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Screen Arts and Cultures, University of Michigan

THIS WEEK'S EVENTS  

The Act of Killing 

Pre-Screening Q&A/Discussion
Tuesday, March 11
5:00 PM
Rackham Amphitheater

Film Screening
Wednesday, March 12
7:00 PM

Michigan Theater

 

In this chilling and inventive Academy Award® nominated documentary, executive produced by Errol Morris (The Fog Of War) and Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man), the filmmakers examine a country where death squad leaders are celebrated as heroes, challenging them to reenact their real-life mass-killings in the style of the American movies they love. The hallucinatory result is a cinematic fever dream, an unsettling journey deep into the imaginations of mass-murderers and the shockingly banal regime of corruption and impunity they inhabit. Shaking audiences at the 2012 Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals and winning an Audience Award at the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival, The Act of Killing is an unprecedented film that, according to The Los Angeles Times, “could well change how you view the documentary form.”

Co-organized by Markus Nornes, SAC Chair. 
Co-sponsored by the UM Center for Southeast Asian Studies.



 


LSA Major/Minor Expo

Wednesday, March 12
11:00 am - 3:00 pm
Michigan Union Ballroom



UM students will get a chance to learn about the SAC program at this event.
 


Haidostian Annual Distinguished Lecture:
Missing Images: Textures of Memory in Diaspora

Wednesday, March 12
7:00 - 9:00 PM
Helmut Stern Auditorium, U-M Museum of Art

In her lecture, Manoogian visiting fellow Marie-Aude Baronian will consider the relationship between images and memory in the context of diaspora. In particular, it will address the meaning of (filmic) images for remembering the genocide and thereby consolidating the Armenian (Western) diaspora. Because there are few graphic images of this violent history and because those that do exist are not circulated in the public visual sphere, this lecture will look at various filmic strategies that not only compensate for this lack of representation, but also more profoundly interrogate the very status of images for diasporic communities in today’s visual culture. Some contemporary filmmakers and visual artists—such as Atom Egoyan, Gariné Torossian, and Mekhitar Garabedian—challenge at once the aesthetic qualities of images and their crucial role in constructing memory. Baronian will reflect upon the “aesthetics of displacement” that characterize their visual enterprise as an obsessive, repetitive yet lacunary necessity for connecting the past to a tangible here and now.

 


Q&A with Lynda Obst, Film/TV Producer and Author

Thursday, March 13
8:00 PM
Chem Building Room 1300

 



Lynda Obst is an author and film & television producer who has made such films as: The Fisher KingSleepless in SeattleThe SiegeOne Fine DayHope FloatsContact, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Obst executive produced NBC's Emmy-nominated, two-part miniseries, The 60's, and is currently an Executive Producer on TVLAND's Hot In Cleveland, and syfy’s Helix. Obst’s upcoming projects include the Christopher Nolan feature Interstellar to be released in November. As an author, Obst wrote the best-selling book, Hello He Lied: And Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches, and recently released her second book about the entertainment industry, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, an LA TIMES bestseller, published in June by Simon & Schuster.  Obst is currently producing both film and Television projects out of her office at Sony pictures.

 


SACAPALOOZA! 
Screen Arts & Cultures Declaration and Information Event

Friday, March 14
1:00 - 3:00 PM
Studio A, 1440 North Quad



 


Working the Fractures:
How Trans Women Artists Are Changing Digital Play


Friday, March 14
1:00 PM
Space 2435 North Quad

 



E-mail digitalenvironmentsworkshop@gmail.com for more information.

 


The Visual Culture Workshop presents
"Modernism and Aesthetic Experience: a Workshop" 
with Professor Justus Nieland (Michigan State) and Professor Burke Hilsabeck (Oberlin) 
 
Friday, March 14
3:00 PM
3241 Angell Hall 

Lunch will be served.

In this collaborative workshop, two scholars will visit to present and discuss new scholarship on modernism and visual culture. Justus Nieland will present material from a new book project about a midcentury modernism that seeks to design the senses for the new natures and media environments of Cold War modernity, with a particular focus on American designers Charles and Ray Eames. Burke Hilsabeck will present work-in-progress about modernism and self-reliexivity in the lilms of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis. 

Hilsabeck is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. He is at work on a book project on the modernist context of slapstick film comedy. 

Nieland is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, where he focuses on Modernism and Film Studies. He is the author of Feeling Modem: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Illinois, 2008) and David Lynch (Illinois, 2012). 

Please RSVP to Katie Lennard: Klennard@umich.edu 

Organized by 
SAC Ph.D. certificate student Akiva Gottlieb. 

The Visual Culture Workshop is a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop composed of faculty and grad students with an academic interest in some aspect of visual culture, including (but not limited to) photography, film, painting, print technologies, and digital media. We plan events throughout the academic year such as guest lectures, panels, workshops of writing-in-progress, and exhibition trips.

 


MARK YOUR CALENDARS

Restoring "Jason": 
Reparative Gestures and Dark Fabulation in the Queer Archive


Tuesday, March 18
4:00 PM
2239 Lane Hall

 



 


Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference

March 19 - March 23, 2014
Seattle, WA



Over the next few weeks, we will feature SAC faculty and Ph.D. students who will participate in panels and workshops at the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference. 

In the run-up to NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, a Dutch hacker named Huub sent a tweet to the US military’s African Command, warning that a F-16 fighter jet was mistakenly broadcasting its identity in the clear due to a misconfigured Mode-S transponder. Assistant Professor Tung-Hui Hu's paper uses this tweet to ask two main questions: What does it mean for war to become “big data”—in other words, for citizens to trade conventional media coverage for the do-it-yourself tools for data mining? And what is the relationship between new media and state violence? He will also hold a worskshop where he will propose two alternate ways that media scholars have approached the formlessness of digital data, using cinematic precedents as a lens to understand them.




Doctoral Student Kathleen Ralko will give a presentation about the Supreme Court regulation of animal crush films, and the questions their discussions pose for digital media.






Stay tuned for more presenters from the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures!

For more information, visit the SCMS website.

 


Have any upcoming SAC news or events?
Please contact SAC.newsletter@umich.edu by Monday of every week.

 
 

NEWS

Chinese Subtitling Expert Akiyama Tamako Gives Talk "The Liberty Coerced by Limitation: Subtitling Independent Chinese Documentary"



 

Oscar Buzz: SAC Student Zaineb Abdul-Nabi Attends Oscars


 

SAC Ph.D. Alumnus Peter Alilunas Accepts Tenure-Track Position at the University of Oregon



 

SAC Welcomes Visiting Fellow Zhuang Su

Screen Arts and Cultures
6330 North Quad
105 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285

College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

phone: 734.764.0147

e-mail: sac.info@umich.edu

University Of Michigan

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