On Thursday, Sept. 16, Janet Bergstrom, Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA, will discuss “Celluloid Past, Digital Futures” in the Center for the Arts (Building 1p), Room 223 at 1:30pm.
The explosion of the DVD market during the past decade has changed the way movies are seen. While the DVD format allows one to view and re-view films (and parts of films) with great ease, it also has great potential for making the specialized knowledge of cinema studies accessible to a general audience through expert audio commentaries and selected DVD “special features.” In this multimedia presentation, Professor Bergstrom will discuss the future of film studies in the digital age and screen excerpts from some of her own award-winning work.
Professor Bergstrom has been on the cutting edge of digital film scholarship. Her work has been included on a number of special edition DVDs and screened at many international film festivals. She entered the field of DVD “critical editions” with Murnau’s Tabu (Milestone/Image Entertainment, 2002; also distributed through Kino), an original audio essay co-extensive with the film, a 25-minute audio essay co-extensive with outtakes, and mastering a captioned slideshow of some 70 photos and pages from Murnau’s annotated shooting script. Subsequently, she made the documentary, Murnau’s 4 Devils: Traces of a Lost Film as a special feature for the Sunrise DVD (Twentieth Century Fox Films, 2003), also released on the French DVD L’Aurore (Carlotta Films, 2003). Bergstrom presented an alternate version of this documentary at the Berlin Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, Cinema Ritrovato/the Bologna Film Festival (Italy), and at the colloquium “L’Invention et l’archive,” IMEC, L’Abbaye d’Ardenne (France). It was screened at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris and was on permanent display during the Carl Mayer Retrospective at the Filmarchiv Austria in Vienna.
This is a CLUE-certified event funded by the Campus Activities Board through Student Activity Fees. Please contact Matthew Solomon (matthew.solomon@csi.cuny.edu) if you have any questions about this event.
