Friends of Art History Visual Culture Series 2014/15
UPCOMING LECTURES:
Friday, March 13th, 2:30 pm, 412 St. Patrick’s Building
“Americanization of a Small Nation Film Culture? The Case of Tancred Ibsen and Norway”
by Gunnar Iversen, Professor, Film and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Visiting Scholar, SSAC, Carleton University.
How does a small nation compete with Hollywood? In what ways are filmmakers in small nations using, imitating, or opposing aesthetic norms and industrial models from the American film industry? This presentation will discuss these questions through a case study of the films of Tancred Ibsen (grandson of Henrik Ibsen) in Norway. Ibsen worked at MGM in Hollywood before returning to Norway and ushering in Norwegian cinema’s “Golden Age” in the late 1930s. Some have argued that these films were successful merely because they mimicked Hollywood style. This talk will explore how the films both used and opposed Hollywood film style, and the impact of this approach on Norwegian film culture then and now.
===========================================================
and with details TBA, a future presentation:
“Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema 1908-1934”
by Laura Horak, Assistant Professor, Film Studies, SSAC, Carleton University
While many assume cross-dressing to be inherently transgressive, my research shows that the American film industry actually used cross-dressed women to achieve respectability in the 1910s and early 1920s. Only in the late 1920s, when the popular press took up the subject of lesbianism, did the film industry exploit cross-dressing’s new sense of transgression. This presentation draws from over ten years of research during which I discovered more than 300 American silent and early sound films featuring cross-dressed women.
======================
PAST LECTURES IN THE SERIES
Friday, January 23rd, 2:30 pm, 412 St. Patrick’s Building
“Two artists walk into an archive: decolonizing a colonizing space”
by Stacy Ernst, PhD Candidate, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University.
This talk will address interventions into the colonial archive by Anishinaabe artist Carl Beam (1943 – 2005) and settler artist Greg Curnoe (1936 – 1992). While each approached the archive in very different ways, I will argue that the result is similar – decolonization of the colonial archive. As Hal Foster argued, contemporary artists have had an intense interest in the archive bringing into question its function in modernity. Through Beam and Curnoe’s engagement with the archive it becomes clear that part of its function may be as a space from which a decolonial future could emerge.
===========================================================
Friday, September 26, 2:30 p.m., 412 St. Patrick’s Building
“The Malleable Moment in English Portraiture, c. 1540-1620”
by Robert Tittler, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Concordia University; Adjunct Professor, Carleton University
This talk concerns the transition from religious to secular portraiture in the decades following the English Reformation, as English men and women worked to sort out what a portrait meant and how it should be employed after the rejection of traditional Roman Catholic belief and imagery.