Cinema Studies // New York University

A special themed issue of The Moving Image (journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists) has just hit the newsstands (and Project Muse database). The Orphan Film issue (officially vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 2009) was edited by associate professor Dan Streible. The journal includes twelve articles, all expanded versions of papers presented at the department's Orphan Film Symposium in March 2008.

• Dan Streible, "The State of Orphan Films"
• Paolo Cherchi Usai, "Are All (Analog) Films 'Orphans'? A Pre-digital Appraisal"
• Cinema Studies PhD candidate Jennifer Zwarich, "The Bureaucratic Activist: Federal Filmmakers and Social Change in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Tick Eradication Campaign"
• Juana Suárez and Ramiro Arbeláez, "Garras de Oro (The Dawn of Justice--Alborada de justicia: The Intriguing Orphan of Colombian Silent Films"
• Julia J. Noordegraaf and Elvira Pouw, "Extended Family Films: Home Movies in the State-Sponsored Archive"
• Cinema Studies alum Charles Musser, "Carl Marzani & Union Films: Making Left-wing Documentaries during the Cold War, 1946-1953"
• Devin Orgeron, "Nothing Could Be Finer? George Stoney’s Tar Heel Family and the Tar Heel State on Film"
• Jennifer Horne, "Experiments in Propaganda: Reintroducing James Blue's Colombia Trilogy"
• Craig Breaden, "Carl Sanders and Albert Maysles: Georgia Politics Meets Direct Cinema, 1969-1970"
• Eric Breitbart, "The Army, Newsreel, and The Army Film"
• Paul Cullum, "Old-Time Religion: Christian Experimentalism and Preaching to the 'Unchurched'"
• Mark Quigley, "Between Sign-Off Films and Test Patterns: Insight at UCLA"
• + Tributes to Bill O’Farrell by Rosemary Bergeron & Sam Kula, Ken Weissman, Charles Tepperman, Nancy Watrous, and Karan Sheldon

Coincidentally, the issue includes book reviews by NYU Cinema Studies staffer Zack Lischer-Katz on Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s by Scott Higgins, as well as alum Mia Firm (M.A. '07) on Body Shots: Early Cinema's Incarnation by Jonathan Auerbach.

The cover of The Moving Image 9.1 features a frame enlargement from Fox Movietone newsreel item, "Dedication of 'Park Row,'" recorded on the Fox lot in Hollywood, January 27, 1928. An actor impersonating "Leon Trotsky of the Soviet Republic!" (as John Ford introduces him) stands before the microphone. The faux Fox Trotsky is Boris Charsky, an actor in Raoul Walsh’s film The Red Dance (December 1928). Image courtesy of University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections.

Guest Speaker
Laurent Jullier // “French Contemporary Cinema & the Music Video Effect”

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 6:15pm
721 Broadway, 6th floor, Michelson Theater

New York University’s La Maison Française & the Department of Cinema Studies present a guest lecture by Laurent Jullier.

Postmodern cinema synaesthetically associates powerful moments in the music with shooting and editing (what the French call “effet-clip”). It is not surprising that an "authentic" postmodern director like Luc Besson should make extensive use of this third way of conceiving the soundtrack, but this talk will show that young authors of “post-Nouvelle Vague” French cinema almost do the same, trying to combine the Brechtian imperatives of modern cinema and music video effect.

Laurent Jullier is a professor at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and is the author of numerous books and articles on cinema.

This event is free and open to the public.

by Marisa Carpico

With Ventura Castro gone, you may be wondering who is supposed to answer all of your Cinema Studies questions. Well, look no further than our new Department Coordinator, Melanie Daly.

Daly, 36, came to Cinema Studies in June by way of Undergrad Film and Television where she worked for six and a half years as a registration assistant. While up on the 11th floor, Daly mostly kept records and occasionally helped advise the Department’s 1,100 students. As she puts it, “I helped them get from freshman year to Graduation.” Just as Film and TV and Cinema Studies approach studying films differently, Daly says the working environment differs between the departments as well. “It was like a 7-11 there,” she says, “we were like a service oriented office.”

As Department Coordinator for Cinema Studies, Daly has had to take on a few more responsibilities. Here, she handles PHD course proposals, oversees graduation for all levels and keeps track of grades and transfers. Most importantly, she holds regular appointments on Mondays from 2pm to 4:30pm and Thursdays from 10am to 12:45pm.

