CJS Noon Lecture Series Presents
The Power of Observation: How and Why I Make 'Observational' Documentaries
Kazuhiro Soda, Toyota Professor in Residence
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Room 1636, School of Social Work
12:10 - 1:30 p.m.
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Kazuhiro Soda has made seven feature-length documentaries in the same method and style. He calls them "observational films" not only because they are inspired by the tradition of observational cinema, but also because he believes in the power of observation. When he says "observation" in this context, he means two things. Firstly, he, as a filmmaker, closely looks at the reality in front of him and makes films according to his observations and discoveries -- not on the assumptions and preconceptions he had before he shot the film. Secondly, he encourages the viewers to observe the film actively with their own eyes and minds. In this lecture, Soda will explain how and why he takes this particular approach to documentary filmmaking.
Collaborating with UM professors and students, Soda is currently making a feature documentary about the Michigan Stadium, The Big House (working title); Soda's work began in SAC 401 this past fall, with co-instructors, Markus Nornes and Terri Sarris.
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The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Presents
The Image Reframed: Visions of Instability
21st Charles F. Fraker Graduate Conference
Friday, February 10 and Saturday, February 11, 2017
Henderson Room, Michigan League
8:00 a.m - 5:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public
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Images can sear, blur, fade, or proliferate. Images can be captured, scanned, altered, or reproduced. The image is a subject and an object; there is a categorical instability to the image that belies the hard dimensions of the frame. We will explore images, the way they inform us about the past and the present, and also the way they affect our notions of reality and personhood.
The conference will facilitate a lively and broadly interdisciplinary engagement among Michigan students and faculty, honored guests from around the country and the globe, and distinguished keynote speakers Michael Taussig and W. J. T. Mitchell.
For more information and a full schedule of events, please click here.
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This event is sponsored by the Departments of History of Art, Comparative Literature, Afroamerican and African Studies, Screen Arts & Cultures, Philosophy, American Culture, Anthropology, History, and Sociology; the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the Institute for the Humanities, the Museum Studies Program, and Rackham Graduate School.
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The Center for Japanese Studies and the Michigan Theater Present
Kuro: The The Dark Edge of Japanese Filmmaking (Film Series)
Monday, February 13, 2017 - Monday, March 20, 2017
Michigan Theater
All films begin at 7:00 p.m.
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The 10-week series brings the genre of Noir and its underworld of crime and suspense through the lens of some of Japan’s most prolific filmmakers who have delivered what we now consider classics to the silver screen. Select films will be introduced by professors from CJS and Screen Arts & Cultures, giving viewers insight into the captivating world of Japanese intrigue, yakuza, revenge and redemption.
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The next film in the series, screening on February 13, 2017, is Pigs and Battleships. Dishonor among thieves runs rampant as the port town of Yokosuka is placed into a power play from the area rag-tag gangsters (yakuza) and the corrupt
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businessmen (chimpira), all looking to profit from a ravaged, post-war Japan. With the city’s residents working to make due and make sense of incoming fleets of United States naval officers, celebrated director Shohei Imamura focuses on the plight of one young couple as they fall into the trappings of this building frenetic and near-absurd new world order to twisted, chaotic results.
Additional support will be provided by Nagomi Sushi Downtown who will host monthly menu samplings on-site and advertise additional offers in the weeks ahead to help support the series.
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SAC Speaker Series Presents
A Talk by Professor Kristen Whissel of UC Berkeley
“Parallax Effects: Stereoscopic 3D and the Postwar Uncanny in House of Wax (André de Toth, 1953) and Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)”
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Osterman Room, 1st Floor Thayer Building
4:30 p.m.
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Stereographic 3D cinema is best known for its transformation of the dimensionality of the moving image through the production of positive and negative parallax (“immersion” and “emergence” effects). Scholars tend to critique the use of negative parallax in 3D films of the 1950s, especially, as a gimmick that doomed the format to failure by disrupting narrative and and disturbing the spectator’s absorption into the fictional world of the film by foregrounding the screen as surface and threshold. This paper departs from prevailing scholarship on 3D films by situating positive and negative parallax effects along a continuum that aligns the first with the epistemological drive - the desire to see
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and know - and the second with an affective charge that is irreducible to the provocation of shock and surprise. The association of positive parallax and negative parallax with knowledge and affect, respectively, made stereoscopic 3D an ideal format for the cinema’s investigation into the uncanny culture and experience of technological modernity in the postwar era in 3D films such as Dial M for Murder (1953) and House of Wax (1953). If, as Anthony Vidler argues, “the vicarious taste for the uncanny has been a constant in modern culture, only intensified by shifts in media,” then it makes sense that 3D’s uncanny optics and aesthetics would reemerge in a postwar era defined not just by the shock of a second world war, but also by Hollywood’s intense competition with television and by the major industrial and technological changes that characterize this era. Indeed, the resurgence of 3D within the postwar era asks that we think of 3D not in terms of its serial failure, but instead in terms of its odd historical persistence—its rather uncanny tendency to be repressed or forgotten and return again in periods of historical and technological change.
Kristen Whissel is Professor and Chair of Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of two books, Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (Duke IP) and Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology and Silent Cinema (Duke UP) and co-editor (with Charlie Keil) of the anthology, Editing and Special/Visual Effects (Rutgers UP). She is currently writing a book titled,Parallax Effects: Epistemology, Affect and Stereoscopic 3D.
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Winter 2017 Communication & Media Speaker Series Presents
A Talk by Associate Professor Kristen Warner of The University of Alabama
"The Difficulty Around Diversifying Hollywood's Labor Force and its Circumventions"
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Space 2435, North Quad
4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
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Kristen Warner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at The University of Alabama. She is the author of The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (Routledge, 2015). Professor Warner's research interests are centered at the juxtaposition of televisual racial representation and its place within the media industries, particularly within the practice of casting.
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Warner's talk will address how discourses of Hollywood labor erase classed and racial identity through three key strategies creatives of color employ as a consequence of those practices.
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ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: SOPHIA KRUZ
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This week, Little Stones director and Driftseed co-founder Sophia Kruz (SAC '11) will be speaking at the TEDxUofM event on the University of Michigan campus at the Power Center. The sold out event will feature 8 Dreamers and Disrupters giving talks in the TED tradition on ideas worth sharing. Kruz will be speaking about her most recent documentary, Little Stones, and her experiences as a University of Michigan student which led her to see the power of using art and culture to empower women and girls globally.
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No tickets? No problem! Here's how to tune into the online live stream:
Thank you for tuning in, and please share the link with a Dreamer or Disruptor in your life!
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THIS WEEK'S FEATURED PHOTOS
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On Monday, January 30, in conjunction with the library's exhibition "It's Still Terrific: CITIZEN KANE at 75," author Harlan Lebo presented an historical overview of the film's production, history, and cultural significance. Lebo is the author of Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker's Journey (2016).
photo credit, Mary Lou Chlipala
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Members of Candace Moore's SAC 375 TV Theory class gathered in the SAC lounge last week to watch prime time television on NBC. The two-hour assignment was a hands-on experiment in analyzing media scholar Raymond Williams's "notion of flow" on modern-day television.
photo credit, Mary Lou Chlipala
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