Film & Media Studies Past Lectures

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Chon A. Noriega was the second of our spring 2020 speakers for the Helene Keyssar Distinguished Lecture Series on March 5, 2020. He presented a talk titled, Seeing Ghosts: Latinx Video in the American Art Museum. 

Chon A. Noriega is professor of cinema and media studies and director of the Chicano Studies Research Center, both at UCLA, and consulting curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He has published on media, performance and the visual arts. Noriega has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Home—So Different, So Appealing (2017-18), Asco and Friends: Exiled Portraits (2014), L.A. Xicano (2011-12) and Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement (2008-10). He is currently completing a book on artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz (b. 1934) and an oral history project on Daniel Joseph Martinez (b. 1957).

 “I remember walking through the WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution exhibition with Barbara Hammer in spring 2007. She had insisted that the curators show her films in the museum galleries and play them on a loop, not exile them to a side theater where they would be shown on a schedule. But letting her speak during the walkthrough was another matter. So Barbara grabbed the microphone and stood by her work: ‘Film is an art form,’ she began. Today, media installations and even two-dimensional media works like Barbara’s are quite common in contemporary art exhibitions. This talk is not so much about the aesthetic status of film/video in the gallery space—one dealt with quite well by Kate Mondloch and Catherine Elwes—as it is about the curatorial frameworks that render certain artists and artworks as ‘orphans of modernism’ or ‘ghosts of modernity.’ I will draw on my own experiences as a curator and art historian who was trained in cinema and media studies.” - Chon A. Noriega

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Melissa Hardie was the first of two spring 2020 speakers for the Helene Keyssar Distinguished Lecture Series on February 6, 2020. She presented a talk titled, The Girlfriend Film: Affection and Affiliation.

Long before the Bechdel Test codified and implicitly critiqued the failure of films to make female interaction the focal point of narrative activity, Fred Zinnemann’s 1977 Julia and Claudia Weill’s 1978 Girlfriends both described the difficulty of conceptualizing female affiliation in narrative as well as visual sequences. Within widely different industrial and political contexts, they each narrated the ways in which explicit interdiction and other forms of “sororophobia” arise as forms of plot advancement and affective dislocation in the lives of paired female friends. In Julia, the adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s memoir foreshadows as public historical and political allegory this separation or dislocation. In Girlfriends, the focus is personal and intimate, although the premise of the plot is also that this interdiction is a political and aesthetic matter. In both, an endeavor to separate affection from desire is gestured at as a condition of affection. This lecture explored the ways in which women, in historical fact or imaginative revision, can be brought together as girlfriends.

Melissa Hardie is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Sydney. Much of her work considers “novel objects,” bridging modernist to contemporary textual practices to find unexpected areas of connection between what are usually thought of as discrete periods, practices or genres. Her recent essays have turned to Marielle Heller’s 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, about writer Lee Israel; texts by filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and novelist Djuna Barnes; and George Cukor’s last film, Rich and Famous, which narrates the friendship of two women writers. Her current book investigates how the closet is a critical vector in the remediation of forms of confession and disclosure, focusing on television, cinema, memoir and the starlet. She is also co-editing a book on Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls with Meaghan Morris and Kane Race. Hardie is driven by an ethos of inclusivity, which means she focuses on the underexplored and underrepresented edges of canons and how fields are transformed when inclusion and diversity are made central concerns.

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Brett Story was our fall 2019 speaker for the Helene Keyssar Distinguished Lecture Series on October 10, 2019. She presented a talk titled, Everything is in Everything: Geography, Documentary, and the Political Imagination.

Brett Story is a non-fiction filmmaker and geographer whose work focuses on capitalism, ideology and the production of space. She is the director of the recent feature documentaries The Hottest August (2019) and The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), and is the author of Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America.

