The Fisher Center Spring 2009 Lecture Series will address the questions:
January 26
If cells animate life, how do imaging technologies breathe new life into cells? And, if visual imaging media change, does cell life become reanimated in new ways too?
University of California, Los Angeles Associate Professor of Sociology and of Society and Genetics Hannah Landecker addresses the intersection of cinema and life science, beginning with early uses of cinematography in experimental biology in the first decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on feminist science studies about biology, embodiment, materiality, and the technologization of life, she asks: What role did (or does) time-lapse imaging play in modern life science, particularly against a background of techniques of fixation and formalization that tend to kill or abstract living things in order to understand them? How then do these imaging techniques serve as a conduit between scientific and popular notions of life? Author of numerous articles and chapters, she received the Suzanne J. Levinson Prize: (best book in life sciences and natural history) for her recent book, Culturing Life: How Cells Become Technologies.
February 19
What happens when monsters become reanimated almost two centuries later? When bodies and words are put in motion anew?
Writer Shelley Jackson will illustrate a discussion of itinerant language and the living dead with passages from or about works, including her groundbreaking hyperfiction Patchwork Girl and her current project SKIN, a "mortal work of art" published in tattoos on the skin of 2095 volunteers, some from countries outside the United States, including Argentina, Jordan, Thailand and Finland. Described as "among the most provocative of feminist hypertexts," and as a "brilliant hypertext parable of writing and identity," Patchwork Girl is about the "female companion to Frankenstein's monster whose 'birth takes place more than once. In the plea of a bygone monster; from a muddy hole by corpse-light; under the needle, and under the pen.'" She is author as well of the novel Half Life, the short-story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, hypertexts My Body and The Doll Games, children's books with her own illustrations, including The Old Woman and The Wave and Sophia, The Alchemist's Dog. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Bookforum, The Believer, The LA Times, The Village Voice and Cabinet Magazine. She is co-founder (with artist Christine Hill) of The Interstitial Library and headmistress of the Shelley Jackson Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children. The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, she has degrees from Stanford and Brown and teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the New School University. She lives in Brooklyn and at www.ineradicablestain.com.
Moving Words Workshop with Shelley Jackson
Friday, February 20
12 - 3 p.m.
R.S.V.P. to fishercenter@hws.edu to reserve a spot.
March 2, 3, 4
Animé Film, Grave of the Fireflies, Monday, March 2, Sanford Room, 6:30 p.m.
Taking place toward the end of World War II in Japan, Grave of the Fireflies is the poignant tale of two orphaned children, Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, who try to survive amidst widespread famine and the callous indifference of their countrymen. Some critics consider it one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever made. Animation historian Ernest Rister compares the film to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and says, "it is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen."
Panel discussion follows film with Professors Les Friedman, Lisa Yoshikawa and Leah Shafer, and students.
Animé Film, Tekkonkinkreet, Tuesday, March 3, Sanford Room, 6:30 p.m.
Tekkonkinkreet centers on a pair of orphaned street kids - the tough, canny Kuro (Black) and the childish but mysteriously intuitive Shiro (White) - as they deal with Yakuza attempting to take over Takara Machi (Treasure Town). Tekkonkinkreet is a pun on "tekkin concrete," the Japanese term for reinforced concrete; it suggests the opposition of the concrete city against the strength of imagination. This film won the 2008 Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year, the Grand Prix award at the Anima 2008 festival, the prestigious Best Film Award at the 2006 Mainichi Film Awards, and was named the number one film of 2006 in the annual "Best of" roundup by the New York Museum of Modern Art's Artforum magazine.
Panel discussion follows with screenwriter Anthony Weintraub, and Japanamerica author Roland Kelts.
March 4
Is there something more to the U.S.'s fascination with Japanese animé and manga? How are animé films and manga comics cultural channeling zones, opened by the horrors of war and disaster and animated by the desire to assemble a world of new looks, feelings and identities?
Professor at the University of Tokyo, Sophia University and the University of the Sacred Heart Tokyo, Roland Kelts addresses the movement of Japanese culture into the West as sign and symptom of broader reanimations. With uncertainty now the norm, style, he argues, is trumping identity, explaining, in part, the success of Japanese pop and fashion, design and cuisine in the West. As Western mindsets encounter a rapid decline in longstanding binaries - good/evil, woman/man, black/white - Japan's cultural narratives evolve in borderless, unstable worlds where characters transform, morality is multifaceted, and endings inconclusive. Animation allows an aesthetic freedom wherein these transformations and gender ambiguity may be given fuller play than in live action films. Nothing appears fixed. No surprise, perhaps, argues Kelts, coming from the only people to have suffered the immediate transformations of two atomic bombs and the instant denigration of their supreme polar father: the Japanese Emperor. Author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US, Kelts is also a contributing writer and editor for A Public Space and Adbusters magazines, and a columnist for The Daily Yomiuri. His articles have appeared in The Village Voice, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, Vogue and The Japan Times. He is the editor in chief of Animé Masterpieces, an anime lecture and screening series. Kelts divides his time between New York and Tokyo.
