2003 Symposium

Montage and Modern Art
April 16 - 19, 2003

Wednesday, April 16

4:15 p.m., Forum South Lounge, “Montage as Dominant Device of the Art in the 20th Century” by Vyacheslav Ivanov, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Ivanov’s long and distinguished teaching career began in 1955 at the University of Moscow, where he taught comparative and general linguistics until he was dismissed in 1958 because of his friendship with Boris Pasternak. For the next thirty years he was unable to travel abroad as the Soviet government denied him an official travel visa. Fortunately, he was still able to continue his research work at various Institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1988 he was invited to return to Moscow University to become Chair of the new Department of the Theory and History of World Culture and Director of its affiliated Research Institute. In 1988, Professor Ivanov also began teaching regularly in American universities — first at Yale University, then at Stanford University, and finally at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has been teaching since 1991. In addition to his undergraduate and graduate courses in Linguistics and Russian Literature, Film, and Civilization, Professor Ivanov is involved in a current research project, “The Languages of Los Angeles Project ,” which seeks to be the first comprehensive linguistic investigation of a multilingual and multicultural metropolis. He is the author of more than fifteen books and over fourteen hundred journal articles on a range of topics including General, diachronic and comparative linguistics; Folklore and mythology; Literature and poetics; Cultural anthropology; Native languages of America; Neuro­linguistics; art history and theory, film studies, opera, Semiotics; and Urban Studies. He has served as a Foreign Fellow of the British Academy since 1977, as a member in the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress since 1990, and is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Latvian Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

5:30 Forum South Lounge, Opening Reception, all welcome.

8:00 p.m. Forum South Lounge, “Blowup” by Maya Turovskaya, Senior Research Fellow at the Research Film Institute, Moscow, Russia. Ms. Turovskaya is a film theorist and historian as well as a scriptwriter. She has been a leading observer and practitioner in Soviet and Russian filmmaking for much of its history. Ms. Turovskaya co­authored the screeplay for Mikhail Romm’s famous documentary Ordinary Fascism in 1966. Her publications include M.M. Straukh (1952), Yes and No: On Film and Theory in the Last Decade (1966), Heroes of an Unheroic Time (1971), On the Borders of Art: Brecht and Film (1985), Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry (1990), and 7 1/2 or the Films of Andrei Tarkovskii (1991). She is a major international figure in the study of Russian cinema and has lectured at many universities in the United States and Europe. A member of the Union of Writers, the Union of Cinematographers, and the Critics Guild, her major research interest today continues to focus on mass culture with an emphasis on film and theater.

11:00 a.m., Herrick Chapel, Scholars’ Convocation – “Is there a Modernist Literary Montage?” by Robert Scholes, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus, Professor Emeritus of English, Comparative Literature, and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University. Professor Scholes is the author, co-author or editor of over thirty books, including Structuralism in Literature; Semiotics and Interpretation; Textual Power; The Rise and Fall of English; The Crafty Reader; and co-author with Eric S. Rabkin of Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision and Hemingway's Genders, with Nancy R. Comley. He has published articles in dozens of scholarly journals including Yale Review, Georgia Review, Philological Quarterly, Quarterly Review of Film, diacritics, Critical Inquiry, Iowa Review, Semiotica, and American Journal of Semiotics. Professor Scholes is director of the Modernist Journals Project and he was recently elected President of the Modern Language Association for year 2004. He is currently at work on two book projects: one is a study of the history of English teaching in particular and the liberal arts in general in America; the other, which continues aspects of The Crafty Reader, is a study of light modernism, or what he calls “iridescent mediocrity.” 

4:15 p.m., Forum South Lounge, “Cinematic Thresholds or the Frame-mobile” by Dudley Andrew, Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Chair of the Film Studies Program, Yale University. Professor Andrew’s areas of research include World Cinema (special attention to West Africa, Ireland, France, Japan), Aesthetics (theories of the image, Film among the arts) and French cinema and culture from the 1930s to today. He has published The Major Film Theories; Concepts of Film Theory; Andre Bazin, co-written with Francois Truffaut; Film in the Aura of Art, a source book on Mizoguchi, a presentation of Breathless, and a “BFI classic” on Mizoguchi’s Sansho Dayu. His most ambitious work, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film came out in 1995, followed by an edited collection, The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography. He has programmed films for The Guggenheim Museum and served as a film festival judge. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim and several NEH fellowships and was named Chevalier dans l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French Cultural Ministry.

4:15 p.m., Forum South Lounge, Round Table: “Montage and Modern Art” Galina Aksenova, Dudley Andrew, Jenny Anger, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Daniel Reynolds, Robert Scholes, Alan Schrift, Maya Turovskaya.