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Ann Arbor Film Festival
March 24 -29
Michigan Theater
The 53rd Ann Arbor Film Festival will feature more than 200 films, videos, and live performances with over 30 world, North American, and U.S. premieres. Fillmmakers and special guests in attendance include Tacita Dean, Wojciech Bakowski, Jane Cassidy, Jesse McLean, Joanna Raczynska, and Julie Murphy. On Sunday, March 29th, at 2:45 p.m., the festival will also pay a special tribute to AAFF founder George Manupelli, including a rare screening of his film Portraits, Self-Portraits and Still Lives 1972-73 with Special Reference to the Assassination of John F. Kennedy; the film will be accompanied by an original score performed live by Los Angeles-based composer David Rosenbloom.
On March 24th at the opening night screening, Ziegler, a film directed by SAC 's Terri Sarris and Alumnus Frank Pahl will premiere. The four-minute film is based on Hermann Hesse's 1908 story entitled "A Man by the Name of Ziegler."
To view the AAFF53 Trailer by Dustin Krcatovich and (SAC Alumna '10) Micah Vanderhoof, click here.
To view the full Film Festival schedule, click here.
Space 2435 Satellite Exhibition During AAFF53
This week, in conjunction with AAFF53, the Space 2435 Satellite Exhibition expands the film watching experience off the movie theater screens with five multi-media, screen-based and interactive artworks on exhibit at Space 2435 in North Quad.
Interested in volunteering for the Ann Arbor Film Festival? The following areas need volunteers: marketing, guest relations, transportation, merchandise, photography, the audience survey -- and more! Please click here for more information!
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference
March 25 - March 29
Montreal, Canada
The following SAC faculty and Ph.D. students will participate in panels and workshops at the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference.
 On Saturday, March 29th, at 3:00 p.m., Professor Caryl Flinn will present her discussion on "The Invisible Baroness" to The Sound of Music at 50 roundtable with co-panelists Steve Cohan, Desiree Garcia, Sean Griffin, and Adreinne Maclean. The roundtable marks the 50th anniversary of The Sound of Music, arguably the most loved and most despised film musical ever made. Using the film's anniversary as an opportunity to reassess its enduring legacy, this discussion brings together renowned film musical scholars to revisit the disparate attitudes toward the film and to illuminate some of its lesser-known features and histories.
Associate Professor Dan Herbert will be presenting a paper at 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 26th entitled "The Media Industry is a Waste Management Industry." In this paper, Herbert looks at the history of Blockbuster video as well as contemporary archival practices at Warner Bros. in order to examine how different sectors of the media business contend with the excess and refuse they inevitably produce.
 Associate Professor Giorgio Bertellini will be presenting a paper on Saturday, March 28th entitled "On the Western Front: Raising Questions of Geopolitics and Periodizations through Latin American Film Modernity" in a panel devoted to Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America: Fifteen Years Later. In the paper, Bertellini will re-read conventional formulations of modernity in early U.S. cinema through the lens of Ana Lopez's discussion of modernity in Latin American Contexts.
 Associate Professor Johannes von Moltke will be presenting his paper entitled "Totalitarian Communication and the Critical Theory of Propaganda" on a panel on Cold War Media and the Administration of Culture on Friday, March 27th, at 9:00 a.m. In his work, von Moltke traces the emergence of a humanist film theory out of wartime communications research by focusing on the American work of Siegfried Kracauer. He argues that, starting out with the study of propaganda, Kracauer charted his own path between the social scientific study of media by early communications scholars and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, which subsumed propaganda under advertisement and saw in film and popular culture the proof of liberalism's quasi-totalitarian underpinnings. By contrast, von Moltke claims that Kracauer strove to rescue the liberal project and imbue it with a critical humanist theory of the media.
Associate Professor Yeidy Rivero will be presenting a paper on Saturday, March 28th, at 9:00 a.m. entitled "The Original Miami Sound Machine: The Emergence of Miami as a Production Center for the U.S. and Latin America" in which she examines the Spanish-language radio production boom that emerged in Miami in the early 1960s. The central argument is that the origins of Miami as a media capital began in this period.
 On Wednesday, March 25th, at noon, Associate Professor Sheila Murphy will be presenting her research in a talk entitled "You are the Message, Wearing the Medium: Software, Quantifiable Selves, and the New-Data Visuality of Everyday Life." In this talk, she will focus on how software programs, fitness trackers, and other forms of wearable technology utilize the logic of video games to make tasks such as exercise, good nutrition, and other metrics of "happiness" part of a game that users can win, effectively turning their bodies and lives into the medium for this form of gaming. On Friday, March 27th, at 2:15 p.m., Murphy will be participating as a respondent on a panel entitled "Para-Gaming: Gaming Beside Itself."
 Emeritus Professor Richard Abel will be presenting a talk on Wednesday, March 25th at 4:00 p.m. entitled "Researching Local and Regional Newsreels in the 1910s and the 1920s" for the Researching U.S. Film Workshop. He will also be presenting "The 'Much Vexed Problem' of Non-Theatrical Distribution in the late 1910s" on the Researching the History of Non -Theatrical Film Distribution Panel on Saturday, March 28th at 1:00 p.m.
 PhD student Katy Peplin will be presenting a talk entitled "A 'Co-operational and Non-competitive Face': Early Non-theatrical Trades and the Struggle for Identity" on Saturday, March 28th, at 1:00 p.m. In this talk, she will explore the rhetoric of educational film magazines in the teens and twenties, focusing on their efforts to become professional without having to abide by the same strictures as the burgeoning Hollywood studio system.
