Film Theory and Visual Culture Seminar

The Film Theory and Visual Culture Seminar fosters dialogue among faculty and graduate students interested in film, visual culture, literature and media studies, as well as in philosophies of perception, aesthetics and critical theory, the politics of technology, and the history of vision. Each semester we host scholars, media-makers, and artists from leading film and media programs (and adjacent fields), as well as scholars from our own Vanderbilt community. See our line-up of speakers below and please join us for the conversation! To see a list of previous speakers, please click here. For more information about upcoming programming, click here.

Spotlight Seminars

Alenda Chang (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Friday, February 7^th 2:15- 4:00 P.M. at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

“Digital Plantations”

Abstract: Will games and other digital preoccupations soon become the stuff of computational luxury? Even as some shifts toward more sustainable computing are happening, the game industry and its corollaries are still driving toward ever more photorealistic and data-intensive imprints of the world around us. This presentation looks at 3D asset libraries to argue that the particular pathways by which natural models show up in games, cinema, architecture, and elsewhere remain largely invisible and undertheorized. If models shape what is knowable and which actions can be taken in virtual spaces, how might a closer attention to modeling—specifically, natural modeling in the worlds of digital games—encourage us to reevaluate our relationships to electronic artifacts and the biosphere? Furthermore, will models become obsolete in a new era of what media theorist Brooke Belisle calls computational photogrammetry, which translates photographic scans into seemingly fully realized three-dimensional renderings of captured space?

Bio: Alenda Y. Chang is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has written extensively about the environmental impacts of digital games, including the 2019 book, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. She was an early member of the IGDA Climate Special Interest Group and currently serves on the advisory board of STRATEGIES (Sustainable TRAnsiTion for Europe’s Game IndustrIES). At UCSB, Chang co-directs Wireframe, a studio promoting collaborative theoretical and creative media practice with investments in global social and environmental justice. She is also a founding co-editor of the UC Press open-access journal, Media+Environment.

Lakshmi Padmanabhan (Northwestern University),

Friday, April 11, 2-4 P.M. in Buttrick 123

“Bureaucratic Realism, or Disjuncture and Totality”

Abstract: In 1967, while India was facing a series of political economic crises, the state-run Films Division produced a surprisingly diverse range of candid and critical documentaries that captured the cultural upheaval of this moment. This paper develops an aesthetic argument for reading these films reinvention of Indian documentary as a site of mediating the intense social contradictions of this period through an aesthetic of what I will refer to as, “bureaucratic realism,” a dialectical form caught up in the tensions between reproducing the spectacle of state power and representing the limits of spectacle as a mode of state power. I do so through a close reading of two exemplary films from this period, SNS Sastry’s I Am 20, and S. Sukhdev’s India ’67 (a.k.a. An Indian Day). Both films break with the Films Division house style of Griersonian state documentary and experiment with new genres and styles of realism. In my reading, I focus on the visual glitches and sonic disruptions that pepper these films (usually understood as evidence of their limited aesthetic value and low-budget production) as aesthetic traces that mediate the contradictory totality of this moment of political upheaval. In doing so, I draw out a complicated postcolonial legacy of cinematic realism which has remained under-theorized since Euro-US film theory’s post-1968 turn to an aesthetics of modernism.

Bio: Lakshmi Padmanabhan is Assistant Professor of Screen Cultures in the Department of Radio, TV, Film at Northwestern University. Her current book project, Documentary Degree Zero, examines the aesthetics of documentary realism and the failed dreams of decolonization in India from the 1970s to the present. Her academic writing has appeared in scholarly journals including Cultural Critique, Camera Obscura, JCMS, Women & Performance, and Art History. She is the editor of Forms of Errantry (2024) on the films of Miryam Charles published with Union Docs. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Women & Performance, “Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform” (2019) Her essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in popular venues including n+1, e-flux, Seen, Public Books, Jewish Currents, and Post45.