David PesciThe National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has offered Wesleyan's Center for Film Studies Cinema Archives a $425,000 challenge grant. Support from NEH, which requires a three to one match with private gifts, will ensure that the Archives continue to grow and flourish. The four-year NEH grant will help endow a full-time curatorial position for the Cinema Archives, a collection which includes the person papers and other materials of such seminal film icons as Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and Ingrid Bergman, among others. The NEH grant will only partially endow the position and, because it is…
David LowThis fall, Wesleyan University’s Center for Film Studies will sponsor a special film and speaker series titled WOMEN AND FILM. This series is dedicated to work made by women. Each installment of the series will feature a movie helmed by a female filmmaker, to be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker herself. Made possible by special support from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, WOMEN AND FILM will comprise a wide variety of cinematic experiences, including short films, documentaries and a romantic feature film. “I am thrilled that the Academy is sponsoring WOMEN AND FILM because I’ve…
Olivia DrakeThe Department of Film Studies received a $7,500 grant from the Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to support the AMPAS Speaker Series in 2011-12. The grant was awarded on May 1. Lea Carlson, associate director of film studies, is the grant's P.I. This is the third year Wesleyan received support from the Academy to fund the speaker series. Film Studies will welcome about four speakers to campus in the second half of the fall semester.
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Planned Parenthood presented Wesleyan Uncut, a student group that promotes sexual dialogue on campus, with this year's prestigious "Walk the Talk" award at their annual gala in Washington D.C. April 7. The students created a video titled “I Have Sex,” to speak out against an ideological attack against Planned Parenthood. Uncut members Jacob Eichengreen ’13, Su Park '12, Melanie Hsu '13, Katya Botwinick '13 and Laura Lupton ’12 attended the ceremony. Planned Parenthood funded their travel expenses to D.C. Wesleyan Uncut conceptualized the film with filmmakers Eric Byler ’94 and Annabel Park. The video has more than 286,000 views on…
Film studies major Zachary Valenti '12 understands how cancer can devastate a family. The disease claimed two grandparents – his father's mother and mother's father – as well as a stepfather. As an adolescent, Valenti was already aware of the risks of male breast cancer. He suffered from gynocomastia, the abnormal development of breast tissue in men. For the past three months, Valenti has combined his life experiences and film studies skills for a project that raises breast cancer awareness in the local community. Valenti is creating a documentary featuring eight female breast cancer survivors for the Middlesex Hospital Comprehensive Breast…
Lisa Dombrowski, associate professor of film studies, is the editor of the book, Kazan Revisited, published by Wesleyan University Press in March 2011. According to WUP: A groundbreaking filmmaker dogged by controversy in both his personal life and career, Elia Kazan was one of the most important directors of postwar American cinema. In landmark motion pictures such as A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, and Splendor in the Grass, Kazan crafted an emotionally raw form of psychological realism. Arriving in the wake of his centenary, Kazan Revisited engages and moves beyond existing debates regarding Kazan’s contributions…
This issue we ask "5 Questions" of Steve Collins '91. Collins is an assistant professor of film studies. He recently completed a new feature film, You Hurt My Feelings. His first feature, Gretchen, won the $50,000 Target Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival and has been shown on the Sundance Channel. Q: What courses do you teach at Wesleyan, and what have you learned from working on films that you share with your students? A: I teach an intro to 16mm film production class called "Sight and Sound" where we focus on how to…
Scott Higgins, associate professor of film studies, edited the book, Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, published by Taylor & Francis, 2010. Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) was a pioneering figure in film studies, best known for his landmark book on silent cinema Film as Art. He ultimately became more famous as a scholar in the fields of art and art history, largely abandoning his theoretical work on cinema. However, his later aesthetic theories on form, perception and emotion should play an important role in contemporary film and media studies. In this new volume, edited by Higgins, an international group of leading…
Manju Hingorani, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, and Jacob Bricca, adjunct assistant professor of film studies, explained their experimental cross-disciplinary course on science documentary filmmaking at Wesleyan in a December 2010 article published in American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Today. In the article, Hingorani and Bricca wrote about their course, "Making the Science Documentary," which they co-taught together, starting in 2007. The course was designed to introduce undergraduate students to the life sciences and to documentary filmmaking (more…)
Jeanine Basinger, the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies and chair of the Film Studies Department, was a member of the American Film Institute motion picture jury for 2010. Basinger and the other 11 jury members released their annual list of the 10 best movies of the year on Dec. 12. The 10 films are: Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, 127 Hours, The Social Network, The Town, Toy Story 3, True Grit and Winter's Bone. The AFI will honor the creative ensembles for each of the films and TV shows at a luncheon sponsored by Hewlett-Packard on…
Jeanine Basinger, chair and the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, curator of the Cinema Archives, received a $7,500 grant from the Academy Foundation to support the AMPAS 2010-2011 Speaker Series. The grant will be awarded Nov. 4 through Jan. 31, 2011.