Last updated: April 15, 2008
Calendar (please scroll down for further information):
Please watch this page. We'll add information pertaining to our events for the 2007/2008 school year as it becomes available.Directions, Map and Parking (click here)
Index (click on the title to take you to more information):
HARVEY KLEHR LECTURE: “Espionage, Informing and the Movies: Hollywood's Communist Problem”, Feb. 6
HORACE NEWCOMB LECTURE: “Television in Transition: Chaos, Confusion, and Promises”, Feb. 7
SPANNING THE GLOBE: INTERNATIONAL CLASSICS SINCE THE 1950s, Jan. 23-Apr. 23
THE WRITERS STRIKE PANEL, Feb. 20
RICHARD MALTBY LECTURE: "Movie Audiences, Exhibition, and the New Cinema History," CANCELLED
JACQUELINE STEWART LECTURE: "In the World of Spencer Williams, Race Film Pilgrim, Mar. 20
RACE AND DIFFERENCE INITIATIVE FILM SERIES: SPORTS AND CHANGE, Feb. 21-
SCREENING A LYNCHING, March 16-
DAS ALTE GESETZ (1927), Apr. 6, 2:30PM
ANUSTUP BASU LECTURE: "Mani Rathnam's Political Trilogy, Apr. 10
DIANE WEYERMANN LECTURE: "The Documentary as a Catalyst for Social Change, Apr. 18
Monday, February 4, 2008
8:00 p.m.
MY SON JOHN
White Hall 205
Helen Hayes and Dean Jagger star as the parents of Robert Walker, a government employee who is sympathetic to Communism and critical of capitalism. Their dilemma over what, if anything, they can do, constitutes this landmark example of anti-Communist filmmaking in Hollywood. Featuring Van Heflin as a sympathetic government agent and directed by Leo McCarey, who excelled at romantic comedy (THE AWFUL TRUTH), romantic melodrama (AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER) and family melodrama (MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW). This was Robert Walker's last film. 122 min.Tuesday, February 5, 2008
8:00 p.m.
ON THE WATERFRONT
White Hall 205
This compelling, moving drama about labor politics and corrupt union bosses among longshoremen was shot on location in New Jersey (by master cinematographer Boris Kaufman) and performed by some of America's finest screen actors of the period—Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Lee J. Cobb and Karl Maulden. It also swept the Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction Editing). It has often been interpreted as an allegory that justified director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg's decisions to testify as a friendly witness to the House Committee on Un-American Activities as it investigated Communist infiltration of Hollywood. 109 min.Wednesday, February 6, 2008
8:00 p.m.
HARVEY KLEHR LECTURE: “Espionage, Informing and the Movies: Hollywood's Communist Problem”
White Hall 205
The Hollywood blacklist has dominated discussion of the communist issue in the movie industry. Using two anti-communist movies of the 1950s—MY SON JOHN and ON THE WATERFRONT—one an award-winning classic, the other a widely derided melodrama, as starting points, Harvey Klehr will consider the curious failure of imagination and historical memory that characterized Hollywood's treatment of the Communist issue.Harvey Klehr is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory. He is the author or co-author of eleven books. His newest book, Early Cold War Spies, written with John Haynes, was published by Cambridge University Press. He has received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award for Emory College, the University Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award and the Thomas Jefferson Award from Emory. He is currently a member of the National Council on the Humanities.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
8:00 p.m.
HORACE NEWCOMB LECTURE: “Television in Transition: Chaos, Confusion, and Promises”
White Hall 205
Television is in a state of transition as profound as any in the medium's history. An explosion of distribution devices has changed relationships among creators, producers, viewers, advertisers and a host of other entities. There's no way to predict the future, but this lecture will consider what has been gained -- and lost.Horace Newcomb holds the Lambdin Kay Chair for the Peabodys in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Newcomb is the author of TV: The Most Popular Art (Doubleday/ Anchor, 1974), co-author of The Producer's Medium (Oxford University Press, 1983), and editor of seven editions of Television: The Critical View (Oxford University Press, 1976-2006). In 1973-74, while teaching full time, he was also the daily television columnist for the Baltimore Morning Sun. From 1994-96 he served as Curator for the Museum of Broadcast Communications (Chicago) with primary duties as editor of The Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television (Taylor & Francis, 2nd edition, 2004), a four- volume, 2,600 page reference work containing more than 1,200 entries on major people, programs, and topics related to television in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The MBC Encyclopedia of Television is the definitive library reference work of first record for the study of television. Newcomb is also author of numerous articles in scholarly journals, magazines and newspapers.