 PhD student Feroz Hassan will be presenting a paper on Thursday, March 26th, at 11:00 a.m. entitled "Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest and the French Dialectics of Hope and Despair" in which he will address the critical reception of Robert Bresson's film through the ambivalent postwar reputation of Georges Bernanos, the author of the novel upon which the film is based; in particular, he will examine the bi-polar thematics of hope and despair in Bernano's work and discuss how they are negotiated in and through Bresson's film against the background of similar concerns in postwar French culture.
 On March 19th at 1:00 p.m., PhD student Nathan Koob will be presenting a paper entitled "You Don't Have to Call Us Home, But Please Stay Here: The Local Film Commission's Management of Urban Development" in which he will discuss the diverse role of the local Film Commission and investigate what productions actually provide for these cities and local industry.
 PhD student Dimitri Pavlounis will be presenting a talk on Friday, March 27th, at 9:00 a.m. entitled "The Promise of Going Home: Queer Historiography, Queer Play, and the Archival Imagination." Using the exploration videogame Gone Home (2013) as a case study, he will examine ways in which digital games can encourage (or inhibit) our ability to investigate and engage archives in ways that question conventional archival frameworks and resist normative and normalizing historiographical methods.
 PhD student Kayti Lausch will be presenting a paper on Wednesday, March 25th, at 2:00 p.m. entitled "Living an Amish Paradise: Reality Television and the Contemporary American Fantasy of the Amish." In her presentation, she will explore the recent surge of Amish-centric reality programming through an examination of Breaking Amish, Amish Mafia, and Vanilla Ice Goes Amish and argue that these shows provide viewers a privileged place to work through anxieties about privacy, surveillance, governmental oversight, and the camera as an inevitable aspect of modern life.
For more information, visit the SCMS website.
LSA Major/Minor Expo
Wednesday, March 25
11:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Michigan Union Ballroom
UM students will get a chance to learn about the SAC programs at this event.
Free Screening and Q & A with Filmmaker Rola Nashef of Detroit Unleaded
April 6
Forum Hall, Palmer Commons
7:00 p.m.
 A fresh take on boy-meets-girl comedy set in Detroit, Sami runs his immigrant family's gas station with his cousin Mike, a charismatic hustler with dreams of expanding into an unleaded empire. More than just a pit stop for late-night gas and rolling papers, their station is where a steady stream of unforgettable and often hilarious customers flow through. When a gorgeous "up-do girl" named Najlah comes to deliver cheap, long-distance phone cards, Sami quickly falls for her from behind the bulletproof glass. Afraid her overprotective brother Fadi will disapprove, Najlah begins an under-the-counter romance with Sami, making his shift anything but routine.
This screening is sponsored by the Departments of American Culture, Communication Studies, and Screen Arts & Cultures.
To view the trailer, click here.
To learn more about filmmaker Rola Nashef, click here.
Have any upcoming SAC news or events?
Please contact SAC.newsletter@umich.edu by Monday of every week.
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NEWS
Mark Kligerman and Candace Moore Nominated for Golden Apple Award
The Golden Apple Award is the only student-nominated award that recognizes outstanding university teaching. Congratulations, Mark and Candace, on receiving this nomination! We are so proud to have you as a part of our SAC community!
"Mark Kligerman combines incredible dedication for the material, an encyclopedic knowledge, and the innate ability to inspire and teach students"
-Student Comment
"Candace Moore is the professor that I would dedicate my entire career to if I could. I don't have much of a career yet, but if one day I do, I know she will be the first person I thank. [...] She has a genuine passion for nurturing young minds in a way that makes you feel as though you are teaching her and not the other way around [...]. "
-Student Comment
March 23, 2015
Professor Markus Nornes Guest Curates "The Most Beautiful: The War Films of Shirley Yamaguchi & Setsuko Hara"
This nine-film series, running from March 21st to April 4th at the Japan Society in New York, offers a rare glimpse into the early days of Yamaguchi and Hara as featured players in the propaganda films that supported Japan's series of wars in Asia.
Shirley Yamaguchi and Kazuo Hasegawa in "China Nights" (1940), a propaganda film. Toho Co. Ltd.
Read more about the film series in the Art Forum and in The New York Times.
March 21, 2015
SAC Alumnus Sultan Sharrief's Street Cred' Detroit Voices Named Finalist in National T.V. Development Program.
The youth reality show Street Cred' Detroit Voices that was shot in the Fall Term of 2014 in SAC 404, Contemporary Media Production and Movement Building headed by Instructor and SAC alumnus Sultan Sharrief, has been accepted to a national TV development program called NBPC360 (National Black Programming Consortium). The show was one of eight finalists out of hundreds of applications from around the country to develop a program in conjunction with PBS; three of the eight programs then received funding for a television pilot after a pitch at the Tribeca Film Festival. Sharrief's crew also received a $20,000.00 grant from the A. Scott Foundation to develop the program further in Detroit.
Watch the Streed Cred' Sizzler here
March 17, 2015
SAC Alumna Erin Hanna Accepts Offer to Join the Media Studies Faculty of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon in the Fall of 2015.
Congratulations, Erin! We at SAC are so happy for you!
Erin holds a PhD in Screen Arts & Cultures from UM and an MA and BA in Cinema and Media Studies from New York University in Toronto. Her research engages with critical questions of economic and cultural power as audience practices are incorporated into the industrial logic of media production, promotion, and publicity.
March 19, 2015
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