Films, panels and lecture are co-sponsored by Comparative Literature, Media and Society, The Young Memorial Trust for International Peace and Understanding, and Animé Central, and presented in association with Anime Masterpieces, a project of Gorgeous Entertainment.
March 25
Smith Opera House
What happens when cultural stereotypes and iconic images are brought to life live on the stage, cabaret style?
With a baroque sharp-edged brilliance, Mayan-Lebanese artist Astrid Hadad embodies multiple images of woman: the passionate, the rebellious, the naïve, the dreamer and the "femme fatale," venomous or scorned. Her unique musical styles include rock-infused Mexican ranchero music, cumbia, La rumba . . . etc. Her method of reinterpreting, performing, and creating popular music has been termed "Heavy Nopal." She points her artistic blade with "Astrident" humor at machismo, fundamentalism, and the powerful elite. This is a show that earned Astrid the title of "walking museum of popular culture," and is not to be missed for either her music or costumes. The show relieves depression, revives the weak, intoxicates (without alcohol) the sober, and excites the hedonistic. Pure animation. Hadad holds a degree from from the Centro Universitario de Teatro de la Ciudad de México. As an actress, she has participated in telenovelas: "Teresa", "Yo no creo en los hombres," "gente bien," and a wide variety of programming on international channels such as "HBO olé." Her filmic work includes a significant role in Sólo con tu pareja and the documentaries Hasta el ultimo trago corazón and the prize-winning Astrid Hadad la Tequilera. Hadad has performed in China, France, Peru, Canada, and Lebanon, and her eclectic discography includes: El Calcetín, Corazón sangrante, Heavy Nopal, en vivo, La Cuchilla, Pecadora, and ¡OH! Diosas. The most recent of these shows have inspired her newest project "Divinas Pecadoras" (Divine Sinners).
During her 25 year career, Astrid Hadad has redefined and restored the tradition of cabaret in Mexico.
Astrid Hadad, La Cuchilla (The Razor), Miércoles, 25 de Marzo, Smith Opera House, 7:30 p.m.
¿Que ocurre cuando estereotipos culturales cobran vida en el escenario cabaret? Con filoso brillo de figura barroca, Astrid Hadad encarna a las mujeres amantes e insumisas, ingenuas, soñadoras o "femmes fatales," venenosas abandonadas en su estilo ranchero mexicano que integra el rock, la cumbia, la rumba etc. Empuña su Cuchilla con humor "estridente" para burlarse del machismo, de los integrismos y de los poderosos. Un espectáculo por el cual la nombraron "Museo ambulante de las culturas populares". Entonces, no se pierde la vista. Un espectáculo "quita depresiones," estímulo para los alicaídos, borrachera sin alcohol para los abstemios excitación orgásmica para los gozosos. Animación pura. Astrid Hadad es egresada del Centro Universitario de Teatro de la Ciudad de México. Como actriz ha participado en las telenovelas: "Teresa," "Yo no creo en los hombres," "Gente bien" y diversos programas de cadenas internacionales como "HBO Olé". En cine tuvo una participación especial en la película Sólo con tu pareja y en los documentales Hasta el último trago corazón y el premiado Astrid Hadad: La Tequilera. Sus espectáculos la han llevado a China, Francia, Perú, Canadá y Líbano. Su discografía incluye El Calcetín, Corazón sangrante, Heavy Nopal en vivo, La Cuchilla, los más recientes: Pecadora y ¡OH! Diosas, siendo estos últimos los que la motivan a realizar su último espectáculo "Divinas Pecadoras".
A lo largo de su carrera de más de 25 años Astrid Hadad ha renovado el ambiente cabaretero nacional.
Co-sponsored with Spanish and Hispanic Studies, and Intercultural Affairs.
April 22
Is the cyborg an everyday animation? Or does the cyborg act as our cultural cartographer, charting reanimations of current and future deepest desires, fears, hopes and dreams?
Fisher Center predoctoral fellow Jillian plumbs cyborgian histories and biographies as they have been brought to life through word and image, sight and sound, signs and symptoms. In the cyborg's theatre of creation where gender, technology and consumer culture combine as its most elemental life-giving forces, there transpires a larger exchange of identity and transformation. But Burcar asks: Is the cyborg narrative dictated by a heteronormative sex and gender system? Does the cyborg offer alternatives to normative models of reproduction? Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (a novel written in hypertext), David Mack's Kabuki (a comic book series) as well as Chobits (a Japanese manga and anime) will provide a starting point to address these questions. However, it is only by examining these stories, as well as the shape these stories take, that the most important question can be explored: what animates the cyborg's narrative and how might it continue to be reanimated?
Burcar is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing (fiction) at the University of Southern California (USC), a hybrid program where she does critical studies while producing creative work. She will complete both the Visual Studies and Gender Studies Graduate Certificates at USC. She has also been honored with the Mildred Fox Hanson Award and Virginia Middleton Summer Award as well as many others. Recently, she has given several talks on comics-related topics across the country.
Presentations will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Geneva Room of the Warren Hunting Smith Library, on Pulteney Street, on the HWS campus unless otherwise noted.
All morning roundtables will be held from 9 to 10 a.m. in Room 212 Demarest Hall, the Fisher Center.
