Laurence Kardish

The School for Studies in Art and Culture, Film Studies is pleased to announce that they will holding an informal talk on film curating and programming by Carleton alumnus and longtime senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Laurence Kardish at 1:30pm on October 8th, in Room 472 of the St Patrick’s Building.

In 2010, Kardish was awarded was awarded an honorary doctorate by Carleton University in recognition of his distinguished career and oustanding contribution to film and arts culture worldwide and for his continuing devotion to Canadian cinema and Carleton University.

Given Kardish’s role as a senior curator at MoMA, and his career as a film writer, director and producer this talk by one of Carleton’s most influential graduates is sure to provide invaluable information to those students who one day aspire to be part of the film world.

from the Huffington Post:

“Kardish started out as a lowly curatorial assistant in 1968, but quickly made his mark on the institution through his breadth and depth of knowledge about film and the work of auteur filmmakers worldwide. He’s championed Weimar-era German films, 60s avant-garde productions, and French films from all eras, and was a part of the selection committee on the New Directors/New Films festival since its inception in 1972. He also co-wrote a book, titled, Weimar Cinema, 1919-1933: Daydreams and Nightmares to accompany a four month, 81-film program at MoMA in 2010.”

Learn more about Laurence Kardish: http://cualumni.carleton.ca/grads/kardish-laurence/

Visit the Film Studies website:  http://www.carleton.ca/filmstudies/

In this talk, noted cinema and video game studies scholar Bernard Perron will examine survival horror video games as a surprisingly rich and complex site for the study of gender. At first blush, the hypersexualized heroines and militarized, ultra-macho heroes that tend to populate the survival horror genre seem to do little other than reaffirm problematic stereotypes, as do the game design choices that underpin this dichotomy and structure player experience. However, as Dr. Perron will demonstrate, through survival and event flight, the horror game genre ultimately narrows the gap between the sexes, aligning players with empowered, active characters that subvert traditional expectations. In so doing, Dr. Perron acknowledges the indebtedness of survival horror games to their cinematic counterparts, at the same time as he considers their uniqueness as games.

Weds, Dec. 5th, 1:00-2:30pm, 303 Paterson Hall

Bernard Perron

Dr. Perron is the Full Professor of Cinema at the University of Montreal. He is co-editor of The Video Game Theory Reader I (Routledge, 2003) and 2 (2009), editor of Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (McFarland, 2009), and author of Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (University of Michigan Press, 2012). His research concentrates on video games; on horror; on interactive cinema; on narration, cognition, and the ludic dimension of narrative cinema.

Poster

Akomfrah was a founder-member of the critically acclaimed and highly influential Black Audio Film Collective (1982-98), a seminal cine-cultural workshop organization, and was a key figure in the Collective’s commitment to using film and other media to examine issues of Black history and identity.

His body of professional creative work spans three decades and is renowned for its complexity, depth and breadth. Indeed, as an artist, lecturer, critic and film director, Akomfrah is widely considered to be among the most distinctive and innovative artists working in World Cinema. In addition, beginning in the early 1980s he gained respect and fame for his strikingly impressive range of interdisciplinary work: single-screen art gallery installations, experimental videos and music videos, in addition to fiction films and creative documentaries.  His work has always traversed the worlds of fiction and non-fiction, cinema and television, the art gallery and the film festival. He is a genuinely interdisciplinary artist and thinker of the first order.

The attached poster identifies the public events – including film screenings – associated with Akomfrah’s visit. A more detailed list of his activities during his time in Ottawa – including background notes on each of the films that will be screened nightly during his visit – is available here.

Please take advantage of the scheduled events to learn more about the internationally important body of work that has earned Akomfrah a wide range of honours, including his 2008 appointment as Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

Co-op Information Session for BA students

All first- and second-year students in the English, French and History honours-level programs are invited to the co-op information session on Wednesday, Nov. 21, at 5:30 p.m., in 1501 CTTC Building.  More information

The cluster will examine how Monsters have been depicted through various mediums, and what we can learn about ourselves by studying these portrayals of Monstrosity.

