Advanced post-graduate students in the department of Film Studies will be sharing work from their PhD theses, as they move forward towards submission. Wesley Kirkpatrick will be presenting, “A Spectre is Haunting Britain: Remediating and Rehabilitating Oswald Mosley’s Image on Postwar Television.” Jiawei You will be presenting, “Textured Spaces in Horror Cinema: The Dilapidated, the…
Abstract: Journeying to Santa Barbara, California with her mother, Svetlana, Diana Markosian had no idea that they would not return to Russia. Escaping the turbulence of Moscow following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Svetlana had secretly become a ‘mail-order bride.’ When Markosian discovered the truth about her migration 15 years later, she embarked on a different…
Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up (2022) is portrait of a female artist by a female artist that explores the connections between artmaking and acts of care towards human and nonhuman others. Continuing her longstanding interest in animals, the film is also a kind of departure for Reichardt. The most intimate of her films to date, Showing…
When Shirley MacLaine became ‘Japanese’: My Geisha and Hollywood’s Filmmaking in Cold War East Asia Hiroshi Kitamura William & Mary March 12, 2025 My paper is an attempt to understand the changing relationship between the US and Japan during the Cold War through an analysis of My Geisha. Released in 1962, this Paramount film told…
“There is a long history of deliberate destructive gestures against images. Religious iconoclasm is its most critical manifestation: historically, it refers to the literal ‘breaking of images’ that are conceived as idols (eidola), namely mere imitations, false doubles of things, and not as icons (eikones) in the proper sense, that is, true images of what…
Join the Department of Film Studies for a special screening of the recently restored Burmese film General Cartoon (Tha Du, 1963) and question and answer (Q&A) session with Director of Save Myanmar Film, Okkar Maung. General Cartoon (Tha Du,1963) is a satirical black-and-white short film that intertwines dark comedy with poignant social commentary. The story…
In the final half-decade of the silent era, the Western film — widely seen to be on the decline — returned to the production schedules of Hollywood’s major studios on an unprecedented scale. Against the backdrop of persistent debates about the social influence of genre and industry alike, the release of Paramount’s Oregon Trail epic…
In Indigenous film cultures across Abiayala/Latin America, the connection with Law is (at least) threefold: cinema portrays legal doxa, notably concerning territoriality and colonial claims to land and water; films — including the vast ethnographic archive and new, original works — are used to support particular legal cases; and productions index plural epistemological and claims…
An academic talk exploring the Rassegna Internazionale del film Scientifico-didattico (International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film [IFSEF]), a pioneering science-based public event held at the University of Padova from 1956 to 1975 in collaboration with the Venice International Film Festival.
This talk will analyse the case of the International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film 1956-1975 (hence IFSEF) organised by the University of Padua in collaboration with the Venice Film Festival. This festival is representative of a broader, international phenomenon of useful film festivals, which are understudied in the literature, attracting entries from around the…