Share: Twitter | Facebook

This conference is dedicated to the memory of Miriam Hansen and her seminal work in film history and film theory. One focus of the conference is her posthumously published book Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (2012). Other topics are early cinema, on which Hansen has published an influential book, the idea of a vernacular modernism in global context which her latest work was focused on, and the kind of political intellectual investments she stood for both in Germany, in this country, and across the world. The conference brings together major film scholars from Europe and the United States and is designed to carry on Miriam Hansen's critical work. The conference is organized by the journal New German Critique on whose editorial board Hansen served for several decades.

Organized by New German Critique and sponsored by DAAD New York, Goethe Institute New York, Deutsches Generalkonsulat New York, Lufthansa, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Columbia Department of Germanic Languages.

Saturday, September 22
9:00 a.m. - 10:45 a.m.
1. Vernacular Modernism I

Moderator: Victoria de Grazia, Columbia University

Gertrud Koch, Freie Universität Berlin
Experimental Aesthetics: Frankfurt, Moscow, Hollywood

Dan Morgan, University of Pittsburgh
'Play with Danger': Vernacular Modernism and the Problem of Criticism

Pamela Wojcik, University of Notre Dame
Vernacular Modernism as Child’s Play

11:00 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
2. Vernacular Modernism II

Moderator: James Schamus, Columbia University

Zhen Zhang, New York University
Melodrama as Global Vernacular: Daybreak and Beyond

Weihong Bao, University of California Berkeley
After Vernacular Modernism: The Case of Propaganda Film Theory in Wartime Chongqing

Yuri Tsivian, University of Chicago
Soviet Amerikanites and the Vernacular Modernism Thesis

Afternoon
2:00 p.m. - 3:45 p.m.
3. Early Cinema

Moderator: E. Ann Kaplan, Stony Brook University

Tom Gunning, University of Chicago
The Interstices of the Moving Image: Experiencing Perception Through Cinema

Mary Ann Doane, University of California Berkeley
Facing a Universal Language

Xinyu Dong, University of Chicago
The Freudian Mime, or a Chinese Shadowplay Goes to Paris

4:00 p.m. - 5:45 p.m.
4. Intellectual Investments

Moderator: Michael Geyer, University of Chicago

Bill Brown, University of Chicago
The Work of Play

Sabine Haenni, Cornell University

Intellectual Promiscuity

Martin Jay, University of California Berkeley
The Little Shop Girls Enter the Public Sphere

External Link »