Author: smthornton
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A Legacy Laserdisc for CMS: Tom Gunning’s Commentary Track for Sansho the Bailiff
A few years ago, Daniel Morgan mentioned a long-time hidden treasure for cinephiles to Ben Ruder (Film Studies Center Manager, Film and Technical Operations). That treasure was a 1991 commentary track done by Tom Gunning for the Criterion Collection laserdisc of Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954). Laserdiscs were used as an audio-visual storage medium…
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CMS Alum Nathan Holmes (Ph.D. 2012) on Cinematic Spaces, Urban Life, and a Research Method of Flânerie
Nathan Holmes, Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at SUNY Purchase College, traces his interest in cinematic and social spaces back to growing up in a small town. As Holmes remembers, “Films were always a way to get somewhere else (to Paris, New York, Hong Kong etc.). This changed slightly as I got older and became…
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Ben Ruder, Film Studies Center Manager, Film and Technical Operations, on Revealing the Magic of Film Projection
Ben Ruder, Manager, Film and Technical Operations at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center (FSC), has had a busy lockdown year. Besides the immense technical support and digitization efforts he provides for Cinema and Media Studies department remote screenings, he also has been hard at work on his own project, Enjoy the Film. As Ruder…
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The Art of Film Production: Fourth-Year CMS and Visual Arts Major Anastasia Liu on Film Editing and the Politics of Asian-American and Gendered Representation
Long before Anastasia Liu arrived at UChicago, the fourth-year undergraduate student was interested in art, film, and production. “I’ve been doing art since I was 8 years old,” Liu says. “Because of my interests in art, I always really admired film and intended to get into film studies before college.” Initially, Liu thought she would…
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Srijita Banerjee (MAPH 2018) on French Ethnographic Film, Experimental Animation, and the Connections She Made During the UChicago MAPH Program
A UChicago MAPH student in the 2017-2018 academic year, Srijita Banerjee is now a second year PhD student in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. The MAPH program was what led her to cinema studies: “I came into the program super interested in art history, but I took a bunch of film courses because…
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CMS Ph.D. Alum Kalisha Cornett on Teaching and Advising for Student Equity
Kalisha Cornett (Ph.D. 2019) has carried a tradition from Miriam Hansen into her role as lecturer and academic advisor in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University: she arrives at each scheduled screening a few minutes early to greet the students, watch the film, and take notes. “In every screening,” Cornett remembers from CA’ing for Hansen, “there…
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BA Alum Katie Kirkland (2015) on Performative Strategies in Contemporary Experimental Documentary and Film Programming during COVID-19
Katie Kirkland, a fourth year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature / Film and Media Studies at Yale University, found film as an undergraduate student at UChicago. “I feel very fortunate to have fallen into film, since I knew next to nothing about it when I first entered college,” Kirkland says. Her interest in film was…
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Ph.D. Alum Sabrina Negri on the Detective Work of Film Preservation and the Increased Digitization of Archives during COVID-19
Sabrina Negri (Ph.D. 2017) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder. Negri’s dissertation, titled “Archival Clues: Film, Digital, and the Evidential Paradigm,” speaks to the rich intersections of her work on the digital preservation of analog moving images, but she has also published…
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Seeing the Micro and Macro in Media: Tom Lamarre on Ocean Media, Contagion, and Teaching Research Creation
Tom Lamarre joined CMS faculty in Fall 2020 from previous posts at McGill University and Duke University. It is a homecoming for Lamarre: he has a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from UChicago that he received in 1992. Furthermore, he has recently returned to his dissertation, with the aim of turning it (along…
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Maria Belodubrovskaya on Teaching Global Cinema and Hitchcock’s Oeuvre
By Amy Skjerseth / CMS PhD Candidate Maria Belodubrovskaya began teaching in the Cinema and Media Studies department in 2019, but 2020 is her first year in residence at UChicago. She joined CMS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was Associate Professor in the Department of Communications Arts. She is the author of Not…