Copy
History Repeats Itself...
(Above) Audience members of the Paramount (1952) marvel as they view the first full-length, color 3-D movie ever screened, Bwana Devil. (Below) Associate Professor Matthew Solomon's SAC 236 class (2016) is similarly captured by a series of never released 3-D film clips from the 1930s. 
 
photo credit (bottom photo) - Anne-Charlotte Mecklenburg
THIS WEEK'S EVENTS
Television Didn't Die, But Broadband Distribution Revolutionized It: A Talk by Professor Amanda Lotz 
Thursday, January 21
North Quad 5450
4:00 - 5:30 p.m. 
Beginning in the late 1990s, the technology and even mainstream press opined extensively on the coming death of television. A decade later—and a time that found television still very much alive—that theme evolved to instead pronounce the
coming death of cable. Rather than demise, the emergence of broadband-distributed television has both reinvented the medium and revealed how extensively our expectations and understandings of television are based not on the medium of television but on logics developed for its broadcast distribution.
Lotz's talk presents key arguments of her current book project, Being Wired: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All with a focus on understanding what transpired when the long anticipated face off between "new media" and television finally took place in 2010.
Little Bang Theory Plays Frank Pahl's Original Live Score to the Film Laugh, Clown, Laugh
Thursday, January 21
Peristyle Theater, Toledo Museum of Art
7:00 p.m. -- Free Admission 
For Lon Chaney’s 1928 tragic-romance Laugh, Clown, Laugh, composer Frank Pahl has written a brand-new score that will receive its world premiere by Pahl and his band Little Bang Theory performing on toy instruments and Toledo Museum of Art’s historic Skinner organ. In the film, Chaney plays Tito, a travelling circus clown who falls in a big way for the beautiful young Simonetta.
SAC Speaker Series Presents 
A Talk by USC Professor Akira Lippit: "Like a Sleeping Cat (In Roland Barthes's Empire of Sleeping Cats)"

Friday, January 22 
Space 2435 North Quad 
4:00 - 5:30 p.m.

One hundred years after his birth, Roland Barthes remains an eccentric legacy in the fields he engaged: literature, semiotics, photography, and to some extent cinema. How might one understand Barthes’s legacy, his preferred spaces of photography, forms of erotic literature, imagined Japan, political stances, and his cinema? 
This presentation considers Barthes one hundred years after his birth, seeking to illuminate the distinct forms of affect that form not only the mood of his writing, but also its mode.  What sort of subject does Barthes project in his empires of signs?  Who or what forms the subject of his semiotics?

This talk is sponsored by the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures Sheldon Cohn Fund and the Departments of American Culture, English Language and Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Comparative Literature. 

MARK YOUR CALENDARS
Screening of Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
Tuesday, January 26, 2016 
Helmut Stern Auditorium - UMMA
5:30 p.m. -- Free Admission 

Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll tracks the twists and turns of Cambodian music as it morphs into rock and roll, blossoms, and is nearly destroyed along with the rest of the country. This documentary film provides a new perspective on a country usually associated with only war and genocide. The film is a celebration of the incredible music that came from Cambodia and explores how important it is to Cambodian society both past and present.

This event is organized by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and co-sponsored by the Sheldon Cohn Fund in the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures, the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, the Center for World Performance Studies, and WCBN-FM. 

TUNING IN TO WOLV TV : WINTER SHOWCASE IN REVIEW

On January 15th, music lovers gathered in the Shinola Lounge in Downtown Ann Arbor to hear the work of three very talented local musicians: Tear Soup, Rella, and Cooper Anstett. This Winter Showcase of performers prefaces the introductory episode of the new series The Ann Arbor Anthem. This show is a new program from WOLV-TV focused on following and interviewing local musicians as they take new steps in their artistic journeys. The Anthem films every Sunday from 7-9 in studio A of North Quad. To find out about how to get involved, come to our mass meeting in Studio A in North Quad at 7:00 pm this Wednesday, January 20th or go to www.wolvtv.org.

Writer credit: Marcella Milder and Julie Fassnacht

NEWS
Associate Professor Daniel Herbert Presents Lecture at King's College London
photo credit,
Owen Gallagher
Daniel Herbert just returned from London, where he presented a lecture at the "Cinematic Bricoleurs: Remixing, restyling and repurposing in contemporary filmmaking practice" conference held at King's College London. Looking most closely at Rovi Corp., Gracenote, and YouTube, Herbert's talk, entitled "Curious Connections: The Historical and Technical Links Between Media Metadata and IP Control," traced these historical, industrial, and technical links between media metadata services and IP control. In doing so, it assessed how these systems serve the interests of the Hollywood conglomerates and present challenges to those who envision alternative ways in which movies and television programs might be accessed and used. While attending the conference, Herbert also participated in a roundtable discussion about intellectual property issues with artists, IP lawyers, politicians, and media professionals.
SAC Director of Screenwriting Jim Burnstein Featured in Deadline
Jim Burnstein and Garrett Schiff (Love and Honor) have been selected to pen a feature film about football players in the American Samoa. The drama -- yet untitled -- is based on true events: it centers on an assistant football coach in the '80s who travels to American Samoa to recruit a high school player. 

Colin Hanks and Sean Stuart's production outfit Company Name is teaming with current and former NFL players Troy Palomalu, Ryan Kalil, and Jordan Gross to make the film. 
 
Read the entire article in Deadline: "
Colin Hanks & Sean Stuart Huddle With NFL Trio For Movie About Samoan Football."
SAC Faculty Spotlight:
Dan Shere 
Dan Shere is very excited to be starting his tenth year teaching screenwriting at the University of Michigan.  Since the release of Fox Animated's feature film Epic, which Dan co-wrote, Dan has been busy on other projects, including adapting an animated feature script for Lionsgate that will star Mexican comic actor, Eugenio Derbez.  When not teaching and writing, Dan enjoys coaching his son's flag football team and playing guitar.  
SAC Graduate Student Spotlight: Doctoral Candidate Benjamin Strassfeld
Ben Strassfeld is in the midst of writing his dissertation, "The Detroit Model: Regulating Race and Pornography, 1950-1979." The project charts the city’s changing methods of media censorship, alongside the activism spurring it, through the lens of a rapidly changing Detroit. Rather than treating antiporn politics as static and unchanging, the project explores the shifts that occurred over time as activists and city officials increasingly drew on the rhetoric and tactics used in contemporaneous fights over racial desegregation. At the 2016 Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference, Ben will present part of his first chapter, which looks at the Detroit Police Department's censorship of both comic and paperback books during the 1950s.