Wednesday, October 28, 2009, Thomas Hall 224

Lecture - “‘Mariconerias’ of State: Mariela Castro, Homosexuals and Cuban Politics”at 4:30pm

Film Screening - “War in Guam” at 6:30pm

contact: Professor Lázaro Lima, llima@brynmawr.edu

Saturday, October 24, 6 PM
Scribe Video Center
4212 Chestnut Street , 3rd Floor
Philadelphia , PA 19104

Ms. Cheang uses New Media Platforms to create multi-artist/author art installations that traverse actual & virtual spaces & actively engages the viewer in the development of the narrative. Some themes of her work include ethnic stereotyping, institutional power, race relations, sexual politics, gender fusion, and the techno body. Her work has been commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in New York and included in permanent collections in museums around the world. Ms. Cheang will present excerpts from her works which use video, websites, projections and live performances, including:

BRANDON, an homage to Brandon/Teena Brandon of Nebraska, USA, a gender-crossing individual who was raped and murdered in 1993 after his female anatomy was revealed. Brandon , billed as the Guggenheim Museum’s first webs based art commission, was conceived as a one year narrative on the web. http://brandon.guggenheim.org

COIN LOCKER BABY TRILOGY, a three part installation that includes Baby Play, realized in 2001 at the NTT Intercommunication Center, Tokyo.

BABY LOVE, commissioned in 2005 by the National Taiwan Museum of Arts and premiered at Palais de Tokyo in Paris; and Baby Work , yet to be realized. http://babylove.biz

Excerpts from MOVING FOREST, a 12 hour, five act sonic performance realized at Transmediale, Berlin in 2008. http://movingforest.net

Ms. Cheang will be joined by award-winning independent filmmaker Rea Tajiri for a discussion of the aesthetic, logistical, and financial challenges in creating truly open and participatory New Media art projects.

More info on the event: http://www.scribe.org/events/mygrandschemesshuleacheang

Contact:
Boone T. Nguyen
Program Coordinator
p. 215-222-4201
f. 215-222-4205
www.scribe.org

Gallery Talk: Saturday 10/24, 4pm, WCC Art Gallery
Moderated by Andrew Suggs of Philadelphia’s Vox Populi

In three video works, Guarded, Flat Land, and Lost, Finley + Muse explore the visual culture of America’s many contemporary wars. These works peer through the imaginative gloss of words, photographs, and video images Americans use to prepare themselves for the wars on terror and Iraq, presenting the lives of those who participate—either willingly or not.

http://www.haverford.edu/calendar/details/99072

Contact: Matthew Callinan
610-896-1297
mcallina@haverford.edu

Marc Erlbaum
Nationlight Productions
200 Bala Ave., Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004
Phone: (610) 999-6381
Fax: (484) 270-8089
merl@nationlightproductions.com
www.nationlightproductions.com
A Little Light Can Dispel a World of Darkness

invites you to a screening & lecture by

LAUREL NAKADATE

Video still from Beg for Your Life, 2006
© Laurel Nakadate, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

***
Wednesday, October 21, 7-9PM

Bryn Mawr College, Carpenter 21

101 N. Merion Ave., Bryn Mawr, PA

Free and Open to the Public

***

Laurel Nakadate is a photographer, video artist and filmmaker. She was born in Austin, Texas and raised in Ames, Iowa. She received an M.F.A. in photography from Yale University and currently lives in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at P.S.1/MoMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Getty Museum, and The Reina Sofia. In 2009, her first feature film, Stay The Same Never Change, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to be featured in New Directors/ New Films at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. She is currently finishing her second feature film, The Wolf Knife. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York City.

http://www.nakadate.net/

http://www.tonkonow.com/nakadate.html

Akira Mizuta Lippit
Professor of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Cinema Television at the University of Southern California

“Reflections on Spectral Life”

10/01/2009 - 5:00pm
Location: Van Pelt Film Room, 410 Van Pelt Library

http://www.facilities.upenn.edu/map.php?id=133&t=1

Abstract:
Among the many legacies of Jacques Derrida, the many lines of thought that
remain to be thought and re-thought, thought through, and extended in
thought, are the reflections that Derrida left on the subject of life,
spectrality, and autobiography. Separately and together, the points of
life, spectrality, and autobiography form a constellation of points, a
virtual universe that opens in and across his oeuvre. The force of spectral
visuality that drives much of Derrida’s thought, the vital economies of
visuality and visibility, avisuality and invisibility, specularity and
spectrality are marked not as opposing dimensions of vision, as the conflict
of visuality with its negations, obfuscations, interferences, but rather as
variations on the aporetic possibility of seeing formed around a subject of
visuality not always visible.