For more information, please call (404) 727-6257.
For more Founders Week events, please see the Founder's Week Website
Spanning the Globe:
International Classics Since the 1950s
Join Us! A reception sponsored by The Emory Alumni Association and The Emeritus College will follow the film on February 13th.
All films will be shown in 35mm in White Hall 205 on Wednesdays at 8:00 pm except the April 16 films, which will be shown in 16mm in White Hall 206.
All non-English language films have English subtitles.
The series is curated by Emory Department of Film Studies with special thanks to Matthew Bernstein. Film Studies faculty will introduce each week’s film.
Film brochure collated and notes written by Emory Film Studies graduate student Laura Dixon.
Special thanks to James Steffen and Alfredo Villar in the Emory Heilbrun Music and Media Library.
The Emory Cinematheque is a joint effort by Emory College and the Film Studies Program to provide the Atlanta community with programs of important international films throughout the academic year in a repertory cinema environment. Co-sponsored by Emory Film Studies Department and the Emory College Office.
Wednesday, January 23
Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray. India. 1955. B&W. Bengali with English subtitles. 112 min.)
Pather Panchali is Ray’s debut film and the first of the critically acclaimed “Apu Trilogy.” Set in rural Bengal in the 1920s, the film chronicles the early life of Apu as he and his family live their daily lives in the face of poverty. Shot on location with unknown actors and a realistic style, the film presented a revolutionary alternative to the melodramatic musicals that were popular in India.Wednesday, January 30
Aparajito (Satyajit Ray. India. 1956. B&W. Bengali with English subtitles. 108 min.)
This sequel to Pather Panchali continues with the Neorealist style of the first film. Apu and his family move to the holy city of Banares, where his father finds work as a priest. After his father’s death, Apu and his mother must find a way to support themselves. The poignancy of the familial relationships presented and the poetic compositions illuminate the film’s reputation as “timeless classic.”Founder’s Week Special Film Events: Communism and Hollywood
Monday, February 4
My Son John (Leo McCarey. USA. 1952. B&W. 122 min.)
Helen Hayes and Dean Jagger star as the parents of Robert Walker, a government employee who is sympathetic to Communism and critical of capitalism. Their dilemma over what, if anything, they can do constitutes this landmark example of anti-Communist filmmaking in Hollywood. Featuring Van Heflin as a sympathetic government agent and directed by Leo McCarey, who excelled at romantic comedy (The Awful Truth), romantic melodrama (An Affair to Remember), and family melodrama (Make Way for Tomorrow).Tuesday February 5
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan. USA. 1954. Color. 108 min.)
This compelling, moving drama about labor politics and corrupt union bosses among longshoremen was shot on location in New Jersey (by master cinematographer Boris Kaufman) and performed by some of America's finest screen actors of the period—Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Lee J. Cobb and Karl Malden. It also swept the Oscars. It has often been interpreted as an allegory that justified director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg's decisions to testify as a friendly witness to the House Committee on Un-American Activities as it investigated Communist infiltration of Hollywood.Wednesday, February 6
Harvey Klehr Lecture: “Espionage, Informing and the Movies: Hollywood's Communist Problem”
The Hollywood blacklist has dominated discussion of the communist issue in the movie industry. Using two anti-communist movies of the 1950s—My Son John and On the Waterfront—as starting points, Harvey Klehr will consider the curious failure of imagination and historical memory that characterized Hollywood's treatment of the Communist issue.
Harvey Klehr is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory.Thursday, February 7
Horace Newcomb Lecture: “Television in Transition: Chaos, Confusion, and Promises”
Television is in a state of transition as profound as any in the medium's history. An explosion of distribution devices has changed relationships among creators, producers, viewers, advertisers and a host of other entities. There's no way to predict the future, but this lecture will consider what has been gained–and lost.
Horace Newcomb holds the Lambdin Kay Chair for the Peabodys in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.Wednesday, February 13
Written on the Wind. (Douglas Sirk. USA. 1956. Color. 99 min.)
