Fwd: Cinema as Vernacular Modernism Symposium

[Aaron Gerow]

Not specifically on Japan, but since I, Mitsuyo, Michael and others have 
been using the concept of vernacular modernism in relation to Japan, this 
looks very pertinent. Only sorry I can't go.

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The Committee on Cinema and Media Studies
University of Chicago

May 17-18, 2002


Symposium

CINEMA AS VERNACULAR MODERNISM


The notion of cinema as "vernacular modernism" has recently been
proposed with regard to classical Hollywood cinema (1920s through
1950s), challenging the account of the latter as a type of narrative
cinema based on universal mental structures and transhistorical
aesthetic norms. Vernacular Modernism highlights certain aspects of
Hollywood previously neglected: its relation to contemporary
modernist movements in the traditional media as well as social and
economic modernization; its ability to offer mass audiences a
market-based cultural horizon in which the experience of modernity,
including its traumatic as well as liberating effects, could be
reflected and articulated, rejected or assimilated, confronted and
negotiated. Thus, the concept of vernacular modernism might provide a
more historically and aesthetically specific approach to reexamining,
not only the centrality of classical cinema in US-American culture,
but also the vexed issue of this cinema's worldwide hegemony, above
and beyond (though not apart from) its well-known economic and
political interventions.

Traditionally, historians have critiqued Hollywood hegemony, its
transnational circulation, as the period's most powerful
universalizing imperial discourse (the modern equivalent of Latin), a
visual-acoustic idiom alternative to, and corrosive of, both official
and diverse cultural heritages. The notion of cinema as the first
global, modernist vernacular complicates that critique by suggesting
that the Hollywood film might have translated differently in
different countries, that it was not only transformed in local
contexts of reception and existing film cultures but also might have
played an important role in mediating competing discourses on
modernity and modernization.

This symposium will explore the usefulness of the concept of cinema
as vernacular modernism through a number of case studies from both
historical and theoretical perspectives. What is the heuristic value
of the concept for the analysis of particular films, genres, and
performers? At which level - narrative and thematic concerns, choice
of settings and milieus, formal and stylistic features - does it work
and how? Are some films more vernacular-modernist than others? How
useful is the concept in describing alternative film cultures shaped
in modernizing metropolitan centers not just in the West (e.g.,
Shanghai cinema), or competing traditions of transnationally
circulating, hegemonic cinema such as Hindi film?


                                Program


The symposium will open with a screening of Lonesome (Paul Fejos,
1928) on Friday, May 17, 6:00pm, at the Max Palevsky Cinema, Ida
Noyes Hall (1212 E. 59th Street).


Saturday, May 18, Film Studies Center, Cobb Hall 307 (5811 S. Elllis 
Avenue):


9:00am  Introduction: Tom Gunning (University of Chicago)


9:15    Panel 1   Moderator: Bill Brown (University of Chicago)

        Lesley Stern (University of California, San Diego),  "How
Movies Move: The
        Vernacular in an Age of Globalization"

        Edward Dimendberg (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)  "Being
on the Inside  of
        a Big Inside Story: Film Noir and the Aesthetics of Simultaneity"

        Jacqueline Stewart (University of Chicago)  "Race Films and
the Black Vernacular
        Tradition"


11:00   Coffee break


11:20   Panel 2   Moderator: Natasa Durovicova (University of Iowa)

        Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck College, London)  "Vernacular
Feminism? A Look at the
        European Flapper and the 'Problem' of Hollywood in the 1920s

        Zhang Zhen (New York University)  "Competing Moderns On and
Off the Screen,
        Shanghai, 1930s"


1:00pm  Lunch break


2:15    Panel 3   Moderator: John Comaroff (University of Chicago)

        Rosalind Morris (Columbia University)  "Black and White in
Noir: Cinematic
        Criminality and the Order of Desire in Apartheid South Africa"

        Tejaswini Niranjana (Centre for the Study of Culture and
Society, Bangalore)
        "Suku Suku What Shall I Do, or, Is this Colombo Tea? Hindi
Cinema and the
        Musical Public Sphere in Trinidad"

        Dudley Andrew (Yale University) "Masks and Mimicry: Some
Forms of Cinematic
        Modernity"


4:00    Roundtable discussion

        Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)
        Norma Field (University of Chicago)
        James Schamus (Columbia University / Good Machine)
        Moderators

        http://humanities.uchicago.edu/openhouse/cvm.html
        For more information, please call 773 834-1077 or write to
        cine-media at uchicago.edu


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Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171