Though Daly says she has “always liked movies,” she was more focused on writing during her own college career. She received her BFA in English from Emerson College and her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Daly says she still writes, though “not as strictly as I did in the past,” and working in Tisch has made her more interested in films. Over the summer she started watching more classic films like Citizen Kane and even read Robert Sklar’s Movie Made America. Despite the classics, her favorite movie is still Richard Linklater’s 2001 film Waking Life. “It’s sort of an existential movie,” she says, “it makes you really think.”

About the Writer
Marisa Carpico majors in Cinema Studies and Journalism and minors in French. This is her last semester at NYU. She writes movie reviews and articles for various blogs and for Movie-Thoughts.com, which was started by a former Cinema Studies student. She has also reported on film for Us Weekly and interned for the Entertainment Section at Metro: New York.

by Paul Fileri

On Friday, October 9th, the Graduate Forum series, organized by students in the Cinema Studies Ph.D. program, hosted a panel discussion on the current state of publishing in the fields of cinema and media studies. The event brought together a number of the discipline’s most notable editors of scholarly journals and university press book series: John Belton (Professor of English at Rutgers University, associate editor of Film History: An International Journal, and editor of a series of books on film and culture for Columbia University Press), Heather Hendershot (Professor of Film and Media Studies at CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College, and editor of Cinema Journal), Drake Stutesman (editor of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media), and Anna McCarthy (Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Cinema Studies at New York University, and co-editor of the journal Social Text). Paul Fileri, a Ph.D. student in the Cinema Studies department, moderated the conversation.

The forum offered an opportunity for each of these distinguished editors to describe the distinctive perch afforded by his or her journal and to elaborate on the practical and intellectual perspectives each had on the scholarly work being published in the field today. The conversation developed in related directions as well, as the panel commented on the practical mechanics of the submission and editing process and layout and design, and moved on to address a host of issues that perennially preoccupy those in academic publishing, such as copyright, the prevalence of jargon (including a few of the panelists’ most detested written tics), and the possibilities and challenges emerging in work with new media, web, and digital publishing.

Anna McCarthy spoke first and addressed how Social Text—celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this fall with a large issue looking back at the journal’s collective history—has remained devoted to left-oriented cultural critique in the humanities, underpinned by the journal’s practice of collective editorial decision-making. While the journal hardly focuses on film and media studies, Professor McCarthy explained that it seeks out writing on film, media, and moving-image-related work that engages with other disciplines and topics of concern.

Heather Hendershot underlined a number of the changes evident in the pages of Cinema Journal since she assumed the editorship of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ official publication in 2008: the introduction of a book reviews section, a redesign, an effort to develop the professional association’s website, and a renewed determination to spotlight especially vital and emerging topics in the dossier provided in every issue’s In Focus section. Drake Stutesman highlighted the storied history of Framework and its connection to independent film cultures and cinemas, both in its first incarnation, when it was based in various universities in England from 1974 to 1992, and since its re-launch in 1999 with Wayne State University Press. She mentioned recent interviews with filmmakers that the journal had published and pointed to feminism, cultural politics, and prejudice as interests she would particularly like to see further addressed in its pages.

In speaking last, John Belton embraced the opportunity to note some of the specific ways that the panel consisted of a range of models for journal publication, distinguished by differing editorial missions, readerships, and institutional affiliations. With Film History: An International Journal, Professor Belton explained, the editors chose not to adopt a peer review process and can thereby take advantage of the ability to organize tightly focused thematic issues and commission articles particularly suited to the journal’s commitment to film historical studies grounded in archival research.

Richard Allen was hosted by South Asian Studies and the Institute for Cinema and Culture at the University of Iowa on a lovely fall day in the midwest for a talk on recognition narratives in Hindi cinema. That is, for example, when the mother suddenly rediscovers the son she lost as a child (as in Amar, Akbar, Anthony), or the father acknowledges the son whom he never knew (as in Awaara). Cinema, with its unique visual and aural resources, can give peculiar potency and drama to moments of recognition or missed recognition and this is especially true of Hindi cinema. In case you couldn't be there, he will be giving a version of the talk on April 14th, 2010, in the Cinema Studies Department.

