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The Chicago Film Seminar presents "The Gertie Project: Animating Liveness" with Donald Crafton on Thursday, April 13th, at 7:30 pm. In 1914, Winsor McCay, who was America’s leading comic strip artist (“Little Nemo in Slumberland,” etc.), produced a seven minute fully animated film to include in his vaudeville act. Gertie was an adorable trained dinosaur that danced for the audience and responded to the artist’s commands. Bringing the beast to life required thousands of individual hand-made drawings Now, Crafton and his research partners are reanimating the film using the original camera footage and the surviving original drawings. Furthermore, they will reconstruct McCay’s vaudeville act to simulate its live performance environment. Key questions arise concerning the ontology of animation cinema and, indeed, early cinema in general, and their complex relationships to the stage and live performance. Donald Crafton, the Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Professor Emeritus, taught a ...

On February 27th, the Chicago Film Seminar held its annual Graduate Student Panel, featuring talks by Benjamin Aspray of Northwestern University and Sabrina Negri of the University of Chicago. Titled "Gross-out as Gatekeeper: Disgust, Anti-comedy, and Taste Distinction in Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!" Aspray's talk explored gross out aesthetics in sketch comedy. Negri's talk, titled "Film As Archival Object: Analog Film Materials and the Evidentiary Value of Archival Holdings," examined the evidentiary function of film prints in the digital age. Opening with a review that calls Tim and Eric's Awesome Show Good Job! an attack on comedy, Aspray discussed how gross out aesthetics implicate the audience while blurring the boundaries between the highest and lowest forms of comedy. Focusing on gross out comedies that risk alienating the audience through inspiring excessive disgust, Aspray argues that, as gross out aesthetics have moved into the mainstr...