Film Festival Militancy

media release: UW Center for Visual Cultures lecture, Room L150. Zoom option

Lecture: Film Festival Militancy

Thursday, September 11, Elvehjem L150, 5 PM

Workshop: Film Culture and Activism

Friday, September 12, University Club Rm 313, 12 PM

Genevieve Yue’s lecture will examine screening spaces as they have been shaped and disrupted by experimental film. She draws on a history of militant actions focused on the screening space, including Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s clandestine screenings of The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), and various incendiary events at Knokke-le-Zoute in the 1960s, to consider the politics of recent protest at film festivals including IDFA, the Berlinale, and others. Against a liberal model of “post-screening discussion” popularized by places like the Flaherty Seminar, these more radical disruptions and the violent suppression they are met with reveal the repressive mechanisms of control that underlie otherwise liberal democratic institutions.

Workshop Abstract:

This workshop will consider the role of activism in relation to cultural workers in film. This pertains not only to academic research on the topic, but instances where film scholars and other film professionals might participate. As a case study, we will examine the history and methods of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) as it has been leveraged through academic institutions, awards shows, film festivals, and other sites of cultural contestation.

Biography:

Genevieve Yue is an associate professor of Culture and Media and director of the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College, The New School. She is co-editor of the Cutaways book series at Fordham University Press, a member of the October advisory board, and an independent film programmer. Her essays and criticism have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, MUBI Notebook Magazine, October, Representations, Reverse Shot, The Times Literary Supplement, World Records, and elsewhere. She is the author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (University of California, 2020), and is currently working on two book projects: one on trains and cinema, and the other on the material history of Hollywood. She is passionate about rescuing injured birds.

More information please check out Yue’s website.