The Education Department of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University are pleased to invite you to

Woman with a Movie Camera: Alice Guy Blaché Symposium
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Film Center, New York University
36 East 8th Street, New York

Trailblazer, inventor, and innovator, Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968) was cinema’s first female director and first female film studio owner. Her legacy extends to groundbreaking filmmaking techniques, novel approaches to narrative, and original directorial style. This symposium explores her imaginative and pioneering approach to film alongside present-day innovations in the spirit of her work.

10 am: Alice Guy Blaché as Cinema Pioneer
Richard Koszarski (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
Alison McMahan (Homunculus Productions, LLC)

1 pm: Women in the Archives: On Film Preservation
Terry Lawler (New York Women in Film and Television)
Kim Tomadjoglou (Moving image preservationist, curator, historian)

2:30 pm: Emerging Media: Now and Then
Rick Altman (University of Iowa)
Virginia Heffernan (New York Times)

Admission
FREE for Whitney Museum members and NYU students, faculty, and staff
$6 for students of other institutions and senior citizens
$8 for general admission

For more information and to purchase a ticket, please visit whitney.org

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, November 6, 2009 – January 24, 2010.

The symposium is co-sponsored by the Education Department, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. This symposium is made possible by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Additional support provided by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer is sponsored, in part, by American Express. Significant support is provided by Jessica E. Smith and Kevin R. Brine. Additional support is provided by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Foundation, and an anonymous foundation donor.

On November 4th, students and faculty from the Cinema Studies Department’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) Program took a trip to the annual Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference in St Louis, Missouri. With 15 students and numerous alumni in attendance, MIAP had a very strong presence this year. In addition to large numbers, MIAP students and alumni also participated in two panels at the conference. The first panel, entitled “A-V Preservation Exchanges: New York, Accra, Buenos Aires,” featured alumnae Paula Felix-Didier (MIAP ’06) and Natalia Fidelholtz (MIAP ’06) reporting on a recent trip to Buenos Aires to conduct a week-long training session, and current student Jennifer Blaylock reporting on her trip to Accra, Ghana, to help conduct a similar workshop. The panel was co-chaired by Professors Mona Jimenez and Dan Streible, who lead the expeditions to Accra, Ghana, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, respectively.

MIAP students also participated in a panel entitled, “Neither Here Nor There: Preservation and Access in the Art World.” MIAP Alumnus Jeff Martin (MIAP ’05) chaired the panel and presented alongside MIAP students Walter Forsberg and Sandra Gibson. Through a variety of case studies, the panelists addressed the special preservation and access needs associated with time-based works – film, single- and multi-channel video, and other types of multimedia installations – in the context of galleries and museums.

During the conference, MIAP students also had a chance to tour nearby Washington University’s Film and Media Archive. Archivist David Rowntree led the tour of the archive’s vaults, which contain, among other notable collections, the Henry Hampton and William Miles Collections. All of the materials that Hampton used to produce Eyes on the Prize, a six-part documentary aired on PBS recounting the history of the civil rights movement from 1954-1965, are contained in the archive, with many interview transcripts available online. Miles is best known for directing the four-part documentary I Remember Harlem (1981), which traces the history of the New York City neighborhood from the 17th Century to the 1980’s.

Related Articles:
Article on AMIA Conference
Washington University Newsletter Article

by Bill Santagata

Last Friday I had the opportunity to sit down with Moya Luckett, visiting professor in our department. Iʼm currently in her Celebrity Culture class, where we have a blast learning about the history of stardom in American cinema as well as dissecting current topics in the celebrity world. I had the opportunity to talk with her about her upcoming classes and publications, in addition to her varied interests.

What classes are you teaching next semester? Why did you choose these topics?
Iʼm teaching a grad class on American Cinema 1930–1960 and the undergrad advanced seminar on genre in international cinema. [The undergrad class will be] looking at genre from a transnational perspective and looking at the national aspects that are endemic in different kinds of genre cinema. The [other] class Iʼve taught before, and I love classical Hollywood cinema—I did a lot of work on classical Hollywood cinema [in my graduate work]. Iʼm always very happy to teach that class.

