SPEAKER ABSTRACTS Fall 2005 - Spring 2006 Friday, April 21, 2006 4:30 pm, 142 Dwinelle Hall (Nestrick Room) "Chaplin and the Soviets" Yuri Tsivian (University of Chicago) Yuri Tsivian will look at what Soviet avant-garde artists of the 1920s made of Charlie Chaplin; at his image as a "Taylorist actor;" at his impact on Kuleshov's workshop; and, more closely, at one movie which Russians thought was Chaplin's, but which Chaplin never made. Yuri Tsivian will look at what Soviet avant-garde artists of the 1920s made of Charlie Chaplin; at his image as a "Taylorist actor;" at his impact on Kuleshov’s workshop; and, more closely, at one movie which Russians thought was Chaplin’s, but which Chaplin never made. Yuri Tsivian is Professor of Art History, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literatures, and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He works primarily in the areas of Russian and Soviet cinema, international silent fi lm, semiotics of cinema, and theory and history of fi lm style. His most recent books are Ivan the Terrible (British Film Institute, 2002) and Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Pordenone, 2004). Click here for the event flyer in pdf. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . February 23, 2006 5:00 pm, 142 Dwinelle Hall (Nestrick Room) "Hard Core Eroticism: In the Realm of the Senses" Linda Williams (UC Berkeley) Sex was once the great unmentionable (and unshowable) of moving picture art. In American movies before the sixties, kisses and embraces were the only visible sex acts. In the short space of a decade, however, the movies "grew up." Since the sixties, explicit sex acts have become increasingly visible. We now expect to learn something from the movies about the quality and kind of sex that characters experience. In this chapter from her book, Screening Sex, Linda Williams will explore Nagisa Oshima's remarkable conjoining of art film with graphic sex, In the Realm of the Senses (1976)--the only example of feature-length narrative cinema anywhere in the world to succeed as both art and pornography. Linda Williams is Professor of Film and Rhetoric at Berkeley. She teaches courses on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and "body genres" of all sorts) and is currently working on a study of sex in cinema and new media since the sixties. Her books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema, Figures of Desire, an edited volume on film spectatorship, Viewing Positions, a study of pornographic film, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible, and Reinventing Film Studies (co-edited with Christine Gledhil). Williams's latest book is Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. She has also recently edited a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies. Click here for the event flyer in pdf. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . November 17, 2005 6:00 pm, 142 Dwinelle Hall (Nestrick Room) "Hero: China's Response to Hollywood Globalization" Jenny Lau (San Francisco State University) Jenny Kwok Wah Lau is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She has published articles on pan-Chinese cinema in Wide Angle, Film Quarterly, and Cinema Journal in the United States and Breakthrough (a cultural magazine) and Ming Pao (a newspaper) in Hong Kong. Her articles have also been anthologized in Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua edited by Jing Wang, and The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity edited by David Dessler. Her book Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia was published by Temple University Press in 2003. Click here for the event flyer in pdf. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . October 6, 2005 5:00 pm, 142 Dwinelle Hall (Nestrick Room) "Photography's Expanded Field" George Baker (UC Los Angeles) In opposition to photography's former centrality to the definition of postmodernism in the visual arts, today everywhere one looks in the world of contemporary art, the photograph seems to be an object in crisis, or at least in severe transformation. Resisting the technological determinism of recent accounts of photography's digitalization, this lecture returns to the postmodernist model of the "expanded field" to explore how the photograph has been, in effect, reconstructed as an object-structurally speaking-in art practices of the last two decades. The argument traces the emergence of projects ranging from Jeff Wall, James Coleman, and Cindy Sherman to younger artists such as Nancy Davenport, Sharon Lockhart, Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, Gabriel Orozco, Gerard Byrne, and Sam Taylor-Wood. George Baker teaches modern and contemporary art history at UCLA and is an editor of October magazine. A critic for Artforum since 1996, his recent publications include an edited anthology of essays on the work of James Coleman (MIT Press, 2003) and the book Gerard Byrne: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers (Lukas & Sternberg Press, 2004). Co-sponsored by the Rhetoric Department, the History of Art Department, and the Townsend/Mellon Strategic Working Group "When Is Art Research?" Click here for the event flyer in pdf. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . September 15, 2005 6:00 pm, 142 Dwinelle Hall (Nestrick Room) "Crying in Color: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolor Died" Russell Merritt (UC Berkeley) Russell Merritt is an Adjunct Professor in the Film Studies Program at UC Berkeley. A well-known Griffith scholar, he has contributed more than 50 entries on D.W. Griffith's Biograph films for The Griffith Project, Vols. 1-8 (London: BFI, 1999-2003). He is the author of numerous articles, including "Rescued From a Perilous Nest: Griffith's Escape from Theatre Into Film" published in Theatre and Film: a Comparative Anthology (Yale University Press, 2003) and "Lost on Pleasure Islands: Storytelling and Disney's Silly Symphonies," which will appear in the next issue of Film Quarterly. His book (co-authored with J.B. Kaufman), Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies is forthcoming in November from Indiana University Press. Click here for the event flyer in pdf. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contact: FilmSeminar@berkeley.edu or Kristen Whissel, kwhissel@berkeley.edu Sponsors: Film Studies Program, Townsend Working Groups Site design: Irene Chien