McFarlane will be teaching The Sociology of the Weird and Apocalyptic, while Loiselle will be instructing Movie Monstrosity: A Creepy Fascination with the Abnormal.  Both Loiselle and McFarlane took the time to explain why studying the Monster can be a frightfully telling endeavor.

Craig McFarlane (Sociology): The Sociology of the Weird and Apocalyptic

Does your interest in fictional portrayals of monsters and mass devastation stem from your background as a Sociologist?

I’m somewhat of a pessimist by nature so I’m naturally drawn to portrayals-be they real or fictional-of mass destruction. I think a lot of people are drawn to this as well: who didn’t watch hours and hours of 9/11 footage or stare at their TV screens dumbfounded during the recent Japanese tsunami? There isn’t much of a tradition within sociology that takes an interest in mass destruction; there are some people who study war, some people who study genocide, and some people who study natural disasters. But sociologists who study fictional accounts of mass destruction, such as me, are certainly in the minority. With respect to monsters, sociologists have always been obsessed with abnormality and deviancy. “Deviance” is one of the most popular sociology courses in nearly every department and the founding text of sociological method, Emile Durkheim’s “Rules of the Sociological Method,” distinguishes between normal and pathological social processes.

Can you give an example of how these fictional events and characters are a reflection of a greater sociological trend?

Max Weber, one of the early and important sociologists, has a famous thesis that modernity is characterized by what he calls “the disenchantment of the world.” What he meant by this is that the world is increasingly organized on rational schemes; people orient themselves to the world in increasingly rational ways, and so on. What this also means is that supernatural explanations of the world decline more or less in proportion as rational explanations increase. Most important for human behaviour is that there is a general and increasing disbelief in magic and religion. This view is increasingly challenged by contemporary sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, among others, often taking the point of departure with Charles Taylor’s-a Canadian philosopher, incidentally, who teaches at McGill-recent book “A Secular Age.” A lot of this work has been done under the heading of “post-secular” and seeks to understand and explain why religious belief has persisted through modernity and, indeed, seems to be on the increase.

In many ways, horror and science fiction are working within this dynamic. With horror, albeit not with the “torture porn” genre, we see a fascination with magical, mysterious, and religious powers that escape our understanding; that still haunt the world; that still haunt us in the dark. On the one hand, we “know” that there are no ghosts or demons out there, but, on the other hand, despite this knowledge, we are still afraid of them. If we weren’t afraid, why would we bother to pay any attention to horror? Likewise, with much science fiction, we’ve seen an interesting transition: early science fiction was utopian and progressive looking at how technology would improve our lives and deliver us into a better world; much contemporary science fiction is the complete opposite-apocalyptic and presenting us with an existential threat. That technology-which we made, of course-can turn on us and have its own desires including, perhaps, the desire to eradicate us, was rather remote in 1984 when “The Terminator” was released. But now, in 2012, where cars will happily parallel park themselves for us because, apparently, we don’t have the basic capacity to park our own cars anymore-or we’re just really lazy-the idea that intelligent machines might not like us is certainly rather feasible.  And, I think that it is noteworthy that the two most recent installments of “The Terminator” franchise aren’t about preventing the end of the world but, rather, portray its actual ending and portray life some time after the ending of the world. We’ve resigned ourselves, at least insofar as much recent science fiction is concerned, to the fact that we, humans, aren’t the sovereigns of the planet anymore or, at best, for not much longer. Of course, we don’t just need to fear the potential rise of the machines: we also need to fear that our industrial production systems will poison our food supply (think of the various swine and avian flues) or destroy the entirety of the planet (at least by our standards of living).

To look at it a little differently, the entire zombie genre, especially the recent “The Walking Dead,” is asking basic, fundamental questions of sociology: how do people form communities? How do strangers relate to one another? Why do we co-operate? What is the role of force, violence and power in social systems? How do we manage threats and risks? Contrary to what many people believe, the zombie genre-even in its apocalyptic form-is not about zombies; it’s about how strangers relate to one another and, more importantly, it is about the ontological priority of the family to all other forms of human associations. It’s a fundamentally conservative genre. But then, most horror on TV and in the movies is also fundamentally conservative: think of the slasher movies of the seventies and eighties, which were largely about policing the sexuality of teenagers–you know who is going to die next; the people–especially the women–who just had sex.

