Guest Lecture by Prof. Dr. Pete Porter “Screen Stories and Moral Codes: It Happened One Night and Get Out”

Screen stories enact and express moral codes, moral codes that audiences can accept, reject or even ignore in the name of entertainment. It Happened One Night (Capra 1934) and Get Out (Peele 2017) offer perspectives on how different eras negotiate moral codes within a context of heterosexual romance. In IHON, a working class newspaper reporter meets a wealthy heiress on a cross-country bus ride and converts her to his way of life. In Get Out, an African-American photographer meets the wealthy family of his white girlfriend and barely retains his identity. Although vastly different in terms of affect, genre, and narrative, both films resonated in American culture in part because of their moral politics revolving around masculinity, class, and race. This talk will show how both films negotiate moral values to embody as well as transcend their historical moments. We will consider IHON and Get Out against a background that considers how scrutiny of movie content has gone from local to national, from explicit to implicit, and how moral codes that were once enforced by industry are now scrutinized on social media.

Bio:

Pete Porter is Visiting Scholar at University of Amsterdam and Chair and Professor of Theatre and Film at Eastern Washington University. He also serves as Film Review Editor for Society & Animals. He is currently working on the manuscript Moving Animals: Screening the Nonhuman in the Age of Bioinclusivity, which explores how motion pictures of the 21^st century are fulfilling their promise of affording more inclusive understandings of nonhuman nature. His publications include “Engaging the Animal in the Moving Image” in Society & Animals, “Teaching Animal Movies” in Teaching the Animal: Human-Animal Studies across the Disciplines, and “It’s a Complicated Case: on the Modest Menippeanism of The Big Lebowski” in Lebowski 101.

Date and place:

May 9, 2018

HS 10, 12-13:00

Guest Lecture by Sean Lovitt „Blueprints for a Long Hot Summer: The Speculative Fiction of Revolutionary Action Movement”

In context of the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the Black Nationalist aspirations of Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) make the group seem ahead of its time. RAM developed a political program for African American autonomy in the Northern cities while much of the country was focused on the South and the struggle for integration. RAM’s “speculative fiction” encompasses their elaborate and prescient vision of things to come, including urban riots, armed self-defense groups, and other characteristics that came to be associated with the Black Power era. In his presentation, Sean Lovitt will examine this cultural production as a literary forerunner to Black Arts and Black Power, arguing that the habitual exclusion of RAM’s writing from the cultural history of the 1960s comes at the cost of a significant link between the Civil Rights and Black Power eras.

Bio:
Sean Lovitt is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Delaware and the Graduate International Exchange Fellow at the University of Graz with research interests in the print culture of the Underground Press of the 1960s. His dissertation “Mimeo Insurrection” brings together the writings of an array of publications from the period, including Umbra, Black Panther Newspaper, Floating Bear, and Black Mask. More broadly, his interest in dissident writing extends across the long history of the book and printed ephemera from zines to avant-garde little magazines to black magic manuals.

Date and place:

April 24, 2018

HS 10, 12-13:00

Buchpräsentation “Horror Kultfilme” 23.1.2018

Die Bibliothek lädt alle Interessierten zur Buchpräsentation von Horror Kultfilme (Marburger Studien zur Medienforschung) ein. Das Werk wurde gemeinschaftlich von Angela FABRIS, Jörg HELBIG und Arno RUSSEGGER herausgegeben. Es widmet sich unterschiedlichen Aspekten des Horrorfilms. Analysen von individuellen Filmen stehen neben Ausführungen zu einzelnen Genres (z. B. Gothic Horror, Giallo, Parodien) und zu spezifischen Aspekten wie Gewalt oder Musik im Horrorfilm.

Die Herausgeber_innen werden Auszüge aus dem Werk vortragen. Für die musikalische Untermalung sorgt Werner Delanoy. Ein kleines Buffet erwartet Sie!

Haben Sie keine Scheu vor dem gebotenen Horror, finden Sie den Weg

am: 23.1.2018

um: 18:00 Uhr

in den: Monografien-Lesesaal auf Ebene 3.

Auf Ihr Kommen freuen sich die Herausgeber_innen und das Bibliotheksteam!

Game Pics – ein kunstvolles Spiel mit dem Spiel

An der Alpen-Adria-Universität fand heuer erstmals eine Game Pics Jam & Show statt. Neunzehn Videogamer, Fotografinnen und Künstler gestalteten Videospielszenen nach eigenen Vorstellungen um.