Fwd: Cinema as Vernacular Modernism Symposium
Alex Zahlten
Alex.Zahlten
Thu May 9 11:43:05 EDT 2002
Hi Aaron,
I was wondering how (since you wrote that you have been using the concept of
vernacular
modernism in relation to Japan) that would look (specifically in Cinema, of
course) in a country
that probably has a very specific relationship to modernism- Japan hasn't
exactly gone through
the struggles and stages that made Europe and America reach modernism in the
same
chronology, so I would suppose there is a very specific brand of modernism,
or a different
relationship towards it...
Is that right, and how does that effect the use of the concept of vernacular
modernism?
Sorry if the question seems very general-
Alex Zahlten
> 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.
>
> ---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ----------------
>
> 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
>
>
> ----------------- End Forwarded Message -----------------
>
> 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
>
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