Seminars

We will honor David Lynch with a free-wheeling meeting of diverse perspectives. Panel members will discuss their personal histories with Lynch; their considered assessments of how journalism and academia have represented Lynch; their informed perspectives on his impact on the art of international media culture; and their views about the controversies that have arisen about Lynch’s relationship to psychology, physics, dreams, genre, violence, and sexuality. “Nothing will die;/ The stream flows, /The wind blows, /The Cloud fleets, /The heart beats,/ Nothing will die.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as quoted in The Elephant Man (1980)

Beginning as a director of cult “splatstick” horror films, New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson has emerged as a filmmaker of international blockbusters like The Lord of the Rings and King Kong. He is now a major figure in international cinema in his multiple roles of producer, writer, director, actor, editor, and creator of several production companies that, in turn, have provided effects and post-production services for other blockbusters. His name is now above the title, a director thought of as producing state-of-the art fantasy blockbusters, like James Cameron and Steven Spielberg, both of whom Jackson has worked with. In short, he is the paradigm of the contemporary auteur in his use of the media and construction of the “Peter Jackson” persona to support his filmmaking. Jackson has steadfastly refused to work in Hollywood, working instead in his home country, although he makes brilliant use of “Hollywood” in terms of marketing, merchandising, the internet, and fan discourse. His success as a film entrepreneur on a global scale is especially remarkable given that Aotearoa New Zealand—a country of two island with a population of fewer than six million (the country has 4 times as many sheep!)—has been able to sustain only a small and intermittent feature film industry, with the occasional breakthrough of a film in the international art cinema market. Jackson’s work thus explores issues of national cinema, Hollywood in its global context, marketing and financing, adaptation, authorship, and genre, and even, I suggest, the ontology of cinema itself. This presentation of a work on progress addresses these interrelated questions while considering how Jackson’s films speak to New Zealand culture while at the same time working within the traditions of American popular cinema. It is perhaps no coincidence that many of Jackson’s films feature two worlds, the everyday world of reality and a domain of fantasy: Borovnia and the Fourth World in Heavenly Creatures, “The In-between” in The Lovely Bones, Skull Island in King Kong), Middle-earth in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. These dual worlds embody the thematic tensions in the work of a filmmaker who himself straddles two cultures and who responds by embracing the possibilities of cinema.

What space do dressing rooms occupy in our cultural imagination? Why has American cinema insisted on visiting these otherwise secluded sites inhabited only by performers? How has Hollywood lifted the curtain on dressing rooms, thereby making a space that is strange feel very familiar? In this presentation, I recount my journey through the dressing rooms of American cinema in the creation of my recent book, The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film (RUP 2025). An examination of a spatial trope across time, The Dressing Room reveals similar thematics and formal aesthetics amongst genres as disparate as the musical and the thriller, the melodrama and the superhero movie. The book also foregrounds specific archetypal inhabitants of the space, social actors who appear again and again, such as the wife and mother, the maid, and the leading man. But while The Dressing Room is in many ways a traditional example of academic prose, its words were conceived, shaped, and ultimately expanded by the practice of videographic criticism. Written with sounds and images from behind the scenes as I drafted chapters, and as supplemental “texts” to the book itself, videographic essays were instrumental in how I came to understand the dressing rooms of American cinema for their spectacular, cinematic qualities and significance.

As Hollywood’s final studio-trained child who successfully transitioned into adult stardom—just as the studio system itself was disintegrating—Natalie Wood embodies temporality as few other actors would or could. In her roles and publicity-constructed persona spanning four decades, Wood mediated critical intersections of Hollywood and cultural histories. She emerged as a child actress in the mid-1940s and early 1950s, most notably in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), when children and family were linchpins in the postwar return to normalcy. Although Hollywood faced Paramount Decision divestitures and earlier consent decree challenges, it maintained its own “normalcy” in appealing to broadly-based family audiences. Emerging as a teen in the mid-1950s, when the term “teenager” first appeared in sociological discourse and when Hollywood first discovered this untapped demographic, Wood co-starred in the iconic Rebel Without a Cause (1955)—just as television, adult-oriented European films, and political divisions were fracturing a previously unified audience. As a twenties-something adult in the early 1960s, Wood was cast in roles like Splendor in the Grass (1961), signaling both the culture and Hollywood’s unease in responding to and representing women’s sexual independence and autonomy. Equally uneasy was the industry’s transition from mogul-driven projects to independent, agent-driven production packages. Like Hollywood, itself caught in contradictory currents, the studio-trained Wood embraced old Hollywood stardom, while simultaneously aspiring for acceptance as a serious actor—a newly perceived dichotomy that Method training publicly promoted. Part of a larger book project, this talk will concentrate on Gypsy (1962) and Inside Daisy Clover (1965)—two of Wood’s most self-reflexive roles and ones that are allegorical of an industry in transition. In these films, Wood’s characters mature as performers from childhood or adolescence into adult stardom on stage or screen—echoing Wood’s own career trajectory and inviting speculation about the specific ways in which Natalie Wood, as a former child star, was positioned for audiences who had witnessed her maturation onscreen.