What do you hope every student leaves your FYSM with?

Despite the actual content of the course-i.e., monsters, monstrosity, horror, and so on-the real goal of a First Year Seminar is to act as the university equivalent of high school “home room.” FYSM instructors are the primary point of contact our students have with the university. We are often put in the role of helping find the services they need and, to a large extent, helping them understand what university is all about. In my case, my goal when I teach FYSMs (I’ll also be teaching in the “Criminal Matters” cluster again next year) is to get students into the habit of (1) showing up to class, (2) doing the assigned reading, and (3) writing a lot. Thus, I’m not just interested in ensuring retention from first year to second year, but putting my students in a position where they will successfully graduate from their programs

In terms of the actual content of the course, I hope students come out of it with an appreciation of why popular culture is worthy of serious study. Our so-called “mindless entertainment” might be entertaining, but it certainly isn’t mindless!

Do you have a favourite Monster/Apocalyptic Genre or title? If so, why is it your favourite?

As my answers have likely suggested, I’m somewhat pessimistic. Not in the simple sense that I expect things to go bad, but that, overall, things can only go bad. This is tempered rather strongly with fatalism. For instance, as an intellectual exercise, I often wonder if human non-reproduction or even suicide is morally obligatory! A horror writer that adequately captures this sensibility–indeed, he even wrote a book of amateur philosophy on it called “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race“-is Thomas Ligotti. His most recent novel, “My Work Here Is Not Yet Done” is an especially good corrective to the sarcasm and irony of the workplace that you find in movies like “Office Space” or in TV shows like “The Office.” In terms of “weird fiction,” which wasn’t brought up in this interview, I quite like China Miéville’s work. I’m actually teaching his “The City & The City” in my “Power & Violence” FYSM in the “Criminal Matters” cluster. And, lastly, one of my favourite television shows–the “reimagined” “Battlestar Galactica.” “BSG” is the best show that has ever been made on war, terror, religion and politics, and whether or not humanity has any right to exist. It was, by far, the show that most ably captures the spirit of the Bush Era. Unfortunately for the story line, Obama won the Presidency partway through the final season of the series and the writers got caught up in the misleading ideology of hope. Perhaps if John McCain had won the Presidency, “Battlestar Galactica” would have had a far more impressive conclusion!

Andre Loiselle (Film Studies): Movie Monstrosity: A Creepy Fascination with the Abnormal

Why are films featuring Monsters important to study?  What can we learn from them?

Horror films, like other fictional forms that depict monsters, serve a complex and, one might argue, paradoxical function in society. From campfire ghost stories, late 18th/early 19th century gothic novels and Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of terrors to gory video games and contemporary zombie movies, monster narratives expose our demons so that we may confront them and come to terms with the disturbing thoughts, dreadful visions and paralyzing memories that haunt us. As such, they allow both individual anxieties and collective fears to be exorcized or at least temporarily contained. Not unlike the cathartic classical tragedies of ancient Greece (think of the monstrous Furies who relentlessly terrorize Orestes in Aeschylus’s The Eumenides [458BC]), terrifying movies and books provide an outlet through which we can purge our bloodcurdling torments.

But at the very same time – and this is the paradox – tales of terror also encourage the reader, spectator or gamer to indulge in a fascinatingly wicked spectacle of blood, gore, disgust and abjection. As civilized beings, we must always repress our basic animal instincts. We all have brutal, vengeful, perverse fantasies that we would never dare to act upon and that we barely ever talk about in mixed company. Horror fiction is one of the few cultural sites where we are permitted – however briefly – to wallow in those uncivilized urges. From this perspective, the monster is less the harmful threat that we are trying to contain, than the grotesque incarnation of the secret desires that we do have, but that we never express. Georges Bataille has argued that the Evil doer is attractive because s/he is “Sovereign”; s/he embodies freedom. The monster disregards our petty human rules and regulations, and does what it pleases – and we secretly envy this monstrous disregard for law and order. The guilty pleasure of horror is precisely that we identify, at least in part, with the evil freedom of the monster.

