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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...

Join the Chicago Film Seminar on February 27th at 7:30 pm for our annual graduate student panel, featuring graduate students Benjamin Aspray and Sabrina Negri. Zoran Samardzija will serve as respondent. Gross-out as Gatekeeper: Disgust, Anti-comedy, and Taste Distinction in Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! by Benjamin Aspray Psychologist Susan B. Miller describes disgust as “the gatekeeper emotion,” and indeed, the wide-ranging scholarly concepts of disgust almost unanimously understand it as signifying the transgression of a boundary, whether biological, cultural or social. Hence its use in comedy, a close ally of transgression - particularly gross-out comedy, the film and TV subgenre centered on the human body’s impolite functions. But whereas many accounts of gross-out comedy understand it as a populist discourse, celebrating universal animal drives in defiance of civil society’s inhibitions, few consider its potential for the contrary: deliberately alienating the viewer and flo...

At the inaugural meeting of the Chicago Film Seminar for the 2016-2017 academic year, Aymar Jean Christian of Northwestern University presented on his current research project, Open TV Beta, a production and distribution platform for independent web series and pilots by queer, trans and cis-women and artists of color. Mobilizing the concept of scale to analyze the development of work by Open TV artists, Christian argued that “production value” has different meanings at different production scales. For small scale productions, like the work produced through and for Open TV, Christian argued that production value no longer depends upon a logic of scarcity (in which resources are rare and competition for resources is key) and that instead production value resides in a logic of capacity (in which resources are seen as something to be mined from what is available in community). In his talk, Christian focused on how space, time, and culture were utilized in Open TV productions from the 2016 ...

Join the Chicago Film Seminar on October 20th at 7:30 pm for " The Art of Scale: Production Value in Networked Television" with  Aymar Jean Christian of Northwestern University.  Neil Verma will serve as respondent. "Scale" dominates how technology and entertainment executives discuss their work today, and for them, scale almost always signifies "big" – whether as a noun to imply the size of capital available for production or as a verb to imply a process to facilitate capital accumulation while keeping costs low. Yet scale by definition is relational, a way to orient collective perspectives. A scale allows agents to approximate size in relation to other agents, projects, or objects so it is conceivable to collaborators and stakeholders. Scholars in media studies have for too long taken for granted the implicit bias toward "bigness" in television and new media, limiting our conception of television’s representational possibilities. The networked ...

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar on Thursday, April 28th, 7:00PM, for a roundtable discussion, titled "Defining the Field." Bringing together scholars with diverse perspectives on the field, this workshop opens up a discussion of the evolving contours of cinema studies as it confronts new media and technologies, new methods, and new intellectual and institutional challenges. The conversation will focus broadly on the objects and approaches of cinema and media studies as they are transforming with the academic landscape.The workshop participants will include: Gerald Butters, Aurora University D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago Salomé Skvirsky, University of Chicago Neil Verma, Northwestern University Pam Wojcik, University of Notre Dame Bios:  Gerald R. Butters Jr. is a Professor of History at Aurora University. He is author of the following books - Beyond Blaxploitation (2016), From Sweetback to Superfly: Race and Film Audiences in Chicago's Loop, 1970-1975 (2015...

On February 18th, Chicago Film Seminar hosted a graduate student panel on science fiction and Soviet documentary style. Our panelists were Stephen Babish (Northwestern University) and Zdenko Mandusic (University of Chicago). A response was provided by Professor Joshua Malitsky (Indiana University). In his paper, titled "Empty Spaces: Large-Scale Plans and Urban Dystopia in  A Clockwork Orange  and  THX 1138 ,” Babish began by outlining the methodology and major claims of his dissertation project on the capacity of science fiction films of the 1970s to produce a critical architectural space through their engagement with the modernist built environment.  It then traced two case studies that analyze the way in which films from this era exploited notoriously incomplete and over-budget large-scale modernist construction projects to critique both their forms and the ideologies underlying them.    To do so, it utilized archival research into both the papers of the...