STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT IN FILM STUDIES, 2010-11
Christian Caminiti '12 (English) previews the Grinnell College issue of FILM MATTERS 2.4 (Winter 2012) with his film review of FISH TANK--http://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2011/09/20/fish-tank-2009/
STUDENTS SERVE AS GUEST EDITORIAL BOARD FOR UNDERGRADUATE FILM JOURNAL Grinnell students are currently editing a special issue of the undergraduate journal, FILM MATTERS, published by Intellect Press. FILM MATTERS is a new academic journal with a commitment to mentoring undergraduate scholars. For the inaugural course of HUM 290: "Film Genres", students of the class undertook the project of editing a special issue on the topic of film genre.
The students on the editorial board of FILM MATTERS 2.4 include: Christian Caminiti '11, Winsome Eustace '12, Christian Loggins '12, Laura Stamm '12, Devin Turner '12, Amanda Stromquist '12, and Phillip Brogdon '12. Other students, including Paul Dampier '12 Mike Kleine '11 and Kramer McLuckie '12, will have their work published in the issue due out this winter.
This issue will also share with its readership some of the outstanding Cultural Films programming we have had this past year at Grinnell College. The students of HUM 290 had the unique opportunity of interviewing filmmakers Sam Green and Nina Paley, who visited the college to showcase their work. Academy-award nominee, Sam Green, presented his "live documentary," UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS to the Grinnell community in February, while filmmaker Nina Paley addressed a packed house at the JRC following the screening of her phenomenal animated retelling of the Ramayana, SITA SINGS THE BLUES. Students of the course interviewed each filmmaker, publishing a version of it in the College's newspaper, Scarlet and Black. Reworked and expanded versions will be included as features in FILM MATTERS 2.4.
GRINNELL STUDENTS INVITED TO TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL Each year during the Telluride Film Festival, fifty students (undergraduate and graduate, film and non-film majors) are invited to spend four days screening and discussing a huge number of films. The students also participate in conversations with filmmakers, artists, and other Festival guests led by the Symposium’s faculty. In addition, Symposium students are allowed into selected Festival events. This year, two Grinnell students, Phillip Brogdon '12 and Corbin Eule '12, have been invited to join the other students, including graduate students, to represent Iowa at the student symposium.
http://www.grinnell.edu/news/features/telluride-film-festival
SUMMER FILM INTERNSHIP IN BROOKLYN, NY Daniel Agostino '13 is currently doing an internship with documentary filmmaker Sam Green. Sam Green visited Grinnell College for a Cultural Films event (see above). After meeting Green on campus, Agostino contacted the documentarian about an internship. Agostino spent the summer helping with the subtitling of Green’s film, THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, and traveling to San Francisco to assist with Green's next project on Buckminster Fuller.
STUDENTS PRESENT ACADEMIC RESEARCH AT NATIONAL CONFERENCES
Gabe Tomasulo (Space and Visual Culture, '11) presented research from his MAP: Contemporary Perspectives in Visual Culture (Spring 2010). His paper, "Violent Houses: Program and Restriction Following the MOVE Conflict," was part of a panel on Deleuze, Zizek, and (Post)Modern Architectural Space at "Composing Spaces: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference," May 2011. Also, Gabe has his creative work from his senior thesis MAP: Community, Posthumanism, Aesthetics (Spring 2011) featured in "Photo Technique: Variations on the Photographic Arts" [ http://www.phototechmag.com/index.php/underexposed/gabriel-tomasulo ]. Gabe is starting the Master of Architecture Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in the fall.
Carly Jerome (Religious Studies, with a concentration in GWS, '11) presented her final paper from HUM 395: Queer Theory/Queer Cinema at the 2010 Film and History Conference in Milwaukee, WI (the meeting of the Literature/Film Association). She presented her paper, "Queering the Connection between Pleasure and the Death Drive" on the panel, "Queered Love: Death, Sex, and Romance". Carly also presented her paper, "The Cult Film and Religion: Withnail and I & The Rocky Horror Picture Show" at the Joint Conference of the National Popular Culture & American Culture Association and the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture & American Culture Association, April 2011. Carly is beginning the Media, Journalism and Film program at the University of Denver this fall. It is a two year program that differs from many other master's degrees in film production, as it incorporates both film theory and filmmaking. Carly is the second student in two years to pursue an integrated film theory/film production program after graduation; Rebecca Kahn (English '10) is in her second year of a MFA program in film studies at New York University Tisch School of the Arts--Asia, located in Singapore (Oliver Stone is the Artistic Director of the program).
Torrey MacGregor (English '11) also presented her work, along with Carly Jerome, at the 2010 Film and History Conference in Milwaukee. Torrey gave her paper, "Love You to Death: Vampirism and Venereal Disease" on the panel, "Vampire Love". Torrey will be starting the graduate program in English at the Unversity of Connecticut, Storrs, this fall.
Laura Stamm (GWSS '12) delivered her final paper from HUM 395: Queer Cinema/Queer Theory at 12th The Annual San Francisco State University Film Conference, October 2010. She was invited to give her paper, “Exploring the Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” on the panel, "Reforms of Sexuality and Identity: Minority Representations in Film."
FACULTY RESEARCH IN FILM STUDIES
Professor Anatoly Vishevsky presented "The Poetics of Movement (Marching, Walking, Running, and Freezing) in Two Films by Georgi Danelia," at the BASEES (British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies) Annual Conference, April 2011, Cambridge, UK.
Professor Matthew Johnson presented “China’s Transnational ‘Cinema of Improvement’: Documenting Village Governance, Past and Present,” at “New Generation Chinese Cinema: Commodities of Exchange,” a conference at King’s College, University of London, May 2011, which Professor Johnson helped to organize. Johnson also completed, “The Science Education Film: Cinematizing Technocracy and Internationalizing Development,” for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas' special issue, “The Missing Period of PRC Cinema,” Vol. 5, No. 1 (forthcoming 2011). He also contributed a review for the China Independent Documentary Film Archive . American Anthropologist, 122:3 (September 2010).
Professor Vance Byrd will present "Unknown Queer Temporalities and Geographies in Ottinger's Bildnis einer Trinkerin" at the Rocky Mountain MLA meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona this fall. He is also delivering, "The Homosexual Melodrama and Fassbinder's Faustrecht der Freiheit" in November at "Transformation / Adaptation: The 26th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference in the Humanities," University of West Georgia.
Professor Terri Geller presented her paper, "'Capitalism, A Fairytale': The Work of Love in I Am Love" at the Post/Autonomia Conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in May, 2011. She also gave a paper at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, March 2011, entitled, "Guattari Hero: Subjective Arrangements in the Contemporary Genre Film,” on the panel, "Philosophy and the Moving Image." She has completed one entry on the Hollywood director, Dorothy Arzner, and is currently finishing another entry, with the help of Laura Stamm '11, on the pioneering experimental filmmaker Maya Deren for the Oxford Bibliographies Online: Cinema and Media Studies
