Notes from the Chair
The beginning of a term is always a time full of excitement and possibility. This September, I welcome a host of new colleagues to Yale. The award-winning graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home (2006) and The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021), is our most recent Professor of the Practice. Neta Alexander joins us as an assistant professor of television studies, with additional research interests in Artificial Intelligence and Disability Studies. New to our campus are also Afghan-Slovak director Sahraa Karimi, who is teaching in our filmmaking track, and Wanda Strauven, a scholar of media who has taught at many European universities as well as at Columbia. Tian Li is another lecturer in FMS. Her specialty is Korean cinema, but she also teaches Chinese cinema and thinks about cinematic flows within East Asia.
As was the case last year, we have a stellar line-up of events for all interested in film and media studies. This September we kick off a multi-year series on New Voices in Cinema with a mini-retrospective on the works of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, who will be present for Q+As. The New Voices-series showcases filmmakers who are shooting unusual, genre-bending films. Covi and Frimmel make a wonderful “minor” cinema that is interested in people on the fringes of society, in places forgotten by the economic booms of the last decades. These people are at once individual and linked to a larger collective; the films are quietly political. The protagonists are circus types, wanderers, urban nomads, and, lately, individuals who are famous by association (“nepo babies” like the main character Vera). They try to live a morally upstanding life despite the odds being stacked against them. Rainer’s photographic work, of a piece with great 20th century photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Diane Arbus, conveys both empathy with and profound interest in the people in front of the lens and feeds into the films.
There are also many talks to which I invite you, and I limit myself to singling out a few here. A Kempf-funded lecture series organized by Professors Neta Alexander and Francesco Casetti is focused on “Media, Anxiety, and Protection.” It brings three international speakers to campus in fall and spring: Luca Aquarelli from the University of Lille - Gériico Research Center will speak on “Anxieties of Illusion: Immersive Baroque Ceilings and the Intermedial Space of Faith.” Elisa Linseisen, from the HfBK Hamburg, trains her attention on “Application, or How to Cope with Algorithms” (I will be taking copious notes). Finally, Yves Citton, from University of Paris 8 Vincennes-St. Denis, will speak on “Multi-Perspectivist Media: A Protection against Protective Ideologies.” This fall, Antonio Somaini (Sorbonne/Harvard) will give a lecture on “Latent Spaces: A Key Concept for Visual Culture Studies in the Age of AI.” In spring, a large conference on “André Bazin: The Space of Myth” is being organized by Professor Dudley Andrew. Another Kempf-series that I have pulled together is interested in highlighting new scholarship at the intersection of film and media studies: Astrid Deuber-Mankovsky, a visiting professor this semester in the German Department, will speak on “Queer Post-Cinema.” In spring, Bernhard Dotzler (Regensburg) and Volker Pantenburg (Zurich) will grace us with their presence, to speak on the “apparition” of AI and Harun Farocki respectively. But these are only a few of our many, many events.
I should also highlight the generous funding by the Yale Dean’s Office and the Yale University Library, which has enabled the Yale Film Archive to commission many new prints that have become part of our university’s rapidly expanding film collection and are being screened for our community and the larger public. Last year alone, the university acquired Breathless, Foolish Wives, Black Narcissus, Night of the Hunter, The Asphalt Jungle, Cabin in the Sky, Double Indemnity, Bright College Years, Passages, Touch of Evil, Psycho, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gun Crazy, The Killing, Pressure, Adventures of Robin Hood, Queen Christina, Taxi Driver, Bride of Frankenstein, All That Heaven Allows, All the President’s Men, The Killers, The Lady Eve, and Blade Runner. These films are being shown as part of YFA’s Treasures from the Archive-series.
Finally, notes of congratulation are in order. Professor of the Practice Thomas Allen Harris’ Scientists in the Family-project has been awarded a $3.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation. He will create a feature-length documentary My Mom, The Scientist, which will explore pioneering Black women scientists and engage Black families around STEM learning (https://mymomthescientist.com/). A warm congratulation goes to Alison Bechdel, for having become the 2024 Chubb Fellow; her lecture “and I became a lesbian cartoonist.” Reflections on a Curious Career” is on Sept. 18. Last but not least: congrats to Carolyn Jacobs, a former FMS student and now professor at Central Connecticut State, for having won the SCMS Dissertation Award for 2023–2024.
Please join the FMS faculty for these events and any other of our many convivial gatherings (Tuesday Teas and Rough Cut-talks). Peruse our course offerings online and find the faculty during office hours or via email. We are an open group of scholars and practitioners committed to studying media in all forms as well as to making moving images—and to doing so together. In this interface-dominated age, FMS wants to supplement our virtual existence with in-person dialogue.
Fatima Naqvi, Chair