flynn033

Though he cannot join us for Thursday's kickoff session of the 2010-11 Chicago Film Seminar, Dudley Andrew has kindly offered some words about his book What Cinema Is in advance of our panel discussion. Here, he underscores and in some ways expands the sense of the book's core assertions as they were crystallized in the prompt that the CFS officers circulated in advance to our scheduled speakers. "I shouldn't try to inflect Thursday's discussion since I had an entire book to say what I wanted to say, but I do worry that the provocative passage excerpted from the book on the blog's 'invitation' for Thursday may unduly limit discussion. The 'feature film' is not meant to absorb all the attention of the book and shouldn't absorb the attention of the discussion. True, I do call it the bull's eye in the concentric rings of a target, but I also say that we should be concerned with the entire target. Nor is the bull's eye necessaril...

( Note: read to bottom of message for important info about unusual location for this session and follow-up meal!) The Chicago Film Seminar kicks off its annual season of formal presentations on Thursday, September 23 at 6:30pm with a moderated workshop of short responses to Dudley Andrew's What Cinema Is!: Bazin's Quest and Its Charge , the cornerstone text for this year's CFS programming. Hometown all-stars James Lastra (U.Chicago), Lynn Spigel (Northwestern), Virginia Wright Wexman (UIC), and Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Notre Dame) will commence the session with a series of 10-minute reactions to Andrew's book , including the claims it ventures and the larger questions it prompts, all of which will ramify&#151in spirit, thought not always to the letter&#151across the rest of this year's presentations. After our series of invited responses, the workshop session will open outward to a general discussion of the book and the speakers' points, as moderated...