Horror fiction, and monster movies in particular, are worthy of scholarly attention for the very reason that they provide a heuristic tool through which we can explore, analyze and understand both our unsettling apprehensions and disturbing desires. In other words, tell me which monster movie you like and I will tell you who you are…

What is the goal of this FYSM?

The University is an environment in which students are encouraged to develop the critical distance necessary to consider analytically material that can be challenging and disquieting. This is how students learn to deal rationally with the exigencies of the increasingly complex and unpredictable world in which they live. I think that the small seminar setup of FYSM 1509 will offer the perfect space for students to start developing those critical skills. My hope is to create a safe and supportive environment in which students will feel comfortable and confident to examine material that is purposefully troubling.

Through a variety of exercises ranging from short movie reviews to more ambitious group projects, students will learn to write and speak lucidly and passionately about films that hopefully will both entertain and destabilize them.

But beyond movies, students will also be asked to consider the “real” monsters that roam the streets of our gothic city. One of the first projects the students will participate in is what I call – rather awkwardly – a “monstethnographic” research. In late October, they will be asked to observe the behavior of monsters in the streets of Ottawa! During the annual “zombie walk” or Halloween night, the students will survey and scrutinize the conduct of those who choose to be monsters for a day. They will report their findings to their peers in an attempt to understand the intentions and goals of this performance of monstrosity.

In contrast to this early – and admittedly frivolous – exploration of monstrosity as masquerade, a later exercise will require students to study those on which society imposes the label of monster. Beyond “reel” monsters, students will consider the question of who are the real monsters that haunt Canada in the early 21st century. I hope to give students great latitude in both the specific topics that they will study and the medium through which they will convey the results of their research. The First Year Seminar should provide a scholarly milieu conducive to such creative yet rigorous intellectual endeavors.

Do you have a favourite monster title? 

Hannibal Lector from Silence of the Lambs is a horrifying man. But he is also a fascinating and very attractive character. His intelligence, erudition and charisma mixed with his cold, calculating cruelty and abject cannibalism make him the perfect embodiment of Evil, as Bataille imagines it. Hannibal incarnates the sovereign monster who has the freedom to do what the rest of us, ordinary people, would never dare contemplate. As such, he is as hauntingly terrifying as he is mesmerizingly alluring.

ArtsOne Webpage
ArtsOne Cluster Webpage

The inaugural Doc Studio Contest invites students, accomplished and amateur filmmakers to hone their cinematic skills to create an interview-based short documentary masterpiece that can be visually told in five minutes or less. The challenge is to capture the essence of your subject to reveal ‘Life in 5’ – a memorable moment, a shift in perception, a secret no one else could uncover.

Submissions should be inspired by the style of Alan Zweig (Vinyl, I Curmudgeon, Lovable, A Hard Name) and will be accepted until February 27, 2012.

The winner of the contest will win a grand prize consisting of:

-A mentoring session (of up to eight hours total) with Genie award-winning filmmaker Alan Zweig
-A television broadcast of your short documentary on TVO, tvo.org and TVO’s YouTube Channel
-A Hot Docs 2012 industry pass (approximate retail value of $500.00)

Read more details here…Doc Studio Contest

Watch Zweig outline his expectations here…

The selection committee citation wrote:

“Zuzana M. Pick has given us a nuanced and insightful transnational analysis of a national epic and its hero, the Mexican Revolution and Pancho Villa.  This study of the cinematic iconography and archival traces of the two covers the period of the revolution into the modern day, examines a range of Mexican media from the popular to the more obscure, the documentary to the fictional.  Treating the archive as both a resource and a filmmaker’s tool, Pick studies the image of the Mexican Revolution as it was produced in Mexico and the United States, by the conventional motion picture studio as well as by a more avant-gardist aesthetic.  Through readings of the work of Emilio Fernandez, Pedro Armendariz,  Dolores Del Rio, Howard Hawks, and Sergei Eisenstien, Pick gives us new ways to think about the relations between the national and the international and the role of political movements in the production of culture.”

The formal announcement of the award was made on March 10, 2011 at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ annual conference in New Orleans.

