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The next meeting of the Chicago Film Seminar will take place on Thursday, February 8.  Miriam Petty  (Northwestern University) and  Allison McCracken  (DePaul University) will join us to discuss their recent books,  Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood  (University of California Press, 2016) and  Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture   (Duke University Press, 2015), which shared the 2017 SCMS First Book Award.  Allyson Nadia Field  (University of Chicago) will moderate the discussion.  Please save the date and, if you haven’t read the books already, consider adding them to your winter reading list. More information will follow in the new year.

On November 16, the Chicago Film Seminar held its annual Graduate Student Panel, featuring talks by Ilana Emmett of Northwestern University and Mikki Kressbach of the University of Chicago. University of Chicago professor James Lastra provided a response to the talks, which explored, respectively, the role of sound and silence in creating domestic spaces and listener identification on 1940s and ’50s American radio soap operas, and the effect of wearable fitness tracking devices on perceptions of everyday habits and health and fitness. Emmett’s talk, titled “Sound and Silence: Conversation, Emotion, and the Creation of Domestic Spaces on American Radio Soap Operas,” focused on examples from the long-running radio serials The Guiding Light and Ma Perkins in order to show how soundscapes dominated by voices, simple and ordinary sound effects, and silence are able to create the sense of an intimate domestic space that mirrors the listener’s own domestic space. While the sparseness of the s...

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar on November 16 at 7:30 PM for our annual graduate student panel, featuring talks by  Ilana Emmett (Northwestern University) and Mikki Kressbach (University of Chicago). James Lastra (University of Chicago) will serve as respondent. The Graduate Student Panel will be held at DePaul’s Loop Campus in the Daley Building at  14 E. Jackson Blvd., Room LL 102 (use the State Street entrance located at  247 S. State ).  A reception will follow the panel.   See below for more information on the talks and presenters. Sound and Silence: Conversation, Emotion, and the Creation of Domestic Spaces on American Radio Soap Operas by Ilana Emmett From their earliest days on radio, American daytime serials have been associated with their domestic settings. But how exactly did this notion develop within a medium that has no physical location and takes up no space? And what did this aesthetic of domesticity afford or deny for its supposed ...

On Thursday, April 13th, Donald Crafton presented "The Gertie Project: Animating Liveness" at the Chicago Film Seminar. Working with collaborators Marco de Blois and David Nathan, Crafton is restoring Winsor McCay's 1914-15 animated short, popularly known as "Gertie the Dinosaur." A multi-media work that toured as part of a vaudeville act, the film was produced and distributed as a standalone short film, but this version, the version with which most people are familiar, neglects the live performance aspect of the original. Thus, the Gertie project also involves research into McCay and exploration of how modern multi-media technologies could be incorporated into the live performance of the film. The restored version will premiere in 2018, and the research on the film has raised a variety of important points about agency, performance, and "liveness" in animation. Crafton discussed the history of the film and its emergence out of McCay's own explorati...

We're thrilled to announce that W. J. T. Mitchell will be joining the Chicago Film Seminar as respondent next week. Mitchell teaches literature, visual arts, and media at the University of Chicago where he is editor of Critical Inquiry. His books include Iconology, Picture Theory, The Last Dinosaur Book, What Do Pictures Want?, Cloning Terror, Seeing Through Race, and Image Science. He is a well-know hunter of imaginary dinosaurs and a fan of Winsor McCay.

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...