In this talk, Dr. Story explored the relationship between research and creative practice, arguing for a non-fiction cinema that incites the radical imagination. With reference to select scenes from her own documentary films as well as other visual material, Story discussed geography as a cinematic method, the dynamic between rigorous research and aesthetic form, and the political stakes of trusting one’s audience.

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Jenni Olson was our spring 2019 speaker for the Helene Keyssar Distinguished Lecture Series on March 19, 2019. She presented a talk titled, "My Completely Impossible and Yet Partially Successful Effort to Stop Time: Jenni Olson on Landscape Filmmaking".

A major voice in the use of film as personal essay, queer documentarian Jenni Olson has been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films for more than twenty years. Her feature-length essay films, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and have earned awards and acclaim worldwide. In this presentation Olson will share select excerpts from her work as well as discussing her unique storytelling style — in her films, contemplative 16mm urban California landscapes are accompanied by lyrical essayistic voiceovers reflecting on an eclectic array of topics ranging from the history of the Mexican American War to the pleasures of pining over unavailable women.

“I’ve been filming the landscapes of San Francisco since just a few years after I arrived here. In capturing these images on film, I’m engaged in a completely impossible and yet partially successful effort to stop time.” — from The Royal Road

Positing the ambition that landscape cinema has the capacity to transform how we see the world, Olson will also discuss some of her cinematic influences and engage attendees in dialogue about broadening our expectations for film form.

In addition to being an award-winning filmmaker, Olson is also an acclaimed LGBT film historian, co-founder of the pioneering LGBT website, PlanetOut.com, proud proprietor of Butch.org and a 2018 MacDowell Colony Fellow.

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Marc Siegel was our fall 2018 speaker for the Helene Keyssar Distinguished Lecture Series on November 8, 2018. He presented a talk titled, "Scaling Down" where he engaged with current strategies for exhibiting moving images. 

Marc Siegel is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. His research and publications focus on issues in queer studies and experimental film. He is co-editor of Film Culture 80: The Legend of Barbara Rubin (2018) and "Jack Smith: Beyond the Rented World" (2014), a special issue of Criticism. His book A Gossip of Images is forthcoming from Duke University Press. He has also curated numerous film series for festivals, museums and galleries, including the Berlinale; Tate Modern (London); CCCB (Barcelona), Bunkier Sztuki (Cracow) and the Goethe Institute (Kolkata). His curatorial projects include the festivals "Camp/Anti-Camp" (2012) and "LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH!" (2009). He is on the advisory board of the Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale and one of the co-founders of the Berlin-based artists' collective CHEAP. 

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The Film & Media Studies Program at Amherst College presented the Helene Keyssar Distinguished Lecture Series, featuring Tung-Hui Hu on March 8, 2018. Hu presented a talk entitled, "Laugh Out Loud: Race and the Manufacture of Digital Emotions". In his talk, Hu explored how persons of color are asked to perform the role of being emotional online. Taking as a starting point artist Yoshua Okón’s installation Canned Laughter (2009), which depicts a fictitious factory in Juárez that cans every type of laughter for export, Hu suggests that a dystopian world when low-wage workers across the US-Mexico border laugh, cry, or otherwise emote for white audiences is not as far away as we might think.

Tung-Hui Hu writes on media art and the politics of digital culture. He is the author of "A Prehistory of the Cloud" (MIT Press, 2015), and three collections of poetry, most recently "Greenhouses, Lighthouses" (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). Hu has received fellowships from the NEA, Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and the San Francisco Foundation, and is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan.

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Stern is the author of Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing, The Smoking Book, and The Scorsese Connection, and she is the co-editor of Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Her work moves between a number of disciplinary locations and spans both theory and production: although her reputation was established in the fields of film theory and history, she is also known for her fictocritical writing. Stern was born and raised in Zimbabwe, and she has taught in a number of universities around the globe (including at the University of Zimbabwe; Glasgow University; La Trobe and Murdoch Universities; The University of New South Wales; and University of California, Irvine) before moving to University of California, San Diego in 2000.

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