The Derrida oeuvre constitutes a virtual archive on the subjects of
visibility and invisibility, but also on the possibility or impossibility of
visuality as such. He speaks of the specter and spectrality, of the visible
in-visible and absolute invisibility, or the “radiant invisibility of the
look,” and of the image, the photograph and cinema, among many traces of the
invisible. The trope of blindness–abundant in Derrida’s work to the point
of a theme–and the figure of the blind emerge most often for Derrida in the
form of a paradox: blindness is the mechanism or condition through which one
sees oneself. I am blind to myself, but this blindness is revelatory: it
reveals me to myself, and it reveals my blindness as a condition and
precondition of seeing myself. “The blindness that opens the eye,” Derrida
says, “is not one that darkens vision.”

The phenomenon of blindness remains bound to the subject of autobiography in
much of Derrida’s thought. Blindness appears for Derrida not as the absence
of sight but as a particular relationship to oneself, to the image of
oneself; it is an autobiographical condition; a configuration of the regard
and a mode of self-regarding: which is to say, blindness is conditional.
For Derrida, blindness is also bound, as is autobiography, to death.

“The specter,” says Derrida, “is first and foremost something visible. It
is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a
body which is not present in flesh and blood. It resists the intuition to
which it presents itself, it is not tangible.” Something visible, the
visibility of the specter is an invisible visibility, a form of visibility
that remains invisible, without diminishing the force of visibility itself.
It suggests a tangibility where there is none, the idea or trace of
tangibility, a tangibility that Derrida locates in the image. The intuition
to which the specter presents itself, an intuition brought to life in the
image, is the life of the specter, the specter of life, the essential
spectrality of life itself. Derrida is, today and tomorrow, such a specter.

If you have questions regarding this event, please contact:
Nicola Gentili
Inquiries regarding the Seminar can be directed to:
Chris Cagle or Oliver Gaycken

The Philadelphia Cinema and Media Seminar gratefully acknowledges the
funding of the Council for the Humanities at Temple University; the Program
in Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College; the Cinema Studies Program at the
University of Pennsylvania; and the Program in Film and Media Studies at
Swarthmore College.

Sincerely,

Thomas Sovocool, CSCS
(610) 506-0321
t.sovocool@summitstc.com

Thursday 9/24, 7:30pm, Carpenter 21
Presented by the Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center

In the comedy Slippery Slope, a fierce young feminist filmmaker desperate for cash to finish her documentary secretly takes a job directing a porn film after her other moneymaking schemes don’t pan out.  She brings her feminist ideals to the porn set, and the experience unexpectedly awakens her slumbering sexuality, arousing the suspicions of her politically-correct husband and threatening her marriage.

After three sold-out screenings at the 2006 Montreal World Film Festival, the Montreal Gazette called Slippery Slope “a huge success” and said “Montreal audiences are eating up Slippery Slope.” Sarah’s first feature film as a writer and director, Slippery Slope won the Best Feature Award at the 2007 Broad Humor Film Festival in Los Angeles, and is being distributed internationally by Lifesize Entertainment.

Nora Ephron (screenwriter and director, Julie & Julia, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally) wrote: “The movie looks great…and you got great work out of the actors.”

Susan Faludi (author, Backlash, Stiffed) wrote “Slippery Slope was delightful and yes, you did make me laugh in many spots…I admire your verve in tackling a dicey subject.”

Academy-award nominated animator Bill Plympton raves “I’ve just seen Slippery Slope by Sarah Schenck and it’s a wonderful and very funny film.  You’ll love it.”
David Brown (Producer, Jaws, Cocoon, The Player) called Slippery Slope a “fresh and amusing send-up of pornography, funny and well done…good cast and first-rate writing.”

Shere Hite (author, The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality – over 40 million books published) says, “I loved your film Slippery Slope, it is hilarious, funny, multi-layered and really warm.”