Author's Forum Presents - Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television, 1950-1960: A Conversation with Yeidy Rivero and Ruth Behar
Tuesday, September 29
Hatcher Graduate Library, Gallery 100
5:30 p.m. -- Free Admission
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Join SAC Professor Yeidy Rivero as she presents her book in conversation with Ruth Behar, Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies, as a part of the Author's Forum. In Broadcasting Modernity, television historian Yeidy M. Rivero shows how television owners, regulatory entities, critics, and the state produced Cuban modernity for television. The Cuban television industry enabled different institutions to convey the nation's progress, democracy, economic abundance, high culture, education, morality, and decency. After nationalizing Cuban television, the state used it to advance Fidel Castro's project of creating a modern socialist country. As Cuba changed, television changed with it. Rivero not only demonstrates television's importance to Cuban cultural identity formation, but also, she explains how the medium functions in society during times of radical political and social transformation.
The Author's Forum is a collaboration among the U-M Institute for the Humanities, the University Library, and the Ann Arbor Book Festival.
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2015 UM Contemporary Chinese Film Series
Tuesdays in September and October
State Theater
7:00 p.m. -- Free Admission
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Still from Police Story 新警察故事, 2014
Directed by Ding Sheng
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Sponsored by the Confucius Institute and Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at UM, Electric Shadows: 2015 Contemporary Chinese Film Series will feature six exciting Chinese films released in 2014 and 2015. SAC Professor Markus Nornes helped curate the festival, which continues today, September 29th, at the State Theater with the screening of Police Story, a film that tells the tale of a man looking for the release of a long-time prisoner who takes a police officer, his daughter, and a group of strangers hostage. Jackie Chan plays a police officer Zhong Wen in this Chinese-Hong Kong crime thriller. This newest version of Police Story has a darker tone, whereas the previous Police Story films were more comedic.
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Screening of We Are Young Followed by Q & A with Alex Richanbach
Friday, October 2
MLB 1
7:00 p.m. - Free and Open to the Public
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We Are Young, (image from Funnyordie.com)
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On Friday, October 2, Alex Richanbach and Ben Sheehan, writers/producers from Funny or Die in Los Angeles, will be on campus. They will be conducting an exclusive workshop with Terri Sarris's sketch comedy class on Friday afternoon. Later that evening, however, at 7:00 p.m. in MLB 1, there will be a free and open to the public screening of Richanbach's feature film We Are Young (a romantic comedy about twenty-somethings, described on IMDb as "a film about guys who act like girls and girls who act like guys") followed by a Q & A with writer/director/actor Richanbach.
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Panel Discussion about Writing and Directing Comedy
Saturday, October 3
NQ 2435
1:00-3:00 p.m.
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On Saturday, October 3rd from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. in North Quad Space 2435, Funny or Die's Alex Richanbach (actor, director, writer) and Ben Sheehan (supervising producer, talent & artist relations) are available to answer questions about writing and directing comedy.
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AN RSVP is required to attend this event. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP here.
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Screening of Altman Followed by Q & A with Director Ron Mann
Saturday, October 3
Michigan Theater
7:00 p.m.
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Robert Altman directs on the set of his film The Company in 2003.
photo credit, Matt Dinerstien
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Join us for a beautiful tribute to an artist who created some of our favorite films, and a film that will make you appreciate Altman's great work even more. Ron Mann's biographical documentary Altman traces the idiosyncratic career path of iconic director Robert Altman, charting a filmography that spanned over fifty years and earned him five Oscar nominations. Assembled with the help of Altman's widow Kathryn -- and a wealth of home movies, archival interviews, and behind-the-scenes footage -- Mann's film allows Altman to tell his story largely in his own words, giving a rare insight into the mind of a movie-making maverick whose uncompromising vision helped shape the American filmmaking landscape for decades to come. The film includes cameos from many of the faces that Altman collaborated with over the years including Elliott Gould, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Lily Tomlin as they answer one question: What is Altmanesque?
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Ron Mann.
This event is sponsored by the University Library, the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures, and the Michigan Theater.
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Screening of The Hunting Ground
Tuesday, October 6
North Quad Space 2435
8:00 p.m. -- Free Admission
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"The Hunting Ground, a documentary shocker about rape on American college campuses, is a must-watch work of cine-activism."
