Seminars will start at 5:30pm.

Any queries should be directed to the co-convenors, Ferdinando Cocco, Toby Ashworth, Harrison Whitaker and Rebecca Fu.

Lent Term 2024

Thursday, 25 January, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Thursday, 25 January, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Malcolm Cook (University of Southampton)

“Useful Animation, Petroleum, and the Environment”

Thursday, 8 February, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Thursday, 8 February, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Whitney Davis (University of California, Berkeley)

“Depictured World: How Pictures Shape Perception (If They Do)

The talk addresses a basic and global premise of the analysis of visual culture in film studies, art history and related disciplines: namely, that pictures of the world – paintings, films, etc. – constitutively shape the way in which human visual perception actually sees the extra-pictorial world, such that an ambient visual environment literally comes to look (for example) ‘Mondrianesque’ (as if midtown Manhattan has aspects originally surfaced in paintings of New York City made by Mondrian in the 1940s). A strong thesis of ‘depictured world’ – and of its ‘picture-objects’ – was developed by Husserl, and equally strongly contested by Adorno; sociologists of perception (Beard, Freud, Simmel, Benjamin, Kracauer) wrestled with its implications; and it still remains ill-defined for both theory and research.

Wednesday, 28 February, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Wednesday, 28 February, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Brian R. Jacobson (California Institute of Technology)

“Sulfur and Cinema, Earth’s Blazing Entrails”

Thursday, 14 March, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Thursday, 14 March, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Jia Tan (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

“Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China”

Michaelmas Term 2023

Wednesday, 11 October, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Wednesday, 11 October, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Hunter Vaughn, University of Cambridge.

“Screen Studies in the Age of Climate Crisis: Ecocriticism, Environmental Media Studies, and Beyond”.

Wednesday, 8 November, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Wednesday, 8 November, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Kiki Tianqi Yu, Queen Mary University of London.

“Cinema of Qi: The Politics of Ecological Cinema and a Daoist Approach through Vital Energy”.

Wednesday, 15 November, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

Wednesday, 15 November, 5:30pm (Robert McCrum Lecture Theatre)

David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgow.

Cinematic Transculturation: “Floating Heritage” in the Cinemas of the World (tourism, transit, travail, transmission).

Cambridge Film & Screen

Email: office@film.cam.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1223 760355