EVENT DETAILS

The Making of Media Theory and the Future of Film & Media Studies

This conference was organized in part as a tribute to the late Mark Poster, the first chair of Film and Media Studies when we became a department in 2003 and one of the first internationally recognized scholars to deploy the theoretical humanities in exploring and interrogating the appeal and operation of the cultural, social, historic, and institutional entities we call cinema, television, radio, and digital technologies. It is our hope that we can think together collectively about current and future developments in our field of film and media studies, and perhaps begin to have a dialogue about the function and purpose of our discipline(s).

1:00-1:15 Welcome to the Conference: Peter Krapp

First Panel 1:15-2:55
Chair: Lucas Hilderbrand
1:15-1:25 Introduction by Chair of Panel, Lucas Hilderbrand

1:25-1:45 Douglas Kellner, George F. Knellner Chair in the Philosophy of Education and Distinguished Professor at UCLA
“Cinema Wars: Reflections on the Politics and Ideology of Film in the Bush-Cheney
and Obama Eras”

1:45-2:05 Lisa Cartwright, Professor of Communication and Science Studies, UC San Diego
“The Mode of Information and the Matter of the Printed Gun”

2:05-2:25 Peter Krapp, Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, English, Informatics, UC Irvine
"Scenarios: Media Studies, War Gaming, and Simulations"

Question and Answer 2:25-2:55

Break: 2:55-3:15

Second Panel 3:15-4:55
Chair: Victoria E. Johnson
3:15-3:25 Introduction by Chair of the Panel, Victoria E. Johnson

3:25-3:45 Fatimah Tobing Rony, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, UC Irvine
“How Do We Look: Theory and Practice”

3:45-4:05 Linda Williams, Professor of Film and Media, and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley
“Tales of Sound and Fury...Signifying Something"

4:05-4:25 John Caldwell, Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Theater, Film, and Television, UCLA
“Stress Aesthetics in the Para-Industries”

Question and Answer 4:25-4:55

Closing Remarks (Victoria E. Johnson): 4:55-5:10

BIOGRAPHIES
JOHN CALDWELL is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research and teaching focus on contemporary film and television, technologies, and creative labor. Caldwell (MFA Cal Arts, PhD Northwestern) has authored and edited several books, including Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Duke UP 2008), Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, (Routledge, 2009, co-edited), Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, (Rutgers UP, 1995), Electronic Media and Technoculture (Rutgers UP, 2000), and New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, (Routledge, 2003). Caldwell produced and directed the film Rancho California, which premiered at Sundance in 2002. His awards include: German Bauhaus IKKM Senior Fellow (2012), Annenberg Scholar-in-Residence, University of Pennsylvania (2012), UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award (2010), and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1979, 1985). His current ethnographic fieldwork focuses on L.A.’s post-production cultures, and a media archaeology project in the San Joaquin Valley entitled: Highway 58: Boron to Buttonwillow.”

LISA CARTWRIGHT is Professor in Communication, Science Studies, and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California at San Diego. She has held the Marie Jahoda Visiting Chair in International Women’s Studies at Ruhr University, and has been a visiting professor of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, and was on the faculty of the University of Rochester's visual and cultural studies program for many years before moving to San Diego. She is the author of Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minnesota 1995); Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (Duke 2008); and co-author with Marita Sturken of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford 2001, 2008). She works across film, media and visual culture studies, feminist STIM (science, technology, information and medicine) studies, and disability theory.

LUCAS HILDERBRAND is Associate Professor of Film and Media studies at UC Irvine. He is the author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (2009) and Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic (fall 2013), as well as essays in Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, GLQ, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Women & Performance, Millennium Film Journal, Framework, and Flow. He is currently researching queer media histories and the cultures of gay bars in the U.S.

VICTORIA E. JOHNSON is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and affiliated faculty in African American Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She Chaired the Department of Film and Media Studies from 2009 – 2012 and was granted the School of Humanities Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education in 2012. Prior to her appointment at the University of California, Victoria taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She was the Dick Wolf Professor of Television Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Her Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity (NYU Press, 2008) was awarded the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award in 2009. Victoria teaches and writes about broadcast media history and theory; music and scoring in film and television; sport culture; corporate branding and identity; and entertainment law and media policy. She is currently working on book projects and articles that examine the cultural history of U.S. television through the lens of sport media, and on the “post-Title IX” generation of women in sport culture and its commodification.

DOUGLAS KELLNER is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education and Distinguished Professor at UCLA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture, including Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film, co-authored with Michael Ryan and an Emile de Antonio Reader co-edited with Dan Streible. Other works include Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity; Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond; works in cultural studies such as Media Culture and Media Spectacle; a trilogy of books on postmodern theory with Steve Best; and a trilogy of books on the media and the Bush administration, encompassing Grand Theft 2000, From 9/11 to Terror War, and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy. Author of Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, Kellner is editing collected papers of Herbert Marcuse, four volumes of which have appeared with Routledge. Kellner’s Guys and Guns Amok:_Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombings to the Virginia Tech Massacre_won the 2008 AESA award as the best book on education. In 2010, he published with Blackwell Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush/Cheney Era and just published in 2012 Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere! Kellner’s website is at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html

PETER KRAPP is Professor and Chair of Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine, where he is also a member of the English Department and contributes to Informatics, as well as to the graduate program in Visual Studies. He is the author of Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2004) and of Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2011), and co-edited Medium Cool (Duke University Press, 2002: SAQ 101:3), and has published articles and book chapters on media theory, film, machinima, gaming, and digital culture in various anthologies and journals.

FATIMAH TOBING RONY is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, and Visual Studies, at the University of California, Irvine. She received her MFA in Film (Directing/Production) from UCLA and her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University. She is a two-time winner of Directors Guild of America Student Film Awards, and has been awarded a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, Berlinale Talent Campus, and an ABC/Disney Writing Grant. Her first book was The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Duke University Press, 1996), which won the Society for Cinema Studies prize for best book in the field in 1998, and is in its third printing. Her feature film, Chants of Lotus [Perempuan Punya Cerita] (2008), which she co-directed with Nia Dinata, Upi, and Lasya Susatyo, focuses on stories about Indonesian women and was a controversial winner of the Indonesian Film Awards in 2008, since it was met by serious resistance by the Indonesian government's censor board. Her second book project focuses on realism, sexuality, and globalization in representations of Indonesian women and is tentatively titled Annah la Javanaise.

LINDA WILLIAMS is Professor of Film and Media, and of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema, Figures of Desire (1981), a co-edited volume of feminist film criticism (Re-vision, 1984), an edited volume on film spectatorship, Viewing Positions (1993) and Reinventing Film Studies (co-edited with Christine Gledhill, 2000). In 1989 she published a study of pornographic film entitled Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (second edition 1999). This study of moving-image pornography looks seriously at the history and form of an enormously popular genre. In 2001 Williams published Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001, Princeton)–an analysis of racial melodrama spanning the 19th and 20th centuries of American culture. She has also edited a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies, featuring work by many U.C. Berkeley graduate students (Duke, 2004). Her most recent book is Screening Sex (Duke, 2008), a history of the revelation and concealment of sex at the movies. Her forthcoming book is On The Wire.