Once dismissed as “merely melodrama” then later acclaimed for its self-reflexive attention to the genre’s artifice and excess, Written on the Wind tells the story of a love triangle between alcoholic playboy Kyle (Robert Stack), down-to-earth Mitch (Rock Hudson), and the demure object of their desire Lucy (Lauren Bacall)—complicated even further by Kyle’s wild sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone). Controversial at the time, the film foregrounds the psychologically darker side of sexuality.Please join us at our reception after the film, sponsored by The Emory Alumni Association and The Emeritus College.
Wednesday, February 20
Nobi (Fires on the Plain) (Kon Ichikawa. Japan. 1959. B&W. Japanese with English subtitles. 108 min.)
Controversial in Japan and around the world, Ichikawa Kon’s grim saga of madness and despair charts the psychic, moral and physical demolition of a Japanese platoon in the jungles of the Philippines in 1945. Based on Ooka Shohei’s novel, Nobi should be numbered among the classic film depictions of the Second World War, or indeed, among the classic depictions of War itself.Wednesday, February 27
Peeping Tom (Michael Powell. UK. 1960. Color. 101 min.)
Released the same year as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom also focuses on the perverse pleasures of voyeurism and scopophilia inherent to film viewing. Powell's film, however, both more emphatically indicts the spectator and exposes the vulnerability of the voyeuristic position. Initially decried critically, and often credited with demise of Powell's career, new interest in the film was generated with the rise of spectatorship theory and feminist film theory especially.Wednesday, March 5
Equinox Flower (Yasujiro Ozu. Japan. 1958. Color. Japanese with English subtitles.118 min.)
Equinox Flower, Ozu’s first color film tells, with gentle humor, the story of a patriarch (Wataru Hirayama) who opposes his daughter Setsuko’s (Ineko Arimo) choice of husband. Watch for the red teapot!Wednesday, March 19
Sans Soleil (Chris Marker. France. 1983. French with English subtitles. 100 min.)
Created by Chris Marker (La Jetée, Le Joli Mai), for five decades one of the French cinema’s most innovative and challenging filmmakers. Sans Soleil is part experimental travelogue, part ethnographic pastiche, and part cinema-poem. Visually stunning, occasionally cryptic, always moving, the film is an elegant dance along the tightrope lines between fiction and documentary, East and West, the Other and the self.Wednesday, March 26
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov. Ukraine. 1964.Color. Ukrainian with English subtitles. 97 min.)
Set in the Carpathian Mountains of the Ukraine in the 19th century, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors tells the story of the young peasant Ivan in a series of vignettes. The film takes visual style to the extreme and violates most known codes of representation, blending the narrative of one man and the mythic into a deeply psychological masterpiece.PLEASE NOTE THIS CHANGE TO OUR SCREENING SCHEDULE:
Wednesday, April 2
The Searchers (John Ford, USA. 1956. Color. 99 min.)
One of John Ford's most highly regarded westerns, The Searchers features John Wayne as the racist Ethan Edwards, determined to find his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood) among the Commanche who raided and murdered his brother's family when Debbie was a child. Accompanied by "half breed" Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), Edwards undertakes a hardscrabble quest in this remarkable reworking of the western's traditional themes of manifest destiny, white supremacy and the origins of democracy on the frontier. Much admired (and copied) by filmmakers ranging from George Lucas (Star Wars, 1977), Paul Schrader (Hard Core), Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver) and others, The Searchers, shot in Ford's signature Monument Valley, remains one of the American cinema's crowning achievements of the 1950s. With Ford cast regulars Ward Bond, Harry Carey, Jr., John Qualen, Wayne's son Patrick, and also starring Vera Miles.Wednesday, April 9
Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple. USA. 1976. Color. 103 min.) Filming this documentary took Barbara Kopple and her camera into the front lines of a Kentucky coal miners’ strike that turned violent. A moving diegetic soundtrack sung by the miners and their families accompanies Kopple’s historically significant footage.Wednesday, April 16: WHITE HALL 206
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger. USA. 1964. Color. 28 min.)
