
This chapter maps the U.S. cultural Cold War institutions, their context, objectives and investments in Islamist imaginaries and how they collectively helped build information infrastructures for Islamist social worlds. It particularly focuses on the institutions involved in influencing print cultures i.e., the Congress for Cultural Freedom - Pakistan Committee (CCF-Pak) and Franklin Book Programs (FBP) and the physical spaces in Pakistan such as universities, publishing houses and libraries where they constructed alliances and patronage networks.
Find out more »March 2021
GMTaC Lab Research Lecture: “Silicon Valley’s Caste System: Race, Class and All Women Coding Boot Camps” by Professor France Winddance Twine, UCSB
Why do Black women comprise roughly 1.2% of technical workers in Silicon Valley technology firms? In this talk, Twine examines the 'inequality regimes' that currently operate in Silicon Valley and how recruiting practices shape the recruitment, retention, and treatment of technically-skilled women of diverse ethnic and class backgrounds.
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
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 »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 »January 2022
“Sly As A Fox: Twentieth Century-Fox, Corporate Diplomacy, and Racial Strife on the African Continent” – Ross Melnick (UC Santa Barbara)
Ross Melnick (UC Santa Barbara) Thursday, January 27, 2:00-3:30 pm PT Zoom Link: https://brandeis.zoom.us/j/93467786764. 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. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way. In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to…
Find out more »February 2022
TELEVISION AS DEMOCRATIC EXPERIENCE
A lecture by Dr. Sandra Laugier , Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and senior member of Institut Universitaire de France. Hosted by Dr. James McNamara (PhD, Oxford, 2011). Dr. McNamara is a screenwriter and a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. McNamara’s creative practice, teaching, and research focus on adaptation studies, with a particular interest in screen adaptations of Shakespeare. Co-Sponsored by the Film & Media Studies Department, the Carsey-Wolf Center, and…
Find out more »April 2022
Magic lantern: seeing far, seeing self and other delights in Méliès’s Lanterne Magique, Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel and Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann – Gabriela Cruz, University of Michigan
The stupendous impact of magic lantern technology on the imaginative labors of the romantic generation has long been recognized in scholarship about seeing and gazing. Less understood, however, is the mobilization of the apparatus for re-imagining voice, singing and song during the 19th-century. This presentation takes its point of departure from an eccentric assemblage of scenes from silent film, narrative, song and opera, read in kaleidoscopic manner for traces of sound and for the sense of how the magic lantern…
Find out more »What We Are to Make of Creative Digital Youth – Josef Nguyen, The University of Texas at Dallas
This book talk explores how contemporary American culture constructs youth in the era of digital media as inextricable from creativity, which is the subject of The Digital Is Kid Stuff: Making Creative Laborers for a Precarious Economy (UMN Press, Dec 2021). Rather than taking creative digital youth as a natural fact, however, The Digital Is Kid Stuff shows how youth are instrumental to the creative economy not solely as the future labor force but also as cultural sites for negotiating…
Find out more »Page Views Live: A Conversation with Ross Melnick
Join Film Quarterly for "Page Views Live," its original webinar series showcasing the best in recent film and media studies publications. The series continues this spring with a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná (Boston University) and Ross Melnick (University of California Santa Barbara) about his new book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2022). A truly global account, Hollywood’s Embassies offers a new understanding of Hollywood’s role in U.S. cultural…
Find out more »November 2022
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 »September 2023
The Political Mandate of the Arts with Sasha Razor
Join the Wende Museum, the Thomas Mann House, and dublab radio for the eighth program in our monthly virtual program series on art and politics in times of crises. The freedom of art is one of the imperatives of every democracy. But does this freedom make art inconsequential? Does art have a role in addressing social issues, promoting social justice, or in defending democracy when it comes under pressure? In short: does art have a political mandate? The Student Council…
Find out more »December 2023
African Media Arts Series [#1]: Q&A with Baloji preceded by a showing of Zombies (Baloji, 2019, 15 mins) on Zoom
We have invited the filmmaker and musician Baloji to discuss Zombies (2019, 15 mins), which will be shown at the beginning of our 1 hour long event. The conveners will introduce the filmmaker, the film will then be made accessible through a link in the chat, and a discussion will be convened. The co-conveners will begin with a series of questions and open the floor to participants to ask further questions. This event will be recorded and some of the…
Find out more »February 2024
African Media Arts Series: Certain Winds from the South: Short Film and Q&A with Eric Gyamfi (Accra, Ghana)
Certain Winds from the South (dir. Eric Gyamfi, 2023, 40 mins) will be presented as part of the African Media Arts series convened by kwabena agyare (History), Francis Yeboah (Film and Media Studies), and Peter Bloom (Film and Media Studies). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, Eric Gyamfi, who will join us from Accra. The film focuses on the decision of Issah to embark on a journey to the South of Ghana in search of…
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