Photo Credit: Marina Romani
The Visual Cultures Writing Group is open to all who are writing about film, media and other visual cultures. Our group is highly interdisciplinary: our participants have come from Film, Rhetoric, Slavic, French, German, Italian Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, Architecture, Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, Political Science, Anthropology, Linguistics, Jewish Studies, Art History, Near Eastern Studies, East Asian Studies, among other departments and programs on campus. At our “discussion and critique” meetings, we discuss two substantial essays (often dissertation chapters) submitted ahead of time by two participants. The Visual Cultures Writing Group has been a great source of support and feedback for students writing dissertations on film and other “visual” topics. In the past our topics have ranged from everything from presentations on Hollis Frampton, the view of the globe, boxing, horror, digital archives, imaging Antartica, imaging death and much more. This is the intellectual core of our group.
Primary Organizer: Professor Linda Wiliams (Film and Media/Rhetoric) lwillie@berkeley.edu
Secondary Organizer: Professor Anne Nesbet (Slavic Studies) nesbet@berkeley.edu
2011/2012 Meetings
9/16 First meeting: George Larkin (Film) "Engineering Art: The Writings of Early Film Engineers"; Kris Fallon, "Technology, Transparent."
10/21 Alenda Chang/Brooke Belisle
12/2 Marina Romani/Justin Vaccaro
All meetings will be on Friday afternoon 1-3 pm at Linda Williams’s house, 34 Panoramic Way (see directions below). We will begin discussion at 1:10 pm sharp.
Readings will reach you by the Wednesday before the meeting if you are on the mailing list. Please contact Marcus Norman if you are not yet on the list (mdn@berkeley.edu). If you would like us to consider your essay, please contact Linda Williams (lwillie@berkeley.edu).
Directions to Linda Williams’ home:
34 Panoramic Way, just south, and up the hill, from the stadium.
By car from Berkeley: take Dwight up to Prospect, turn left and go to Bancroft Way. Veer right rather than going into the parking lot south of the stadium. Veer right again onto Panoramic Way. We are about 8 houses up on right hand side. You can also park in the non-red parking places on Panoramic Way, but there are not too many.
By foot from Campus: go up Bancroft to I House, turn right on Piedmont and immediately left on Bancroft Way. Continue up hill to steps leading up to the stadium. At the top of the steps continue up the hill on Bancroft Way half block until you hit Panoramic Way. (Do not go in the direction of Strawberry Canyon). Eight houses up on the right.
Our 2010-2011 Past Schedule of Events
September
Chris Goetz (Film), “Gaming the Game.”
Kris Fallon (Film), “Where Truth Lies: Documentary Film, Digital Media and Political Engagement.”
October
Liu Xiao (East Asian), “Between the Banal and the Spectacular: Cell Phones, Flash Animation and Jia Zhangke's Realism.”
Sanjay Hukku (Film), “A Structuralist Analysis of Deep Throat.”
November
Emily Carpenter (Rhetoric), “No Way Home: Landscape as Fleshly Field of Care in The Last Winter.”
Jesse Constantino (English), “The Property Man: Violence and the Spectacle of Serial Unemployment in the Films of Charlie Chaplin.”
January
Jennifer Pranolo (Film), “Paul Sharits' Innervated Spectator.”
Kevin Wynter (Film), “A Brief Phenomenology of Horror: The One, The Other and Their Encounter.”
April
Andrew Moisey (Film), “Digital Photography in an Art History Universe.”
Brooke Beslisle (Rhetoric), “Panoramic Sky, Digital Universe; Seeing the Bigger Picture from Telescope to Satellite.”