A kaleidoscope of Christological, Hollywood, homoerotic, and fascist imagery merge with biker culture, drug culture, and pop music in this cult/experimental classic.Lemon (Hollis Frampton. USA. 1969. Color. 8 min.) This eight-minute short is a meditation on the most basic elements of cinema: moving light and shadow.
Zorns Lemma (Hollis Frampton. USA. 1970. Color. 60 min.) A famed example of what P. Adams Sitney has labeled “structural film,” or film whose content is secondary to its organization. Zorns Lemma invites us, like a good puzzle, to discover its complex patterning even as it works to “purify” the language of cinema.
Wednesday, April 23
Alice (Jan Svankmajer. Czechoslovakia. 1988. Color. 86 min.)
Famed Czech animator Jan Svankmajer uses both live action and stop-motion animation to adapt Lewis Carroll’s stories Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass for the screen. In this surrealist retelling, the rabbit hole is a desk drawer, ink is a drug that changes the size of things, and the world Alice enters looks like it was furnished by raiding the rag-and-bone shop and the butcher’s store.
The Writers Guild of America has just ended its strike
against the studios, but the issues raised will continue to reverberate throughout
the movie and television industry. Find out what it’s all about at:THE WRITERS' STRIKE PANEL
With writers Jason Dolan, Phil Nutman
and Courtney Bugler4-6 p.m., Wednesday, February 20
White Hall 206
For more information, call 404-727-4683 or e-mail creativewriting.emory.edu
CANCELLED
Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case in Film and TV
a Forum for Lovers of Film and Historypresented by Dr. Matthew H. Bernstein
at The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum
Film scholar Matthew Bernstein will lead a film series, Screening a Lynching, that explores how Hollywood has dealt with the controversial subject of the Leo Frank case, beginning Sunday, March 16. Dr. Bernstein is Professor and Chair of the Department of Film Studies at Emory University and the host/moderator of Atlanta’s Key Sunday Cinema Club. He is also the author of Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent (1994, 2000) and editor of Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era (2000), among other books. This series is derived from his forthcoming book, Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and TV (University of Georgia Press, 2009).
Please see The William Bremen Jewish Heritage Museum site for more information: http://www.thebremen.org
Special thanks to The Film Studies Department,
Race & Difference Initiative, of Emory University.
Jacqueline Stewart, Northwestern University
"In the World of Spencer Williams, Race Film Pilgrim"
(Race and Difference Initiative)
THURSDAY, MARCH 20
4:00 P.M.
WHITE HALL 206
Reception and Book Signing to Follow
Although Spencer Williams’ religious drama The Blood of Jesus (1941) was the first "race film" selected for the National Film Registry,
there is very little scholarship on his extensive career in front of and behind the camera. This talk explores the numerous geographical
and stylistic trajectories of Spencer Williams' career as a director, writer and actor, and discusses how these travels reveal the striking
contradictions (between the sacred and the secular, uplift and minstrelsy, authorship and objectification) shaping early African
American film culture.Jacqueline Stewart’s research and teaching focus on African American film and literature, American silent film, histories and theories of
spectatorship, and the role of race in “orphan films” (non-commercial and other marginalized film and video works in need of preservation,
from home movies to cable access television programs).Her book, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (University of California Press, 2005) explores African American
images, spectatorship and filmmaking practices up to 1920. Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Film Quarterly, The Moving
Image and American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, eds. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)). Her current projects include a study of the life and work of African American
actor/writer/director Spencer Williams, and the South Side Home Movie Project.
Sponsored by the Race & Diversity Initiative, the Department of Film Studies,
the Department of English, and The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts
(All films to be shown in White Hall 205 at 8pm and in 35mm, unless otherwise indicated.)
--Thursday, February 21
The Pride of the Yankees (Sam Wood, 1942, B&W, 128 min)This Hollywood biopic of the star first baseman is less a sports story than it is a tribute to a heroic figure who displayed remarkable “grace under pressure.” Lou Gehrig, son of immigrant parents, native of New York City, designated captain of its major sports franchise, was stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis which would kill him just short of his thirty-eighth birthday and would subsequently carry the name “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” Released in July 1942, seven months after Pearl Harbor, The Pride of the Yankees offered “the story of a gentle young man who,” as Damon Runyan wrote in the film’s Preface, “faced death with that same valor and fortitude that has been displayed by thousands of young Americans on far-flung fields of battle” to its wartime audiences. Starring Gary Cooper and Theresa Wright.
