Note: If you will be attending the reception immediately following the talk, please RSVP by Thursday, October 18 to the CFS Coordinator, Nova Smith, at nova@uchicago.edu.
Please save the date for the opening of the 2012-13 Chicago Film Seminar.
We are pleased to announce that on Thursday, October 25th at
6:30pm Haidee Wasson, associate professor of film studies and associate
dean of research and graduate studies at Concordia University in Montreal, will
give a talk entitled "Protocols of Portability and Projection: Technologies of
the Small Screen at Mid-Century." Jacob Smith,
assistant professor of radio, television and film at Northwestern working on
the cultural history of media with a focus on sound and performance,
will deliver the response.
We will convene in our new location at DePaul's Loop Campus in the Daley Building at 14 E. Jackson Blvd. (at State St.), Room LL 102. **We ask that you use the State St. entrance to the building, located at 247 S. State.** Maps can be found here and here. A reception will follow.
Wasson describes her talk as follows:
The history of portable film projectors offers us a very different view of what cinema has been -- not big but small, not only moving but also still, permanent but just as often provisional. Through the lens of the portable projector and its small screen, cinema’s apparatus has long been less a singular ideal and more an iterative process, serving a range of aesthetic ideals, epistemological projects, corporate and governmental mandates. This presentation will provide a framework for thinking about what it means to integrate portability into our assumptions about cinema’s past, using a cluster of case studies beginning in 1939 and ending in 1959. Particular attention will be paid to the role of the American military in developing film projectors during the war and well beyond.
We look forward to seeing you all there.
