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.
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Spotlight Seminars
Michael B. Gillespie(NYU)
“The Erasures Between Us: Visual Historiography and the Art of Blackness.”
Friday, September 27, 2 PM, RPW Center
Abstract: The talk considers the aesthetic, cultural, and historiographic frequencies of the art of blackness with a focus on two films: Flumen Orationis (Terry Adkins, 2012) and Missing Time (Morgan Quaintance, 2019). Working across contemporary art, music, and cinema, the presentation will detail the consequential ways that these objects enact and render blackness with an experimental/avant-garde practice that poses new conceptual circuits for understanding black visual historiography.
Bio: Michael Boyce Gillespie is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. His work focuses on black visual and expressive culture, film theory, visual historiography, popular music, and contemporary art. His writing has appeared in Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971, ASAP/J, Film Quarterly, liquid blackness, Journal of Popular Music Studies, as well as other journals and edited collections. He was the consulting producer for The Criterion Collection releases of Deep Cover, Shaft, and Drylongso. He is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and currently working on a monograph entitled Dreams and False Alarms: Ambivalence, Pleasure, and the Art of Blackness.
Armond R. Towns (Williams College)
“The Fourth Room: AI, the Human, and the Problem of Rationality”
Friday, October 25, 2 PM, RPW Center
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently become the hot technological innovation for corporations in the United States, informing their business decisions and their future endeavors. Much of these business decisions accept Western ideas of humanity as the basis on which AI must be built. This has led to a number of important and foundational studies on AI, which argue that AI, as it is now deployed in the US, is racist. This talk argues that, in these dominant studies on racism and AI we can miss how problematic Western conceptions of humanity continue to live on in new digital spaces. This talk examines the history of AI and race through an idea less addressed in dominant studies: that Western conceptions of humanity, central to Alan Turing’s “imitation game,” inform the intelligence of AI. It is from concepts like Turing’s imitation game, its theoretical “three rooms,” and its acceptance of human development (from child to adult) that race crept into one of the central theories of AI from the start.
Bio: Armond R. Towns is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. He is the author of On Black Media Philosophy, published in 2022 by the University of California Press.
Bishnupriya Ghosh (University of California, Santa Barbara)
“Air Apprehensions: Rethinking Milieu in Epidemic Media”
Friday, November 1, 2 PM, RPW Center
Abstract: One of the enduring effects of the COVID-19 pandemic was the sudden visibility of air. In climatic media, drone footage, feature photography, and documentary film, among other media cultures, air became comprehensible as a risk environment. But beyond the calculable environment, new attunements to air as a dynamic milieu arose from (what I have described elsewhere as) a post-COVID “pandemic viewing position.” As the epidemic medium of transmission, the seen and unseen milieu, air generated anxiety and dread, curiosity and fascination. Drawing on film-theoretical discussions of cinematic milieus (by Inga Pollmann, Francesco Casseti, and Jennifer Peterson), my talk tracks apprehensions of air in the visual media cultures of India’s second wave COVID-19 experience (April-May 2021). Specifically, I look at crematoria footage in Delhi, one of the hardest hit localities, in which COVID-19’s deadly air-breath complex took center stage. On the one hand, then, I fine tune the pandemic viewing position to differential epidemic intensities: what does it mean to visualize air after this particular experience of catastrophic mass death? On the other hand, I propose a theory of milieu cued toward what lies beyond the frame—towards “the surrounds” (pace Fred Moten and Stefano Harney) that are never fully legible or containable as a risk environment. At stake is what film theory can offer in understanding the post-pandemic milieu. How might thinking/feeling air galvanize making potential histories? What respiratory politics become possible when we apprehend air?
Bio: Bishnupriya Ghosh publishes in global media cultures, environmental media, and critical health studies. Her early research includes two monographs, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011), while her current research is exemplified by the co-edited volume, The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge 2020) and a new monograph, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).