--Thursday, February 28 (6pm)
The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (Aviva Kempner, 1998, 90 min)Another New Yorker, another first baseman, Hank Greenberg chose not to sign with the hometown Yankees because his position on that team was occupied by one Lou Gehrig; instead, young Hank signed with the Detroit Tigers. The Motown of the Thirties, owing to the presence there of industrialist Henry Ford and “Radio Priest” Father Coughlin, was the virtual epicenter of anti-Semitism in America. Greenberg not only faced up to the bigots by celebrating his Jewishness, he also won over fans nationwide with his skills and dignified presence. During World War II, rather than playing “service ball,” he volunteered for combat duty. When Major League Baseball was integrated in 1947, Hank Greenberg was among the first and most vocal supporters of Jackie Robinson, and when the players began to unionize in the mid-1960s, Greenberg, now in management, supported them.
--Thursday, February 28
Bull Durham (Ron Shelton, 1988, 108 min)For the baseball fan, the baseball movie. The film, wrote Roger Angell in The New Yorker, “is a comic delight and maybe a miracle. It’s the first baseball movie that gets things right without trying. . . . It’s an adult homage to the game.” Bull Durham is also an account of a major transition in life, an early and forced retirement: the phenomenon that Boys of Summer author Roger Kahn described as an athlete’s “first death,” namely the termination of his athletic career. The film’s director, Ron Shelton, who played five years of minor-league baseball, eschews a dramatic or heroic climax to his tale; instead, his hero Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) is simply cut by the Bulls. “Careers end with a ground ball to shortstop,” Shelton explains, “not with a home run.” With Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.
--Thursday, March 6
Bang the Drum Slowly (John D. Hancock, 1973, 96 min; on DVD)Based on the second in a series of four novels by Mark Harris’s about the fictive pitcher Henry Wiggen, Bang the Drum Slowly was first dramatized for television in 1956 on the U.S. Steel Hour, and co-starred Paul Newman, Albert Salmi, and George Peppard. Its title derives from the song “The Streets of Laredo,” sometimes known as “The Cowboys Lament”: “Oh bang the drum slowly and play the fife lowly / Play the dead march as carry me along.” Its storyline follows the impending death of loner-catcher Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro), who is befriended by pitcher Henry Wiggin (Michael Moriarty), and who finally, near death’s door, is accepted by his teammates. In the process, a fractious band of individualists is molded into a working community—a real team.
--Thursday, March 20
Bingo Long’s Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (John Badham, 1976, 110 min)With Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor. Set in 1939, during the pre-Jackie Robinson era, Bingo Long’s Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings is an ode to Negro-League baseball where “only the ball was white.” “It was the first movie made about the Satchel Paige teams,” its co-star James Earl Jones explained. “But it was muted because … the press and many baseball people … were a bit upset that we didn’t make a more serious movie.” In an era of “Blaxploitation films,” its “reception was not great,” Jones acknowledged. “The movie gained popularity later when Bingo Long found its place.” Its place was the inner game of baseball, played by skilled professionals who brought joy to their game and delight to their discerning fans.
--Thursday, March 27
The Natural (Barry Levinson, 1984, 134 min)With Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Kim Basinger and Barbara Hershey.
A loose adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s book of that title, often hailed as the first baseball novel by a major author, the film version of The Natural was the first commercially-successful Hollywood baseball film of the post-World War II era. Its essential themes include injury, death, disfigurement, grotesquery, gambling, and magic. The Natural draws upon numerous baseball incidents, sayings, stories, and legends: in the process, mining baseball history and lore to examine a changing American society.
--Thursday, April 3
A League of Their Own (Penny Marshall, 1992, 128 min)With Geena Davis, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, David Straitharn.
The opening season of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943 provides the timeframe for A League of Their Own. The formation of the AAGPBL by Chicago Cubs owner Phillip K. Wrigley was promoted to compensate for the disbanding of many minor league teams during World War II. While race continued to separate African Americans from Major League Baseball, gender had excluded women from professional baseball at every level. The AAGPBL developed to such a high level of competence that it remained in existence through 1954. The most memorable line of dialog in A League of Their Own is Manager Jimmy Dugan’s (Tom Hanks) injunction: “There’s no crying in baseball.” Really! How about for “the luckiest man,” Lou Gehrig?
