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On Thursday, April 7 at 6:30pm, Michelle Citron (Columbia College) will present "Is This Cinema? Narrative and the Digital," a talk and screening of her short films. Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago) will provide the response. The meeting will take place, as always, in the Flaxman Theater, Room 1307, of the School of the Art Institute's building at 112 S. Michigan Ave. Citron describes her talk as follows: "My reading of Andrew’s What Cinema Is! raises the question: How far can you push the medium (be it film, video, or digital) and still call it cinema? I will show two works, Leftovers (2010) and Mixed Greens (2004). Leftovers , a linear narrative created from photographs, 16mm film, and cameraless digital images, raises issues about the camera and the real (in Bazin's sense). Mixed Greens , an interactive non-linear narrative created from photographs, 16mm film, video, and cameraless digital images, foregrounds issues about editing/ellipsis and aud...

On Thursday, March 3, Elena Gorfinkel (University of Wisconsin – Madison) presented her talk, “’The Gawker in the Text’: Allegories of Reception in 1960s Sexploitation Film” at the Chicago Film Seminar. Jeffrey Sconce of Northwestern provided the response. In this talk, Gorfinkel discusses the reflexive, self-referential nature of sexploitation films, particularly around the generic problem of ‘consuming sex’, to better understand the specific conditions of reception of adult films and sexualized media in the public culture of the 1960s. Gorfinkel notes that sexploitation films of the 1960s, refracting the era’s contentious sexual politics, frequently retained a dystopian tenor, in which sexual activity and exchange often came at a grave narrative cost. The paradox of sexploitation films, she argues, is the that the expanding sexual marketplace is both exploited economically and aesthetically and disdained rhetorically, negotiating the tensions between strategies of display and denial....

On Feb 10, 2011 (rescheduled from the blizzard-plagued previous week), Gregory Waller of Indiana University presented his talk "Tracking the Non-Theatrical: The American Cinema in 1915." The response was provided by Northwestern's Scott Curtis. In this talk, Waller takes a thorough, wide-ranging look at American non-theatrical film production and exhibition in the year 1915 to argue for a re-orientation of our conception of film history in which commercially-released films are but one aspect of “the cinema” among several. Waller focused on the circulation and exhibition of moving pictures outside of what we normally think of as the film industry and the traditional movie theater, as well as the production of educational or industrial film. Waller argues that designations such as “non-theatrical” and “educational” must be understood in a not-so-stable dialectic with “theatrical” and “entertainment,” terms that were perpetually evolving. Particular attention was paid to the...

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, March 3 to welcome Elena Gorfinkel (UW-Milwaukee) for her talk, "The Gawker in the Text: Allegories of Reception in 1960s Sexploitation Cinema." Jeffrey Sconce (Northwestern) will provide the response. The CFS will be held, as always, in the Flaxman Theater, Room 1307 of the School of the Art Institute's building at 112 S. Michigan Ave. Thursday, March 3 at 6:30pm Elena Gorfinkel , Assistant Professor, Art History and Film Studies, UW-Milwaukee "The Gawker in the Text: Allegories of Reception in 1960s Sexploitation Cinema" Respondent: Jeffrey Sconce , Northwestern Gorfinkel describes her talk as follows: "This talk treats the historical aesthetics of 1960s sexploitation films through the lens of reflexivity. It argues that American sexploitation films, in their style, modes of address, narrative preoccupations and thematic tropes, consistently refer outwards towards their conditions of reception. ...