I am happy to announce Amalgamate, an exhibition of videos made by students in my course on “The Video Essay” (Fall 2019). Works range from analytical to experimental, with activist impulses and cinephilic sensitivities sprinkled throughout. The show runs from January 10-31, 2020 in the Gunn Foyer, McMurtry Building, at Stanford.
Coming up on October 18, I am happy to be a part of this event on the topic of “Chemistry and Film: Experiments in Living,” a symposium jointly sponsored by the Departments of Art & Art History and Chemistry at Stanford. I will be presenting on “Frankenstein and the Chemistry of Film.”
My department, the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford, is one of four (along with East Asian Languages & Cultures, English, and Theater & Performance Studies) looking to host a recent PhD as a 2-year Mellon Fellow. The position offers ample time to research, a generous stipend ($83,000), full benefits, a research fund, and an opportunity to work with some amazing people in the humanities at Stanford.
Full details, eligibility, requirements, and application process are outlined on the website of the Stanford Humanities Center.
Please spread the word if you know someone who would benefit from this opportunity!
Above, some of the featured undergraduate courses in Stanford’s Film & Media Studies lineup for 2018-2019. A full listing of course offerings can be found here.
Somehow I forgot to post the syllabus for “Let’s Make A Monster! Critical Making,” which Paul DeMarinis and I are currently teaching as a hybrid Film & Media Studies and Art Practice class in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford. The main focus of the course, as the title indicates, is the production of monsters in a variety of media and informed by reading literary, philosophical, and other critical texts on making and monstrosity. Students have been making some truly astounding work, and I look forward to being able to present some of it later in the quarter. We will be organizing an exhibition of works on campus, and I will post images here.
The inaugural Stanford Film and Media Studies Symposium takes place on Friday April 13, 2018 in Oshman Hall. The theme of the conference is “Pieces” and talks will address questions concerning how bits of film and media make us rethink the relation of part to whole and what methods artists use to make discrete pieces—temporal, spatial, material, performative—that may or may not fit into larger collaborative works.
The keynote speakers are Lotte Hoek (University of Edinburgh) on “Anthropology and the Cinematic Fragment in South Asia” and Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University) on “Speculative Time.” In addition, there will be two panels. The first will feature an artist’s talk by Srdan Keca (Documentary Film and Video); Daniel Cohen (Art & Art History) on “Chinese Comedy and the Postsocialist Art of Deflation”; Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh (Dance Studies) on “Sensorial Performativity of the ‘Veil’ in Aisan Hoss’s Dance-Theater The Pleasant Pain”; and Dustin Condren (Slavic) on Sergei Eisenstein’s film scenario MMM. Terry Berlier (Art Practice) will deliver an artist’s talk on the second panel, followed by Tiffany Naiman (Thinking Matters) on “Memory, Meaning, and Fragmentation in David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’; Henry Rownd (Art & Art History) on the marked disjuncture between widescreen and pan-and-scan in Otto Preminger’s late work Skidoo (1968); and Max Suechting (Modern Thought and Literature) on “Fragments and Wholes in J Dilla’s Donuts.”
9:30am – Welcome
9:50am – Opening Remarks
10:00am – Keynote Speaker
11:30am – Panel 1
2:30pm – Panel 2
4:30pm – Keynote Speaker
5:45 pm – Closing Remarks
Department of Art & Art History, Film & Media Studies, thanks their sponsors: Center for South Asia, Office of the Vice President for the Arts, CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Global Studies Division, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Iranian Studies, The Program in Modern Thought & Literature, Department of Communication, Thinking Matters.
See also the official announcement here: https://art.stanford.edu/events/stanford-film-and-media-studies-symposium-pieces
Post-Cinema: Videographic Explorations — an exhibition of video essays that I am curating at Stanford — opens today. The wall text (above) outlines the aims and objectives of the show. Here is a list of the 13 works included:
Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Book Trailer), 2016
Shane Denson
Video, 4:12The Beyoncé Image: Synesthetic Abilities of the Visual Album, 2017
Cleo Chung
Video, 17:07Iñárritu’s Films in a Conversation on Realism, Hyperrealism, Time-Image, and Movement-Image, 2017
Raquel Orendain Shrestha
Video, 4:00WTF IS THAT? The Pre- and Post-Cinematic Tendencies of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, 2017
Allison de Fren and Brian Cantrell
Video, 10:12hijab.key, 2016
Shane Denson
Video, 2:46The Shared Universe Cinema, 2017
Will Ferrer
Video, 21:18Transformers: The Premake (a desktop documentary), 2014
Kevin B. Lee
Video, 25:03Slowness and Slow Cinema, 2017
Spencer Slovic
Video, 11:42FX’s LEGION and Post-Cinematic Television, 2017
Katie Adams
Video, 19:31Questioning the Human Machine in EX MACHINA, 2016
Allison de Fren
Video, 10:26New Forms of Racism in the Post-Cinematic Dispositif, 2017
Jace Alexander Casey
Video, 4:02A Closer Look at/into Depth Perception: Illusion, Impression, and Indexicality in Animation, 2017
Ouree Lee
Video, 20:14VHS Found Footage and the Material Horrors of Post-Cinema, 2015
Shane Denson
Video, 5:02
Starting May 1, I am proud to present an exhibition of video essays, including works by well-known scholar-filmmakers Allison de Fren and Kevin B. Lee, as well as students from my “Post-Cinema” seminar. Selected videos deal with a range of topics, including digital animation, Beyoncé’s Lemonade and the visual album, contemporary horror, slow cinema, transmedia franchises and post-cinematic television, and more.
The show will be on view May 1-12, 2017 in the Gunn Foyer, McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) at Stanford University.
Syllabus for the next iteration of my seminar “Post-Cinema” (senior capstone / graduate seminar), Department of Art & Art History, Winter 2017.