--Thursday, April 10, 6 p.m.—note different time.
GIRLFIGHT (Karyn Kusama, 2000, color, 110 min)
While Clint Eastwood’s MILLION DOLLAR BABY got all the major mainstream attention and Academy Awards, this independently produced, highly acclaimed film focuses on the motherless 18 year old Latina Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez), who is in trouble in school and who also has a knack for boxing. Winner of the Sundance Film Festival Directing Award and Grand Jury Prize. This film will be introduced by Donna Wong, Director of Multicultural Programs and Services, and Assistant Dean of Campus Life. Michelle Rodriguez has become a bigger celebrity since she starred in GIRLFIGHT due to her involvement in the reality TV show LOST and in the action films THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, RESIDENT EVIL and S.W.A.T.. She also starred as a surfer in another powergirl movie.--Thursday, April 17
MURDERBALL (Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro, 2005, color, 88 min)
This rollicking, action-packed, fast-paced Oscar-nominated documentary looks at American paraplegics who have suffered severe spinal injuries and compete in wheelchair rugby at the Paralympic games held in Sweden in 2002 and in Athens, Greece in 2004. The film profiles several players. their competitive spirit, their personal lives and families. The rivalry between the American and Canadian teams heats up when a former American player decides to coach the Canadian. Winner of the Audience Award and Special Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. This film will be introduced by Moya Bailey and Shannan Palma of the Women’s Studies Department.--Thursday, April 24
JACK JOHNSON (William Cayton, 1970, black & white, 88 min)Produced near the height of the Black Power movement, the documentary Jack Johnson was released on the tail of The Great White Hope (1970), the fictional biopic starring James Earl Jones as the first African-American heavyweight champion. Largely forgotten a generation later, this modest independent production differs markedly from Unforgivable Blackness (PBS, 2005), the high-profile Ken Burns treatment of Johnson's life. Where the Burns film speaks in respectful, centenary tones with a mellow score by Wynton Marsalis, the 1970 telling features narrator Brock Peters shouting in the boxer's voice with a jagged, edgy, angry music track by Miles Davis. Yet Jack Johnson was also an anachronism in documentary style when it was nominated for an Academy Award alongside the likes of that year's winner, Woodstock. Black Power politics aside, the work of producers Jim Jacobs and William Cayton resembles the perfunctory compilation style of their previous Oscar-nominated boxing documentary, The Legendary Champions (1968, assembled by Harry Chapin, the soon-to-be-famous singer/songwriter). Jacobs and Cayton ran the production company Big Fights, Inc., which for half a century held a near-monopoly on archival footage of prizefights. But Jack Johnson was no piece of nostalgia. Jacobs and Cayton analogized the obstreperous Johnson to the insurgent Muhammad Ali, releasing the more provocative documentary a.k.a. Cassius Clay in 1970 as well.
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Das Alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law)
Das Alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law), 1927, Ewald Andre Dupont, German, Black and White, Silent, 128 min.
Sunday, April 6, 2:30pm
White Hall 205When Baruch Mayr decides to leave home to become an actor his father, an orthodox rabbi in a poor shtetl, disinherits him. Baruch joins the Burgtheater, the most important theater in Vienna, but becomes homesick when a friend of his father's shows up. His return to Galizia isn't the homecoming he envisioned for many reasons, so he returns to Vienna. The film is considered to be the source material for The Jazz Singer.
On Monday, April 7, Charles Musser of Yale University will lecture on The Jazz Singer in White Hall 205 at 4pm.
Revisiting that Touchy Subject of Race: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer (1927)
(Race and Difference Initiative)
MONDAY, APRIL 7
4:00 P.M.
WHITE HALL 205
Contemporary scholarship and recent reviews (around the 80th anniversary release of the DVD) have demonized The Jazz Singer as a racist text. But how was the "first talkie" received by African American audiences in the 1920s? And does the use of blackface necessarily mean that this film is "about" race, or might blackface function as the mask of theater? Although this binary may be too simple, our assessment of the film can be further enriched if we see it not only as an adaptation of Samuel Raphelson's Broadway play of the same name but as a quiet (and hidden) remake of E. A. Dupont's little seen feature film The Ancient Law (1923).
