Program Conferences and Screening Series

The Annual Film Studies Conference

The Film Studies Program has organized a major conference annually since the inauguration of its graduate program.  These conferences link our discipline to others on campus both to increase funding and participation and to explore topics that respond best to interdisciplinary examination. Keynote speakers and participants have come from around North America and from across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  Graduate students have frequently served as discussants on panels and as assistants in logistics.

2001 The Theater of Irish Cinema

2002 The Face of Another: Japanese Cinema and Alterity

2003  No Man’s Land, Everyone’s Image: Cinema in the Balkans

2004  Taiwan’s New Cinema: Local Image, Global Context

2006  What is Theater in What is Cinema?

2007  The Transnational Orson Welles

2008 The Human Figure: Painting, Cinema, Photograph

2009  Opening Bazin-Ouvrir Bazin (Paris-Diderot, Nov 22-26; New Haven, Dec 3-6)

2010  The Avant-Garde in the Indian New Wave

2010   Cinema and the Shoah

2011  Fantomas: a Centenary Celebration

2012  The Dialects and Dialectics of Subtitles

2013  Return to Biarritz: Hot film in a Cold War

2014  Tracking Specificity: the Fluctuations of Cinema

2015  Postwar Journals in France: The Bazin Era

2016: Chinese Cinema: to and beyond Hollywood

The Annual Year in European Cinema

Each year since 2003 a cohort of five of our Program’s faculty has been funded by Yale’s European Studies Council to showcase a different year in Europe via an international sample of its cinematic production.  Twelve to eighteen feature films, many drawn from distant archives, are shown in 35mm format, sometimes preceded by newsreels or shorts, and always interspersed with panels that discuss the films in relation to the historical, social, and aesthetic concerns of the year in focus.  The panels are comprised equally of graduate students and faculty, occasionally leavened with guests invited from beyond Yale.  A graduate student curates the event, locating prints, arranging logistics (soft subtitles when necessary), and preparing a sheaf of notes and the poster.  The years that have received attention thus far are:

1945, 1956, 1968, 1989, 1936, 1919, 1942, 1975, 1930, 1962, 1981, 2001.

The Yale Film Colloquium

Each year graduate students organize a series of films screened in 35mm (or the best available format) in pursuit of a selected theme.  Notes and discussions accompany the screenings.  Past themes have included “Revisiting the Canon” and “Bad Girls.” Visit the Yale Film Colloquium website.

The Annual Italian Film Weekend

Each April, the Film and Media Studies Program in conjunction with the Italian Department, and under the direction of Professor Millicent Marcus, stages a four day festival of recent Italian films.  With introductions and post-screening discussions, these films attract a wide public from Yale and the City of New Haven.  Graduate students pursuing Film and Media with Italian play a key role in this always lively celebration.

Japanese Cinema, old and new

The Council on East Asian Studies, together with the Film Studies Program sponsors regular series of Japanese films in 35mm every year.  Since being selected to join FIAF, the Yale Film Study Center has been able to arrange for prints coming from the National Film Center in Tokyo.  Under the leadership of Professor Aaron Gerow, graduate students have been able to interact with many legendary filmmakers who come to Yale for short term visits.  Among the most notable have been: Shinoda Masahiro, Koreeda Hirokazu, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Hani Susumu, Obayashi Nobuhiko, and Aoyama Shinji.   Other series have presented silent films, some including Benshi or musical accompaniment.

The Slavic Film Colloquium

Since 2010, graduate students in Film and Media Studies have teamed up with their peers in Slavic Languages and Literatures to sponsor an ongoing monthly series of films from the USSR, post-Soviet Russia, and Eastern Europe.

Russian Film at Yale

This series, organized under the auspices of the Russian Studies Project at the MacMillan Center, offers audiences at Yale and from the wider community a look at some of the best of Russian fiction and non-fiction film over the course of both the spring and fall semesters. Curated and presented by specialists in the field, the series focuses on post-Soviet cinema, and incorporates important films made about Russia by filmmakers from other countries. We strive to present the finest films by both major, established auteurs (such as Aleksei Balabanov, Aleksei German and Aleksandr Sokurov) and up-and-coming artists, and occasionally dive into the riches of the Soviet and pre-Soviet cinematic past as well. All screenings are followed by discussion sessions in which audience members are warmly invited to participate. In the spring of 2016, we will present a unique series of remarkable films, largely unscreened in the United States except at film festivals, by contemporary directors. The series is supported by the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and all screenings are free and open to the public. For more information, go to the Russian Film Series website.