Manohla Dargis
New York Times
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React to Film: University of Michigan presents a free screening of The Hunting Ground (2015), a chilling documentary from the makers of The Invisible War that presents a nationwide examination of sexual assault on American college campuses. The Sundance Institute comments on the film: "Scrutinizing the gamut of elite Iives, state universities, and small colleges, filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering reveal an endemic system of institutional cover-ups, rationalizations, victim-blaming, and denial that creates perfect storm conditions for predators to prey with impunity. Meanwhile, the film captures mavericks Andrea Pino and Annie Clark, survivors who are taking matters into their own hands—ingeniously employing Title IX legal strategy to fight back and sharing their knowledge among a growing, unstoppable network of young women who will no longer be silent."
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Screening of Korla Followed by a Q & A with Director John Turner
Thursday, October 8
Forum Hall, Palmer Commons
5:30 p.m. -- Free Admission
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"Korla Pandit was a musician of dazzling inventiveness [...]. Long before synthesizers stalked the land, Korla figured out how to coax all manner of previously unheard percussion, brass, and string sounds out of the Hammond B-3 organ."
Dan Epstein, La Weekly
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Join us for a screening of Korla, a new documentary about Korla Pandit, a spiritual seeker, a television pioneer, and the godfather of exotica music. Known for his hypnotic gaze, Korla captured the hearts of countless Los Angeles housewives in the '50s with his live television program that featured a blend of popular tunes and East Indian compositions, theatrically performed on a Hammond B3 organ. In the '90s, he resurfaced as a cult figure with the tiki/lounge music aficionados, filling clubs, skating rinks and bars with retro hipsters. Often pegged as a "man of mystery," Korla lived up to that billing when he took an amazing secret with him to his grave in 1998 -- one that is revealed in Korla. Read more about the film (with spoilers) here.
This event is generously sponsored by Asian/Pacific Islander Studies; the Department of American Culture; the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies; the Center for South Asian Studies; and Screen Arts & Cultures.
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Caryl Flinn and Mark Clague to Give Pre-Concert Talk Entitled "Music in Character and as Character: Bernstein's Musical Score to On the Waterfront"
Sunday, October 11
Hill Auditorium -- Talk will be given on the Mezzanine Lobby; Tickets to the performance are required to attend
2:00 p.m. (talk); 3:00 p.m. (screening and performance)
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Join Mark Clague (Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of Research), Caryl Flinn (Chair and Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures), and Conductor David Newman as they explore the role of music as a storytelling device in Leonard Bernstein’s one and only score for a motion picture, On the Waterfront.
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Karl Madden (left) and Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, screened as the New York Philharmonic played the film's score at Avery Fischer Hall.
Photo credit - Hiroyuki Ito, New York Times
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After the talk, the University Musical Society will be screening the film, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic's live performance of the score. The magnificent soundtrack for On the Waterfront churns with dramatic intensity, underscoring the brutality of the docks, the tough combativeness of the longshoremen, and the dark, looming presence of the mob bosses who dominate their territory. Directed by Elia Kazan, the story is based on true events about crime and corruption on the waterfronts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, with Bernstein’s music accentuating the somber, yet triumphant, conclusion. Academy Award-nominated film composer and conductor David Newman leads the New York Philharmonic in this final concert of their 2015 residency.
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2015 Vivian Shaw Lecture: Piper Kerman (Author of Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison)
Tuesday, October 13
Rackham Auditorium
5:10 p.m. (doors open at 4:30 p.m.)
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"Female incarceration has risen by 800 percent in this country," says Kerman. "I believe we have reached a point [...] where most people are questioning whether we have made the best choices."
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Based on the 13 months she spent in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut on money laundering charges, Kerman’s memoir, Orange is the New Black, explores the experience of incarceration and the intersection of her life with the lives of the women she met while in prison: their friendships and families, mental illnesses and substance abuse issues, cliques and codes of behavior. The book also raises provocative questions about the state of criminal justice in America, and how incarceration affects the individual and communities throughout the nation.
Since her release, Kerman has worked to promote the cause of prison and criminal justice reform. She serves on the board of the Women's Prison Association, which provides preventative services for at-risk women, works to create alternatives to incarceration, advocates against practices like shackling during childbirth and offers programs to aid reentry into society.
This event is co-sponsored Department of Women's Studies, U-M Law School, Department of Sociology, Screen Arts & Cultures, the School of Social Work, and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
The Vivian R. Shaw Lecture is presented biennially by the Women's Studies Department and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Established in 1997 by Ellen S. Agress (U-M, 1968), to honor the memory of her mother, this lecture addresses "real world issues" affecting women.
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THIS WEEK'S FEATURED PHOTO
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Shelia Murphy's SAC 354: The History of New Media screened The Imitation Game last week, a 2014 historical thriller based on the life of legendary cryptanalyst Alan Turing, as a part of their study of "Computational Histories and Views."
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