Charles Musser is professor of American Studies, Film Studies and Theater Studies at Yale University, where he co-chairs the Film Studies Program. He has written extensively about silent cinema in the Philippines, Japan, France and the United States. His documentary film Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter is being released on DVD this month (April) by Kino International.
The Department of Film Studies and the Race and Difference Initiative present
Anustup Basu
LOVE IN THE TIME OF TERROR:
MANI RATNAM'S POLITICAL TRILOGY
Roja, Bombay and Dil Se are three of the South Indian filmmaker Mani Ratnam's major works during the nineties. They are, in different ways, stories about middle class couples or would be couples caught in the crossfire between the Nation and separatists and fundamentalists. The films, in their visual idioms, reveal a far more complex political scenario in relation to desire, ethics, and practices than their narrative formats would suggest. This complexity pertains to the cinematic figuration of the woman in each of these films, and a certain musical style that is perhaps unique to popular Indian cinema.
Anustup Basu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His essays on film, media, globalization, and political sovereignty have appeared or are forthcoming in boundary 2, Critical Quarterly, Postmodern Culture, Postscript and the anthology “Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance,” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Basu is currently completing a manuscript entitled “The Geo-televisual Aesthetic: Information, Capital, and Religiosity in Popular Hindi Cinema (1991-2004)” and guest editing a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture on new media ecologies. He is also the executive producer of Herbert (Suman Mukhopadhyay, 2005), which won the Indian National Award for Best Bengali Feature Film in 2005-06.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
4:00pm
White Hall 206
The Documentary as a Catalyst for Social Change
April 18, 2:00pm
White Hall 207
As Executive Vice President, Documentary Films, Diane Weyermann is responsible for Participant Media’s documentary slate. This includes Brett Morgen’s recently released film, Chicago 10, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, which won the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival , as well as the Fall 2007 releases Angels in the Dust, Jimmy Carter Man from Plains and Darfur Now and last year’s Oscar winning An Inconvenient Truth.
Prior to joining Participant in October 2005, Weyermann was the Director of the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Program. During her tenure at Sundance, she was responsible for the Sundance Documentary Fund, a program supporting documentary films dealing with contemporary human rights, social justice, civil liberties, and freedom of expression from around the world. She launched two annual documentary film labs, focusing on the creative process--one dealing with editing and storytelling, and the other with music. Diane was also part of the Sundance Film Festival programming team, where she was instrumental in creating a platform for international documentary work and responsible for programming the documentary content of the Filmmaker Lodge activities.
Weyermann’s work in the documentary and international fields extends many years prior to Sundance. She was the Director of the Open Society Institute New York's Arts and Culture Program for seven years. In addition to her work with contemporary art centers and culture programs in the Soros Foundation network, which spans over thirty countries, she launched the Soros Documentary Fund (which later became the Sundance Documentary Fund) in 1996. Since the inception of the Fund, she has been involved with the production of over three hundred documentary films from around the world.
"The Prohibition of Fight Pictures:
The Difference between Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey"
After being a common presence in the first two decades of American cinema, motion-picture recordings of prizefights came under federal restriction for the next three. Until 1940, it was illegal to transport such films across state lines. Yet only a few years after the 1912 ban, which Congress enacted to surpress the celebrity of the first black heaveyweight champion, fight pictures flourished again. Throughout the 1920s and 30s these supposedly criminal records were nearly ubiquitous in movie houses. How did this curious dissonance between the law and popular culture sustain itself?
Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky -- quite literally midway between the boyhood homes of Muhammad Ali and D. W. Griffith -- Dan Streible resolved this curious dissonance by writing the book Fight Pictures, in which movies, sports and racial politics intersect. He is a member of the NYU Cinema Studies faculty and associate director of its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Since 1999 he has convened the biennial Orphan Film Symposium, where scholars, archivists and media artists screen, study and save all manner of neglected films.4 p.m., Friday, April 25
Book signing and small reception to follow
White Hall 205
Department of Film Studies
404-727-6761
ahall03@emory.edu
http://www.filmstudies.emory.edu
