Events
Past Events
June 2018
Lukács and the World: Rethinking Global Circuits of Cultural Production
It is again time to take serious account of the thought of Georg Lukács. Thanks, no doubt, to the persistence of Frederic Jameson’s defense, the waning of intellectual currents generally hostile to Lukács including certain strains of American cultural studies, post-Marxism, and poststructuralism, as well as the mounting pressure being brought to bear on modernism as an unproblematically valorized cultural-historical category, the last few years have seen something of a renaissance in Lukács studies. From special editions of journals, ambitious…
Find out more »October 2018
Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm
In the twentieth century, U.S. filmmakers generated tens of thousands of hours of newsfilm that was screened in movie theaters or viewed on television sets across the country. This vast output of news coverage, covering the period from the 1910s to the 1970s, has not been matched by a scholarly effort to understand it. To address this persistent oversight, this symposium will, for the first time in the United States, bring together many of the nation’s leading newsfilm scholars and…
Find out more »November 2018
Mediating Extraction
Join us for a panel and discussion about the ways that film, photography and new media inform how industrial extraction and its environmental and social consequences are witnessed, documented, and memorialized. The panel includes presentations by: Sharon Daniel (Film + Media, UC Santa Cruz) on her interactive documentary work-in-progress about social and environmental challenges in the isolated Inupiaq village of Kivalina, Alaska. Mona Damluji (Film and Media Studies) on the cultural infrastructure of corporate media sponsorship and oil extraction in Iraq.…
Find out more »Through and Beyond the Politics of Carbon
This panel presentation is part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective.
Find out more »February 2019
April 2019
November 2021
Digital Image as Material Object: Archaeologies of Computer Graphics – Jacob Gaboury, Dept. of Film & Media, University of California at Berkeley
The computer is not a visual medium. And yet computation as we know it today has been fundamentally shaped by computer graphics. It was the desire to make computation legible and accessible to human users that drove researchers to develop systems for graphical human-machine communication, and while visual representation is in no way essential to the theory of computing or the practice of procedural calculation, computer graphics played a significant role in the development of the computer as a technical…
Find out more »April 2022
A Roundtable Discussion with Filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako
Please join us for a 90-minute roundtable discussion with the renowned filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, who was born in Mauritania, raised in Mali, and currently resides in France. He is the director and writer of a number of award winning films including Life on Earth (1999), Waiting for Happiness (2002), Bamako (2006), and Timbuktu (2014). He recently staged his first opera, Le Vol du Boli that is currently being staged in Paris at the Théâtre de la Ville, and is in…
Find out more »October 2022
Satyajit Ray and the Sense of Wonder
This three-day conference and attendant film series have been organized to celebrate the birth centenary of the renowned Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1921-1992). Most critical evaluations of Ray, which tend to focus on his films while overlooking his considerable literary and design outputs, have consecrated him as a modernist master or a postcolonial auteur. Such discussions are often couched in terms of modernity and tradition, Orientalism and nativism, objectivity and irrationality, skepticism and enchantment, art cinema and popular cinema. Instead,…
Find out more »February 2023
Theory Now
The organizing principle of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2023 annual conference is to explore the critical and ongoing work of theory in our field. Film Studies emerged as a discipline in the late 1960s and 1970s in the wake of an explosive interest in theory. This interest prompted robust discussion and debate about politics and textual analysis; spectatorship and psychoanalysis; feminist film theory; and fundamental questions regarding gender, race, and sexuality. More than fifty years later, how do we understand theory…
Find out more »May 2023
GCLR Workshop – Translation Across Media
GCLR Workshop “Translation Across Media” on Friday, May 19, 1pm-6.30pm Wallis Annenberg Conference Room, SSMS 4315 The Workshop focuses on translation as a technique for cultural production. Our focus will be on the relationship between translation and media such as literary writing (in print and manuscript), film, photography, and computers, and the way these and other media technologies underwrite different ways of addressing the question of what it means to translate. Some questions we hope to address include: what happens to…
Find out more »May 2024
A Return to the African Personality: Intergenerational Conversations
Thursday, May 23, 2024, 7:00 pm Screening with introduction and Q&A at the Pollock Theater Noorie (dir. Manmohan Krishna and Yash Chopra, 1979, 114’) Professor Katie Young (Concordia University) will discuss the reception of the Super-Hit Indian Romance film Noorie in Northern Ghana (Dagomba Region) up to the present day. She will be in conversation with Francis Yeboah (PhD Student, Film and Media Studies, UCSB). Francis’s work is focused on exhibition practices in Ghana. See: https://www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/pollock-events/cwc-global-noorie/ A Return to the…
Find out more »November 2024
Lisa Yin Han – Deepwater Alchemy – Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor
Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor makes the case the historical developement of deep sea media technologies has been complicit in perpetuating logics of extraction, exploitation, and militarism in our global oceans. From towed hydrophones to networked seafloor observation, the hunt for resources had driven the imaging of the ocean floor and vice versa, imperiling fragile deep ocean ecosystems in…
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