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Please join the Chicago Film Seminar on Thursday, Jan 13 (please note new date) at 6:30 pm to welcome Dan Bashara for his talk "Useful in the Abstract: UPA Cartoons and Pre-War Modernism." Bashara is a PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University. Bruce Jenkins from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 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, Jan 13 at 6:30pm Dan Bashara, "Useful in the Abstract: UPA Cartoons and Pre-War Modernism" Respondent: Bruce Jenkins (SAIC) For more information on this and other CFS events, please visit our website at http://chicagofilmseminar.blogspot.com/ Bashara describes his talk as follows: In histories of animation, the fabled "modern" style of the post-WWII American cartoon, perhaps best exemplified by the film studio United Productions of America and its Os...

The Chicago Film Seminar welcomes Dartmouth's Mark Williams to deliver his talk "Closely Belated? Thoughts on Real-Time Media Publics and Minority Report ." Williams describes his talk as follows: Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002) is renowned as an exemplary instance of the cyber-noir thriller. Even in an age of media convergence and consolidation, motion pictures can function as key sites of interlocution for the structuring of desires and anxieties about political and socio-economic dynamics and effects. Minority Report is rather rich in such opportunities for analysis, although despite the assuredness of its conceit and dramatic structure, I find more compelling what the film cannot resolve quite so neatly--what we might call its belated thematics. Via methods that derive from television studies, I will consider the film in relation to what I call "real-time" desires that condition its configurations of digital culture, the techno-future, and personal/so...

On Thursday, Nov 4, Andrew Johnston of the University of Chicago delivered his talk “Coding Patterns: The Algorithmic Mechanisms of John Whitney, Larry Cuba and Early Digital Animation,” from a chapter of his dissertation. Jon Cates, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, provided the response. Johnston proposed an understanding of digitality based in what he likes to call the “stuff of the digital” – its materials, the processes by which it works and is made, its hardware and its software. To do this he explored the techniques used by abstract animators John Whitney and Larry Cuba to create digital films in the 1960s and 1970s. Using research from interviews he conducted with the filmmakers and programmers as well as from a study of the Whitney archives, Johnston described the complex and time-consuming (as well as time-delayed) methods by which Whitney and Cuba developed computer animation from what might be understood as the aesthetics of the algorithm. Whitney’s animation...

On Thursday, Oct. 14, the Chicago Film Seminar convened at the SAIC for its first regular meeting of the year (following the September roundtable discussion that kicked off this year’s programs). Christian Quendler of the University of Innsbruck, currently a visiting scholar at Northwestern University, delivered a talk entitled “Camera Eye and Dispositif: Descartes vs. Vertov,” from a longer essay-in-progress. Yuri Tsivian from the University of Chicago provided the response. Quendler’s talk brought together the philosophical implications of a pre-cinematic notion of the camera eye rooted in Descartes’ philosophy of subject and Vertov’s notion of the kino-eye. Following Joachim Paech’s writings on Deleuze, Quendler posited a nuanced gradation of the medial aspects of dispositif by adding the rhetorical notion of the disposition and the psychological category of disposition to the discussion. Using Descartes’ and Vertov’s competing models of camera eye, Quendler mapped out the interrela...

It's that time again! This Thursday, November 4 , the Chicago Film Seminar welcomes Andrew Johnston , a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago to present his talk "Coding Patterns: The Algorithmic Mechanisms of John Whitney, Larry Cuba and Early Digital Animation." Jon Cates , Associate Professor of Film, Video, New Media & Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will provide the formal response before opening Q&A to the whole group. Here is the brief abstract Johnston has submitted in advance of his talk: This paper examines the development of digital filmmaking and animation technologies in the 1960s and 1970s through an analysis of John Whitney and Larry Cuba’s films. Whitney made some of the first digital animations while an artist in residence at IBM from 1966-1969 and later worked with a variety of programmers through the 1970s, including Larry Cuba on "Arabesque" (1975). Through an analysis of the materials employed in the ...

This Thursday, October 14 , the Chicago Film Seminar begins its regular season meetings with Christian Quendler of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and currently a visitor to the Radio/TV/Film Department of Northwestern University. He will present his talk "Camera-Eye and Dispositif: Ren&#233 Descartes vs. Dziga Vertov." The response will be provided by Yuri Tsivian of the University of Chicago. What follows is a brief abstract Quendler has submitted for this talk: Metaphors of the camera eye are among the oldest and most powerful tropes to depict human vision and subjectivity. As a proto-cybernetic metaphor that lends itself both to anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic readings, the camera eye has become a double agent of subjectivity. It has served as midwife for a modern philosophy of the subject in Ren&#233 Descartes's discourse on Optics and as a gravedigger for classical notions of subjectivity in Dziga Vertov's radically constructivist aesthetics ...

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...