Particularly in post-pandemic times it has become commonplace to tell ourselves that children are resilient. Stories of resilience emphasize the virtues of grit and creativity, qualities that seem “natural” to kids, as keys to success in an uncertain world. Yet children’s films reveal cracks in the edifice of this ideological comfort. This presentation examines the ways in which the music and sound effects in Disney’s animated films Encanto (2021), Wish (2023), and Inside Out 2 (2024) articulate a contradictory position on the meaning and value of childhood. Disney would have us believe that childhood is a period both innocent and traumatic, a split mapped onto its narration. Building on a tradition established in its earliest animated features, which include a vocal chorus and specific instrumental scoring practices, the soundscapes of these recent films present a nostalgic conception of a sacred childhood. In contrast, the films’ narrative structures rely on the notion that resilience is a necessary component of childhood in troubled times. By looking at particular sonic techniques, I will show how Disney asks us to buy into the fantasy that its stories enhance the “magic” of childhood while simultaneously allowing us to believe that kids can overcome years of societal neglect. As such, a detailed look at these soundscapes lifts the veil of innocence to expose the traumatic underpinnings of specific characters. Encanto, Wish, and Inside Out 2 transform individual traumas into emotionally moving rites of passage that we only imagine to be universal, revealing yet again that Disney has never really been for children at all.

In a media environment that blends cinema, streaming services, video games, comic books, and graphic novels, is the definition of film altering? This presentation examines the impact of these large, multiplatform franchises—particularly Disney’s Marvel and Lucasfilm properties, as well as Warner Brothers’ more troubled attempts at replicating these extended universes with its DC Comics content—not only on storytelling structure and character development, but also on the extent to which popular film can balance artistic authenticity with the requirements of a vast, interconnected juggernaut of media technologies. In an interdisciplinary approach that combines audience studies, genre theory, and that references the tenets of media-ecology theory with its probing of how technology guides the evolution of culture, its values, and artistic sensibilities, the discussion will ask what will happen to popular entertainment in a possible future where “multimedia content” might replace “film” and the movie theater has given way to a networked series of content-delivery outlets.

What happens when a movie studio—that placeless place set apart from the world to better shape our desires on screen—is invaded, plundered, and wrecked by war? My research on the eclectic uses, and abuses, of Cinecittà through World War II and its aftermath has been bound up with an exploration of its historical and fictional mise-en-scènes, the flipping of location and set, the inherently metamorphic nature of the studio, and its own role in shaping events. A walled and gated miniature city, commissioned as part of a major Fascist plan for urban development on the Roman periphery, Cinecittà was transmorphed when occupying armies, prisoners, partisans, intelligence agents, war criminals, and refugees from across the globe found themselves in the broken dream factory. This presentation joins Cinecittà’s geopolitical circumstances, its regional and architectural features, its cultural and imaginary charge, with new archival findings on the German occupation’s ravaging of the studio, intimating still-buried knowledge and unburied ghosts.

The legacy of the National Film Board of Canada’s Studio D, the first publicly funded women’s film unit in the world, is fraught with hard lessons and even harder-earned victories for feminist media arts activism. Founded in 1974 by Kathleen Shannon, with seed money from the United Nations for the upcoming International Women’s Year, the Studio produced approximately 130 films, earned 3 Academy Awards (among many other accolades), and trained countless women in all areas of production. Despite such unqualified success, internal politicking, devastating budget cuts, and a transformed Canadian feminist culture resulted in its closure in 1996. The NFB Commissioner promised that better, more inclusive programs for women would replace it. Instead, women’s participation at the NFB dropped precipitously, resulting in repeated policy adjustments over the decades just to recover lost ground. Women’s overall employment in the film and media industries of Canada remains staggeringly low while an explicitly feminist lens on major social, political, and cultural issues is noticeably absent. Arguably more than in any other nation, feminist documentary was a cornerstone of the Canadian women’s movement due to the efforts of Studio D. They didn’t just produce films, they toured widely, hosting public discussions and meeting with politicians and community leaders. Their emphasis was on connecting with everyday women, eschewing experimentalism and theory in favor of the realist aesthetic for which the NFB was renowned. That often led to accusations of dogmatism, upholding a rigid definition of what issues and positions – not to mention aesthetics – counted as feminist. In this presentation, Dr. Rebecca Sullivan will provide a comprehensive overview of the Studio D corpus in order to assess anew its lasting influence on feminist film. Too often, feminist community building is criticized for a lack of attention to its own roots and inter-generational connections. Histories alone cannot overcome those problems as they remain narratives of the past and so their applicability to present-day contexts is only obliquely referenced. Legacy is more than history or retrospective. Legacy begins with acknowledging the present’s indebtedness to the past in order to advance current ideas and practices. It avoids sweeping generalizations in order to unlock the many diverse lessons Studio D left for contemporary feminist media arts creation and criticism.