What is the topic of your upcoming book? Do you have any other publications in the works?
The topic of my upcoming book is progressivism in early cinema. Iʼm actually looking at a late period of early cinema up to 1917 and Iʼm over-ambitious in many ways but Iʼm trying to find a way to conceptualize that cinema and provide some continuity with earlier forms of early cinema. So the period is roughly 1907–17, but I concentrate mostly on the post-1912 to 1917 period. And hopefully Iʼve found some way of thinking about that where we can make sense of what seems to be a fragmentary period of cinema marked by a lot of change but without its own identity.

Another project Iʼm working on right now is a book proposal that Iʼm submitting to Rutgerʼs University Press on femininity and popular film and television. And again what I have come up with is a conceptual framework to discuss femininity not just as itʼs represented in popular film and television but also in terms of how itʼs shaped the representation of popular film and TV more generally. That book ... covers American popular film and television at periods of transformation in gender politics ... and particularly looks at things like the mobility of feminine forms and feminine protagonists across national boundaries from the ʻ60s onwards.

What brought you from the U.K. to the U.S. and eventually to NYU?
I was actually working on my M.A. in England and my thesis advisor there had recommended that I [think] about U.S. graduate schools. I was honestly very young; I was 21 and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I think really it was just the idea of an adventure.

What brought me here [to NYU] was, again, I think a sense of adventure. I was teaching in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh seems to be in some ways synonymous with post-industrial cities that have nothing to offer and I felt as a young faculty member that this adventure of coming to America had to end in a better place. So that brought me to New York and fortunately coming to New York also brought me to NYU.

What are your primary research interests?
Iʼm actually fairly broad in my research interests. Iʼm very interested in gender, particularly femininity, but Iʼve also taught classes on masculinity, [which is an area] I might develop further in later works. Iʼm still very interested in American media and British media, too. But studying British television is difficult ... because early British TV was mainly wiped. Even TV from the 1970s when it went onto videotape, the BBC, partly because it was short of cash, wiped a lot of programs and reused the tapes. So itʼs an exercise in frustration.

Iʼm also really interested in more international contexts. Iʼm interested in international co-productions; Iʼm interested in the circulation and migration of texts; Iʼm very interested in concepts of nation and transnationalism and I think thatʼs something thatʼs reflected in both my book and in my teaching. And Iʼm always finding new things that I want to study so I donʼt know what the next thing will be. But celebrity has obviously been a more recent and important part of my research.

What are your interests outside of cinema? Do you incorporate these interests into your readings of films?
In some ways my interests outside of cinema and television are things I go to both to keep my research fresh and my private life somewhat distant. So some of the things Iʼm interested in have nothing at all to do with my research and I think thatʼs healthy. I love things like architecture, particularly old architecture, and preservation, which really doesnʼt reflect my research interests. Iʼm really interested in fashion and thatʼs something I do have some convergence with.

Whom do you most admire (a real-life person) from the annals of film history?
I donʼt think thereʼs a single person but I would say that I think there are certain directors who are either underrated or whose work you canʼt overlook. Obviously Hitchcock and Fritz Lang are two seminal directors, and Stanley Kubrick. I also really like a director whose work is less studied, Maurice Tourneur. He worked in the late teens and heʼs an early feature pioneer. And in terms of film studies and in terms of people who have influenced me and have just changed paradigms, I think in some ways itʼs the obvious figures: people like Tom Gunning, Charlie Musser, Lynn Spigel, Anne Friedberg.

Which fictional character from cinema (or TV) do you admire most?
I donʼt know if I admire any of them. Some of the ones who fascinate me the most are some of the most reprehensible ones, like the character that Julie Christie plays in Darling. I tend to like films that donʼt necessarily have admirable characters in them which is probably why Iʼve given examples like Kubrick, Lang, and Hitchcock as directors whose work I enjoy. Eric Cartman from South Park is also a minor hero of mine, and Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

If you were to give a student extra points on an exam, what type of dessert would s/he have to give you?
Oh god! [laughing] Well I always say I never give extra credit but you managed to hit my weak point with dessert. Iʼm a big fan of English chocolates, as long as it doesnʼt have peanuts or peanut butter in it (not that English chocolate would have any peanut butter because we donʼt like it). But what can I say? Youʼre pitting my two ethical parts against each other and it puts me into a very deep existential conflict.