Sociologists and education science specialists (i.e., Bourdieu or T. Becher) have shown that academic disciplines are spaces in which identities, “academic tribes” are formed, to use Becher's expression. Their work also illustrates how practicing an academic discipline is linked to and even creates ways of seeing and conceiving the world. These identities assume many different forms. For example, national traditions of Film and Moving Image Studies in France, the United States and Japan are very different. These differences affect both the institutional places where Film and Moving Image Studies are practiced and disseminated, as well as research topics and the way they are conceived. These questions are distinct from the historical and epistemological problems addressed in axes 1 and 2, but they are certainly not entirely foreign to them either: they provide another angle on a disciplinary field, one that is oriented toward other preoccupations closer to that of sociology and anthropology – or “cultural studies”. Indeed, the history of institutions as well as epistemological considerations regarding approaches and background beliefs emerge from issues that are raised by questions of disciplinary identity and cultural traditions within Film and Moving Image Studies.
If it is true that since the introduction of accelerated digitalization, the practice of archiving has strongly influenced modes of academic work and cultural activities, it has also massively affected artistic practice.
If cinematic media may be understood to have a Copernican potential, whereby they may be used as instruments of scientific discovery and anti-anthropocentric displacement, how does such a potential change how one conceives of the world or even constructs, or for the historian, reconstructs new ones?
What is a "medium"? And how can the history of the term - the way in which it has been used and theorized - help us answer this question?
VISUAL STUDIES. Intersecting Art History and Film Studies
February 18, 2016 16h00
DB Clarke Theater
A discussion with Thomas Elsaesser and James Elkins
Our contemporary media landscape might be called the era of heightened seriality. In this talk, Professor Jason Mittell explores how serial storytelling has pervaded both film and television narrative, considering what formal elements define contemporary seriality, and how seriality is forged by industrial and viewing practices.
Laikwan Pang, Thomas Lamarre
The name Walter Ruttmann recalls enthralling and controversial contexts. A pioneer of experimental film, whose Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is still seen as the quintessential urban documentary of the 1920s, Ruttmann also worked extensively in advertising and other commissioned film genres throughout the 1920s and 30s.
