Calendar
Sixty Six
Lewis Klahr (2015)
3:00pm || Friday, February 22, 2019 || B122 Wells Hall || Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Road, East Lansing, MI 48823
Listed as one of the 10 Best Films of 2015 by New York Timescritic Manohla Dargis, Lewis Klahr’s Sixty Sixoffers a compelling point of entry into his decades of work as an experimental animator. Each of the twelve short films that make up this feature-length anthology reference, as the title partly suggests, Klahr’s lifelong fascination with the 1960s and its cultures of intoxication. Klahr’s images are cut or torn from his personal collection of magazines, manuals, illustrations, and wallpaper samples. His films draw attention to the paper on which these images are printed. He does not shoot through glass, he lets the edges of his paper figures curl or cast shadows in three dimensions, and he lets us see their subtle patterns of pulp grain. These reanimated pieces of dead paper remind us of the importance of archives of this material, like the one here at MSU.
Unlike his predecessors in avant-garde animation, which often focused on realms of the unconscious or on occult symbolism, Klahr’s works tend to dwell in the painful, terrifying, and sweet stories of 1960s popular culture, which have been partly forgotten and now exist largely in paper traces. The films are often grand melodramas inside quiet shoeboxes. They are saturated with color and blurred by tears. In Sixty Six, myths of ancient Greece couple with the myths of recently outmoded popular culture. Hades comingles with classical Hollywood, Roy Lichtenstein with Helen of Troy. Figures cut from color comics move across black-and-white photographs that seem stark and empty, like crime scenes. Throughout the film, Klahr uses a lightbox to shoot both sides of the paper, recto and verso, at once. The pulp of the paper is no longer an opaque boundary, but a medium that transmits the fiery pools of color from its other side. If our recent history has been too easy to forget, Klahr reminds us that its fragments remain and will bleed through in unpredictable ways.
—Programmed by Kaveh Askari & Julian Chambliss
Broad Underground is an ongoing collaboration between the MSU Broad, Film Studies program, and Department of English at MSU. This year’s partnering venue is The Robin Theatre in REO Town, Lansing, with special thanks to the Lansing Public Media Center.
Cosponsored by the MSU Comics Forum
Designers in Film
7:00pm || Friday, March 29, 2019 || Robin Theatre
1105 S. Washington Ave., Lansing
After studying with Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy at Chicago’s School of Design in Chicago, the Goldsholls made a series of innovative and socially engaged films in the 1950s and 1960s at their trailblazing firm Goldsholl Design Associates. The Goldsholls’ films collapsed boundaries between the avant-garde and the midcentury corporation as Chicago established itself as the Hollywood of industrial and educational filmmaking. Our program features a selection of the Goldsholls’ experimental and sponsored work crossing the domains of art, industry, design, and film.
—Programmed by Justus Nieland
Broad Underground is an ongoing collaboration between the MSU Broad, Film Studies program, and Department of English at MSU. This year’s partnering venue is The Robin Theatre in REO Town, Lansing, with special thanks to the Lansing Public Media Center.
Cosponsored by the MSU Comics Forum
Fractured Landscapes
7:00pm || Saturday, April 6, 2019 || Robin Theatre
1105 S. Washington Ave., Lansing
This edition of the Broad Underground Film Series features a selection of short experimental videos by contemporary Brazilian artists. In sensuous and surprising ways the artists’ cameras probe into a variety of cultural landscapes, which are populated by natural surroundings, religious climates and political currents. These works deliberately fracture the kind of power-laden gaze that is traditionally held on such subject matters. In order to uproot and refresh the hegemonically conditioned outlook of the present-day spectator, they engender a productive form of deviant and defiant anthropology by means of subverting the language of ethnographic film itself.
—Programmed by Marcos Serafim & Mashya Boon
Broad Underground is an ongoing collaboration between the MSU Broad, Film Studies program, and Department of English at MSU. This year’s partnering venue is The Robin Theatre in REO Town, Lansing, with special thanks to the Lansing Public Media Center.
Cosponsored by the MSU Comics Forum
Nostalgia for the Light
7:00pm || Wednesday, September 18, 2019 || Abrams Planetarium
755 Science Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824
Patricio Guzman’s 2010 documentary, Nostalgia for the Light, calls upon viewers to explore the aesthetics, ethics, and technologies of memorialization amidst and in the wake of oppressive regimes. Rooted in the arid ecology of the Atacama Desert—a celebrated site for cutting-edge astronomical research and archaeological survey—the film parses the similarities between astronomers’ search for deep human history among the stars and Chilean women’s search for “disappeared” loved ones in the desert’s parched earth. This screening and discussion of Nostalgia for the Lighttraces the ecosystem of people, landscapes, technologies, and politics that has shaped the memorialization of Augusto Pinochet’s victims. This event is offered in connection with “The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes” on view at the MSU Broad through January 5, 2020.
—Programmed by Scott Boehm & Shannon Schmoll
Broad Underground is an ongoing collaboration between the MSU Broad, Film Studies Program, and Department of English at MSU. This year’s partnering venue is The Robin Theatre in REO Town, Lansing, with special thanks to the Lansing Public Media Center.
Cosponsored by the MSU Comics Forum
Students currently in the GSAH major or minor, and any other student interested in Global Studies:
- Learn about the degree options in Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities.
- Meet other students, the advisor, the program director, and faculty.
- Meet comic book artists and authors John Jennings and Stacy Robinson.
- Enjoy snacks and pick up MSU swag.
Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities has partnered with Professor Julian Chambliss who is bringing to MSU the creators of Black Kirby. John Jennings and Stacy Robinson will do a brief presentation on their work at the student meet and greet. Read about their visit to MSU here:
After the discussion with Jennings and Robinson, Kate Rendi, the GSAH student advisor, and Professor Salah Hassan, the GSAH Program Director, will lead an informal advising session on our Global Studies degrees.
This event is open to all students and faculty
10:00am – Symposium, “Toward an Expansive Definition of Genocide” – John Cox, UNC Charlotte
11:00am – “Can the Spanish Genocide Speak?” – Scott Boehm, Michigan State University
12:00pm – Roundtable Discussion
- Almudena Carracedo, Film Director
- John Cox, UNC Charlotte
- Sebastiaan Faber, Oberlin College
- Cristina Moreiras-Menor, University of Michigan
- Joseba Gabilonda, Michigan State University
Film Screening
The Silence of Others
Goya Award for Best Documentary
Shortlisted for 2018 Best Documentary Academy Award
Followed by a discussion with Almudena Carracedo