CROSSING BORDERS: RETHINKING FILM STUDIES

February 8-10, 2008
Nestrick Room, 142 Dwinelle Hall
University of California at Berkeley

Laura Horak (horak at berkeley dot edu) and Anupama Kapse (an_prab at berkeley dot edu), Co-organizers

A dialogue between the early film cultures of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. A critical space to think about the ways early cinema re-envisions race, gender, nation, empire, and cinema itself.

In conjunction with a series on Japanese-American silent film actor Sessue Hayakawa at the Pacific Film Archive.

Keynote by Jennifer Bean (University of Washington). Other participants include Lauren Rabinovitz (University of Iowa), Shelley Stamp (UCSC), Priya Jaikumar (USC) and Michael Baskett (University of Kansas).

Sponsored by Film Studies, the Townsend Center, the Graduate Film Working Group, , Department of Scandinavian, Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures, Department of Gender & Women's Studies, and the Beatrice Bain Research Group.

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Film Faculty Member Receives Fulbright Senior Specialists Award

Mark Berger, adjunct professor of film, has been selected for a Fulbright Senior Specialists project in Chile at the Vicente Perez Rosales University during September 2005, according to the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Prof. Berger (UC Berkeley '67) will give lectures, participate in conferences, assist in curricula development, and teach a course about 'Sound In Film' to improve faculty knowledge in audio for film and video, as well as provide information about current sound practices to professionals in the expanding Chilean Film industry.

A San Francisco native and long-time resident of Berkeley, Prof. Berger has a distinguished career in making soundtracks for motion pictures.   Winner of 4 Academy Awards for Best Sound ( Apocalypse Now, Amadeus, The Right Stuff, The English Patient ), he has worked on over 130 films in the last 30 years.   He is one of over 400 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad in 2005 through the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program. The Fulbright Senior Specialists Program, created in 2000 to complement the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, provides short-term academic opportunities (two to six weeks) to prominent U.S. faculty and professionals to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at post secondary, academic institutions around the world.

The Fulbright Program, America's flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 59 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have taught, studied or conducted research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the United States. Over 285,000 emerging leaders in their professional fields have received Fulbright awards, including individuals who later became heads of government, Nobel Prize winners, and leaders in education, business, journalism, the arts and other fields. 

Linda Williams Interview
On/Scenity: She Knows It When She Sees It

Linda Williams, a professor of rhetoric and film studies and, for the last five years, director of Berkeley’s Program in Film Studies, is drawn to film genres that some might characterize as lowbrow — among them melodrama and pornography. " She has been regarded as something of an authority on the latter subject since 1989, when she published Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” the first book to detail and analyze the history and forms of moving-image pornography. The Interview is in two parts. Part 1 and Part 2

Film Students in the News

Senior Film major Eric Martin receives Berkeley's prestiguious Eisner award in Film and Video. Eric's film "Unknown" will be screened at the Pacific Film Archive along with other short films by Berkeley students on May 7. In addition, Film Studies graduate student Andrew Moisey was awarded the Eisner prize in Photography. The Eisner Awards got their start in 1963 with a $250,000 grant from Samuel Marks to promote the arts at Berkeley. Marks named the prize for his stepdaughter, Roselyn Schneider Eisner, an artist and sculptor who graduated in 1933. The Chancellor's Advisory Committee on the Arts decided to use the money to fund annual prizes in each of the creative arts. Eisner Awards range in size from $2,000 to $6,000; $62,000 was awarded total this year

Film Studies graduate student Tung-Hui Hu will featured in the Holloway Poetry Series on March 13 at 7:00 in the Maude Fife Room, Wheeler Hall. Hu's collection,The Book of Motion, was published in the University of Georgia Press's Contemporary Poetry Series and won an Avery Hopwood Award. His next volume, Dirt, will be published in 2007.

The Dissertation Award Committee of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies has chosen Sylvia Chong's (PhD 2004) dissertation, "The Oriental Obscene: Violence and the Asian Male Body in American Moving Images in the Vietnam Era, 1968-1985," as this year's winner. Honorable mention (the only other award given) goes to Guo Juin Hong (PhD 2004) for his dissertation, "Cinematograph of History: Post/Colonial Modernity in 1930s Shanghai and New Taiwanese Cinema since 1982."

Luis Recoder, experimental filmmaker, installation artist and 1995 Film Studies alumnus has been awarded the James D. Phelan Art Award in Film from the San Francisco Foundation.

New Books from Film Faculty

November, 2005:

Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, University of Minnesota Press

August, 2004:

Marilyn Fabe, Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique, University of California Press

July, 2004:

Linda Williams, Porn Studies, Duke University Press (includes essays from Film Studies graduate students)

June, 2004:

Seymour Chatman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Taschen