Mainstream Hindi and regional cinemas in India have long represented Africa and Africans in passing, regulating the continent and its people to short, bit part stereotypical depictions that underscore fantasies of Indian racial and civilizational superiority. African men, in particular, have been variously positioned as hypersexualized, as terrorists, or, quite simply, as primitive subjects that easily double with India’s tribal and oppressed caste Others. In several recent indie films produced on the subcontinent, however, there has been an interesting shift. Nigerian men have been cast in lead roles, opening up space for complex character development and depictions of a subtle relationality with their male Indian counterparts. While this move to center African men doesn’t necessarily negate a racializing gaze, it locates and destabilizes it within homosocial cross-cultural camaraderie. Drawing from a decade of ethnographic research with African nationals living in India and thinking through three films, the first about a Nigerian football (soccer) player in Kerala, the second focusing on a Nigerian student in Delhi, and the third, and final, Professor Dattatreyan’s soon-to-be-finished ethno-fiction film focusing on an aspiring actor, friend, and long-term ethnographic interlocutor from Nigeria; he explores the particular registers of masculine intimacy that emerge when African men, specifically Nigerian men, become protagonists in Indian cinema worlds.

This book presentation will be anything other than a pro forma book talk. In the spirit of “Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation,” I will focus on the process of researching and writing Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia UP, 2024), which comes out in March and was vividly shaped over the course of a decade by ongoing, collaborative feminist projects in archival film curating. How can humanities scholars team up with film archivists and community programmers? How else might we approach these creative openings for collective critical thought and material praxis going forward? This un-book talk will traverse the trajectory of an interdisciplinary monograph: from the discovery of hundreds of obituaries for women who allegedly died from laughing too hard to the production of a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set. And beyond!

The Cuban Revolution is now 65 years old. Founded in March 1959, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) continues to curate the official history of the revolution. But what of other versions? Professor Carlson’s presentation will explore how three independent Cuban feature films of the digital 21st century propose alternative visions of revolutionary history. All tell nuanced, deep-diving stories that eschew the simple binaries of the Cold War. Sin Alas / Wingless(USA/Cuba, 2015), directed by Ben Chace, follows the memories of an elderly writer as he reconstructs a love affair played out amid the cultural politics of the early revolutionary years. La Obra del Siglo / Project of the Century (Cuba, 2015), directed by Carlos Quintela, portrays the tensions among a grandfather, father, and grandson living in the same household in a ghost town, the nearly abandoned CEN (Ciudad Electro Nuclear) built to service a never completed nuclear plant launched in partnership with the Soviet Union. In Caja Negra / Black Box (Cuba, 2021), directed by Kiki Alvarez, a granddaughter discovers the life of her grandmother through the diaries she kept in the 1960s. In addition to analyzing the historiographic implications of these works, Carlson’s presentation will pose two contextual questions: What is “independent” Cuban cinema? And how does it fit in global networks of exhibition and distribution?

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) observes the domestic life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family in their villa just outside the gates of the concentration camp. Meticulously researched, the film’s detached approach to its subjects has elicited a range of critical responses. Amy Herzog will read the film in relation to its framing of historical violence, and its attention to the gendered labor of fascism. Artist Zoe Beloff will join the conversation to discuss the political ramifications of representing genocide in film, and the reception of Zone of Interest during the Israel-Gaza war.

The word diagnosis comes directly from the Greek, and its meaning has changed very little through the years. It implies discrimination, separation, decision: the knowledge of something that is not something else. In the culture of medicine where the word is mostly used, diagnosis has practical and irreversible consequences. This talk will explore a form of diagnostic cinema that took shape in psychiatry mostly after World War II—psychiatry being, with neurology, one of the few forms of medicine that based its diagnoses on the way that people moved and talked. We will consider three examples spanning the interwar period to the Cold War in North America: Symptoms in Schizophrenia (1938), produced by a psychologist at the University of Rochester; the National Film Board of Canada’s Mental Symptoms series (1951); and UCLA’s Psychiatric Interview Series (1959-61). The latter is especially interesting given the viral afterlife of one of the subjects filmed, a young man with catatonic schizophrenia whose ten-minute interview now has twenty-four million views and counting. In addition to the films themselves—their structure, their style, their various ways of grasping illness by means of technique—we will also consider the place of such films in a visual economy for which they were hardly destined. Today anyone is free to assume the role of expert.

