[UWcinema] Pacific Northwest Media Commons] Change for December 2nd Event

[UW Cinema Studies List]

Hello everyone,

I’m writing to inform you that we have unfortunately had to cancel Johanna Gosse’s talk on Ray Johnson. Luckily, Jennifer Bean has offered to step in for the December 2nd slot. She will be presenting her work-in-progress titled “In Defense of the Junk Print: Early Cinema’s Vital Decay.” Full details about the event can be found on the Facebook event page (https://fb.me/e/2syjuFS7H) and below.

Happy break!
-Ben



Title: "In Defense of the Junk Print: Early Cinema’s Vital Decay"

Time: 3:30pm PST, December 2nd

Place: https://seattleu.zoom.us/j/6498489179<https://seattleu.zoom.us/j/6498489179?fbclid=IwAR37nzZApWB_PBvvy0TUXaGBzX32YfezACSchbfcKcwZfuPckrwDDKZxCTI>



Abstract: Cinema’s liveliness is often construed in terms of the represented image and/or sound designed by humans to be seen and/or heard. In like manner, film restoration is often conceived as the intentional (and most often laborious) act of recovering a representation that existed at some point prior to the current existence of the filmic thing itself. These common conceptions involve many fallacies, among them a disregard for the material composition of a given print—silver, gelatin, chemicals, plastic—that are never static or stable, that transform, mutate, or decay with every projection, every unspooling, every touch. When a print no longer conveys the self-same images it presumably once indexed, it is classified as junk: useless, discarded, and utterly lacking in appeal.



This talk places junk at the center of film historical inquiry, urging a materialist conception of cinema over the precepts of aesthetic philosophy. It takes as a case study the extant reels of several mystery-crime serials featuring icons of transgressive femininity, Pearl White and Grace Cunard, that were produced in New York in the 1910s, distributed from Winnipeg to the Yukon in the early 1920s, discarded as trash in 1929, discovered in the late 1970s, transferred to acetate safety stock in the 1980s, and forgotten today in archival vaults in Washington, D.C. and Ottawa.  I argue that the decayed, blurred, warped, and shrunken images are not obstacles that need to be overcome, but rather fundamental signs of the countless, dispersed, anonymous historical forces—both human and non-human—on which the vitality of cinema depends.

Bio:
Jennifer M. Bean is Robert Jolin Osborne Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.  Her publications include the award-winning collections Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (2014) and A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (2003), as well as Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s (2011).  She has served as advisory board member for the National Film Preservation Foundation, the British Film Institute, Turner Classic Movies, and Thanhouser Film Preservation, Inc., and is currently Editor-in-Chief of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal.


Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa (he, him, his)
Assistant Professor of Film Studies
Seattle University
901 12thAve
Seattle, WA 98122
schultzfigub at seattleu.edu
https://www.benjaminschultzfigueroa.com

Author of The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life available for pre-order from UC Press here:

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520342347/the-celluloid-specimen

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