Higher Learning at TIFF Bell Lightbox is hosting Sanogo’s talk, “The Lumière Brothers and Africa.”  The lecture will examine the work of the Lumiere brothers in and on Africa from 1896 to 1903. This Lumiere Africa Corpus, made of about 100 of the 1425 films currently restored, will be examined in relation to the historiography of early cinema. The talk will take place on Friday, February 4 at 10 am.

Sanogo’s second talk is entitled “A Sembenian Century: Ousmane Sembene and his times” will focus on the significance and resonance of Ousmane Sembène’s films and include screenings of La Noire de…and Borom Sarret. The lecture will take place prior to the screening and an audience Q&A session will follow the films. The event is scheduled for Saturday, February 5, at 6:30 pm.

Sanogo’s research interests include African cinema, documentary, world cinema, colonial cinema, and the relationship between film form, history and theory. He is also a film curator, and has curated programs at the Smithsonian Institution and the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou.

Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis through the TIFF Bell Lightbox Office an hour before the event begins. Students and faculty must show valid university ID.

More information on “The Lumière Brothers and Africa”

For information regarding La Noire de . . . and Borom Sarret

With their implausibly stupid protagonists and gore splattered monsters, horror films are more often than not dismissed as tripe produced for the entertainment of teenagers. André Loiselle feels the genre offers a far more subversive critique of modern society.

In his upcoming book, Stage to Scream: Theatricality in the Horror Film, Loiselle, professor, SSAC, contends that the genre offers the most stinging commentary on violence and our increasing acceptance of it.

“It is precisely because it operates below the radar of political correctness that horror has the freedom to explore issues that other, more respectable genres would never touch,” said Loiselle. “In fact, it could be argued that horror is the only genre that consistently deals with controversial moral issues, inviting its audience to confront their own response to difficult situations and contentious subjects.”

His thesis runs counter to a common perception that the genre encourages a voyeuristic thrill that ultimately desensitizes us to violence.  Rather horror films hold up a mirror to society’s acceptance of a decade in which the nebulous “war on terror” saw nations shadow boxing with a rotation of villains.

“Saw’s serial sadist “Jigsaw” offers a striking analogy for North American political figures who use “raison d’etat” to justify their assault on human life,” said Loiselle. “Only horror film dares to confront its spectators with their own ambivalence about such politics.”

Loiselle’s book examines the over-the-top theatricality of antiheroes portrayed in movies like Hostel, Saw, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Fracture. The histrionics of these modern day monsters can be traced back to medieval morality plays in which audiences witnessed barbaric acts of sex and violence performed by demons that both repulsed and fascinated them. The intent of these plays was to reinforce religious compliance through a cathartic process of tightly-regulated subversion. Loiselle contends that the paradox of corrective evil upon which the horror genre is built is actually a means to encourage social reflection. Rather than perpetuating violence, the horror genre portrays evil for the purpose of exposing our culture’s uneasy relationship to the unruly body, excessive discipline, sexual perversion and the irresistible pleasures of pain.

Anderson is one of ten students who write regular blogs which are posted on Carleton’s Admission’s website. The blogs are intended to give potential students a glimpse into Carleton life and aid them with post-secondary decisions as our students discuss their experiences online.

The second year student also serves as a Proceedings and Verification Officer for Hansard, the publication which records the House of Commons daily debates. Anderson sits in the middle of the chamber and tracks the different bills being debated as well as the speakers. “I have to keep my ears open and catch any comments members yell out,” explains Anderson. He also works in the Hansard Satellite Office just above the House of Commons where he collects MPs’ notes and faxes them to editors.

This position and his past position as a Parliamentary Page led him to be recruited to speak to Carleton students who are currently working as Pages. At the beginning of the year he spoke to them about what to expect as a first year Carleton student and how to balance their studies with work in the House. Anderson answered their questions, kept in touch with most of the Pages throughout the semester and met with all of them during exams to see how their year was going.

When he’s not advising potential or current students, Anderson is focussing on his studies. He says he loves the atmosphere of the Humanities program. “I feel that the subjects we are studying are extremely important and the professors encourage us not to just do assignments for the sake of doing them, but to really further our knowledge, to understand ideas, and ultimately become better people,” says Anderson.

Visit www.carleton.ca/admissions/blogs to read Anderson’s blog.