What does it mean to both see the world and to construct the world through a queer lens? This discussion endeavors to explore this question, providing a theoretical framework for understanding what it means to see queerly — as the title states — and for interpreting the work of queer film directors operating in both mainstream and independent cinematic spaces, industrial contexts, and across both queer and heteronormative narratives. Based on my research of existing scholarship in the study of queer filmmakers, which tends to focus on esoteric ideas of aesthetics rather than analyzing their application, Seeing Queerly is unique in its approach to articulating what a queer aesthetic might look like, and how it might be applied to out directors who compose their own screenplays for the telling of both queer and heteronormative stories. I begin with a look at the work of John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925), who was, as recounted by art historian Robert Hughes, “the most vivid American presence on the Anglo-European cultural stage in the late nineteenth-century” (248). Born in Florence to expatriate parents, Sargent and his three sisters led a nomadic life throughout the continent until he settled in Paris to begin his studies with Charles Auguste Emile Durand, the noted portraitist and teacher. Under his tutelage, Sargent developed the techniques that distinguished his own ideas of portraiture, related to the l’art pour l’art theory espoused by his dearest friend, Henry James. Sargent believed this theory allowed portraits to involve the spectator – creating a “performance to reflect upon, admire, enjoy for its own sake” (Hughes 250). Sargent, now labeled a gay artist, sketched men and painted women quite differently. And here is where we can apply a queer eye to his developing perspective. While Sargent’s portraits of the grande dames of Gilded Age society developed from appearing academic, in respect to the parameters of the French and English salon culture, they developed over time to become reflections of an engaged perspective, capturing so much going on under the guise of social formalities. But to develop that method of capturing the human behind the frippery, Sargent sketched and painted male nudes, many surfacing only after his death. To our knowledge, Sargent never sketched nude women – even in the salon. But his portfolio is filled with more than 100 sketches of naked men, many of his valet Nicola D’Inverno and his longtime model Thomas E. McKeller, a Boston elevator operator. In addition, many of his watercolors, beginning in 1911 after turning away from society portraiture, are of men cavorting in the water, naked in their homosocial privacy. The second part of the talk will look at the work of Todd Haynes, notably one of the most out of the Hollywood auteurs. One of the first architects of the “New Queer Cinema” with his debut film Poison (1991), Todd Haynes’ work continues to use and aesthetic of color and light to render a queer experience in his queer and heteronormative texts. Looking at his films Poison and Safe (1995), I will delineate his queer aesthetic in respect to color and light, using the method derived with Sargent’s work. Then I will show how it operates in his pastiche films that tell of women’s experiences through a stylized Hollywood lens: Far From Heaven (2002) and his miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), each applying Haynes’ aesthetic of color and light developed in his queer work. Moving from Sargent’s paintings to Haynes’ films, I argue, reveals how we might be able to read films authored by queer writer/directors in a new way, steeped in the artistic methods that help make the personal political.

“The Patty Duke Show,” the ABC domestic sitcom that aired from 1963-1966, was known for three things: 1) its theme song; 2) its split screen technique enabling teen star Patty Duke to seem to appear as the two “identical cousins” Patty and Cathy Lane in a single shot and 3) being the first show to be named after a child star. Yet the series has been virtually ignored by both television scholars and social historians of the 1960s, and when it has been taken up, it’s often to be dismissed; one feminist mass media scholar writes “Identical cousins?? Get real!” before damning the show as “a turkey.” Foul or not, we argue that the premise of “The Patty Duke Show,” along with the way it articulates twinning and doubling, offers insights into central preoccupations of early-to-mid-1960s American thought. While not interested in “positioning” the series ideologically (e.g., as conservative or radical), we find that it raises concerns and contradictions in topics ranging from JFK’s “Camelot” to American cosmopolitanism; to mass conformity, agency, stasis, and marriage.

For decades, different film theories have assigned seemingly antithetical positions to the contents of the image. Semiotics understands the image as a sign and is unconcerned with its referent, the real-world object it shows; phenomenology insists on its centrality. My presentation argues for a productive combination of both approaches by focusing on the cinematic representation of ocean liners, whose (film-)historical role has long been neglected. Proceeding from the premise that ocean liners are movie stars whose personas position them somewhere between reality and a film’s diegesis, I bring both schools of thought into dialog. Drawing on theories of cinematic experience, I argue that viewers invest in the ship as cinematic object via its name, recognizable form, public image, and, if applicable, their own encounters and histories with it. Casting famous liners, I argue, generates a “poetics of referentiality.” My case study is Billy Wilder’s use of the French liner Liberté in his 1954 romantic comedy Sabrina. I explore how Wilder capitalizes on the ship as a “floating signifier” in a literal understanding of the term that reaches beyond its semiotic origins—so as to turn Sabrina into a subtle but pervasive critique of capitalism and the transactional nature of human relations.