FTVM Faculty Spend Summer Publishing and Presenting

 

On July 8, 2019, Markus Nornes appeared on Japanese television, NHK's J-Flicks program "Focus on Japanese Directors" to discuss the Japanese films that played at Cannes Film Festival. 

Photo from FRIAS interview Image credit, Sophie Baar

Johannes von Moltke participated in several interviews on his ongoing work on the "alt-right" this summer: one for the Free University of Berlin, one for German radio, and one forthcoming in a publication from the FRIAS Institute for Advanced Study (where von Moltke worked this past year).

von Moltke also gave a talk on the social media presence of the "alt-right" in Berlin this summer. Watch "The Meme is the Message: Alt-Right and the Political Affordances of Social Media"  here. 

Associate Professor Colin Gunckel was one of the participants in the interview roundtable "Lessons from Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA" organized by Elena Shtromberg and C. Ondine Chavoya and published in the April 2019 issue of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. The piece features a conversation between seven curators and scholars involved in the Getty Research Institute's most recent Pacific Standard Time initiative, which explored the cultural and artistic exchanges between Latin America and Los Angeles. 

Professor Matthew Solomon published the essay,“Visible and Invisible Hands: Chomón’s Claymation and Object Animations,” in the recent volume Les mille et un visages de Segundo de Chomón. 

The chapter to which Solomon contributed discusses the work of the prolific early filmmaker Segundo de Chomón, who made more than 500 films in France, Spain, and Italy during the silent period. Solomon's contribution to the book focuses on part of Chomón’s work as an animator, which included object animations and some of the earliest known examples of clay animation, which it juxtaposes with Sergei Eisenstein’s idea of "plasmaticness."

In July, Assistant Professor Sarah Murray published an article in a special issue of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture on podcasting and publics 
(eds., Matt Sienkiewicz and Deborah Jaramillo).

"Coming-of-age in a coming-of-age: the collective individualism of podcasting's intimate soundwork" focuses on U.S.- based podcasting collectives and explores the challenges indepen-dent podcasters face in a growing, ill-defined industry. 

Murray's article is currently available online and will be available in print in December. 

In June Professor Giorgio Bertellini gave a plenary address at the second Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Rome and taught a class at the "Mediating Italy in Global Culture" Summer School in Bologna. In July he continued his research on his new project at the Cineteca Nazionale (Rome), the Cineteca di Bologna, and in Milan, at the Fondazione Mondadori and Fondazione Corriere della Sera. 

Below, Professor Bertellini engages in an interview with students during the "Mediating Italy in Global Culture" Summer School in Bologna.

Discussion conducted by Anouk Baldassarri Pheline, Daniele Biffanti and Giulia D'Alia Summer School "Mediating Italy in Global Culture" - II edition (Università di Bologna, June 17-22 2019)

Doctoral Candidate Vincent Longo presented a portion of his dissertation at the History of Movie-going, Exhibition, and Reception (HoMER) conference at the University of the Bahamas in June. Vincent's dissertation explains the important roles live performance in large metropolitan movie theaters played during the Hollywood studio era in shaping film production and celebrity culture, as well as in interconnecting Hollywood to other entertainment industries, including radio and recorded music. His conference presentation focused on the Marx Brother’s decade-long strategy of testing scenes from their next films in vaudeville shows and their obsession with collecting and incorporating the feedback of Midwest audiences who saw these shows into their films.  

FTVM Hosts Summer Film & Media Camp with Wolverine Pathways Scholars

This July, FTVM partnered with Wolverine Pathways to offer a two-week summer camp to 38 rising 11th grade scholars. The camp included two hours of production in the FTVM studios, one and one half hours of screenwriting instruction and practice, and one and one half hours of media studies. 

FTVM's summer camp is situated within a broader WP goal to expose scholars to U-M’s schools and majors and to cultivate their excitement about studying at the University of Michigan.

FTVM faculty involved in the camp include David Marek, Sarah Murray, and Dan Shere. 

A special thanks to the FTVM office and studio staff for helping to make the camp such a success! 

FTVM Students and Faculty Contribute to TCFF

On August 1, 2019, two FTVM 423 films screened at the Traverse City Film Festival's Old Town Playhouse: Skin (Director, Sarah Costello; Writer Phoebe Hopp) and Weiner Police (Director, Sophia Lynch; Writer Sophia Georginis). Both screenings were followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and crew.


The two student productions were developed throughout the semester by students in Screenwriting Program Director Jim Burnstein's and Production Faculty Robert Rayher’s Screenwriting 423 class and carried out with the help of fellow undergraduate writers, actors, and the multi-faceted production crews. 

In addition to the screenings and Q&A, the festival's Film School also featured two classes taught by FTVM faculty: Robert Rayher and Oliver Thornton taught a course entitled "U-M Pilot Production: Behind the Scenes" while Casting Director/Actor Pamela Guest teamed with Robert Rayher to teach the course "Landing the Part: Open Auditions."