Cinema Studies at NYU

Another fall (and election) season, another Reel China! Please mark your calendar (and book your train or flight :)) for Nov. 1-3.
https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/events/fall-2024/11th-reel-china

What movie is this theater marquee promoting??
This photo on the book cover is not identified.

Firat, I thought PSYCHO. But a newspaper search matched "Please do not reveal the ending" to a couple of ads for MIDNIGHT LACE, a Doris Day movie, and also releaed in 1960.

don't hit that snooze button 🐟 happy first day of school!

🎥: Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, 2003)

When writing his book MOVIE-MADE AMERICA and living in Ann Arbor, Robert Sklar published this public request for research documentation to small-town newspapers across Michigan.

Alas, no e-version of the Sklar book available. The 1994 edition available via https://archive.org/details/moviemadeamerica0000skla_o8y4
is not available since Hachette v. Internet Archive went against the defendant. (Judges heard oral arguments in the appeal last month. Might be 2025 before they rule.)

A wonderful roundtable--gracefully chaired by Intan Paramaditha--with many contributors to the nearly 600 page Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas, at AAS-in-Asia, in Yogyakarta last week. It marked a "soft launch" of the book--one of several to come!

. . . and her name was . . .

"ChatGPT Is Bu****it,"
by Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater,
Ethics and Information Technology 26, no. 28 (2024): doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5.

Published online: 8 June 2024

Abstract
Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bu****it in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bu****it, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bu****itters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bu****it is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behavior of these systems. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

ChatGPT is bu****it - Ethics and Information Technology Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that thes...

Edgardo Cozarinsky’s film work was rich and thoughtful. I was fortunate to see him and several films at a Flaherty seminar. Ten years later when I first traveled to Buenos Aires I told Paula Felix-Didier I hoped to meet him. That first night she took me to a giant art fair. As we enter, Señor C. is walking out. So I instantly got my wish.

Boulevards du crépuscule (Sunset Boulevards) (1992) is a reverie, BA as a cinephile city. With Falconetti.

One Man’s War (1981). Compilation film with text from a German lieutenant’s diary in WW2. The sudden appearance of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse footage took me aback. It’s there, Cozarinsky explained, because it’s on the original German newsreel. N**i propaganda of technical superiority. (America is falling apart.).

Celebrated Argentine Author and Filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky Passes Away at 85 — Cinema Tropical Celebrated Argentine author and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky died yesterday at the age of 85. Cozarinsky's multifaceted career

Good news: The book is in final production and due out on July 4!
Have your university libraries order both hard and soft editions--in time for the fall semester classes! (I myself will use a few chapters :))

Just received email from the press with marketing/publicity suggestions, along with discount offer visuals. So here is one try!
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Asian-Cinemas/Zhang-Lee-Mukherjee-Paramaditha/p/book/9781032199405

Finally a real picnic in the park since moving to the neighborhood of "People's Park." Congratulations on the graduation of Dr. Zoe Meng Jiang, freshly minted MIAP Masters Juju and Jenny, Columbia U's Victoria's MA (former NYU Cinema Studies BA), and to ABD Ann Zhang for high passing her Ph.d proposal defense and candidacy.

Yo.

Criterion and Janus Films Have a New Owner: Indian Paintbrush Founder Steven Rales Criterion and Janus Films have been acquired in a private transaction by Steven Rales, the founder of Indian Paintbrush.

Held over, from at MoMI. Running on a loop all month!

My Own Yard to Play in – Museum of the Moving Image My Own Yard to Play in documents children at play on the streets of Harlem in the late 1950s.

Curated by recent Cinema Studies MA grad, Will Hair, Ideological Adventures: Two Films by Ibolya Fekete runs at Spectacle Theater from May 8th to May 31st!

Hungarian filmmaker Ibolya Fekete began making documentaries in the late ’80s in an attempt to capture the radical changes happening around her. In the wake of the collapsing Soviet communist regime, the whole of Eastern Europe was left scrambling as processes of democratization, nation building, economic upheaval, and violent conflict coincided. Though the nonfiction films she completed during this time are vital archival records, the difficulty in “authentically” representing this politically tangled and ideologically confused period spurred Fekete to infuse its people, places, and events into scripted narratives.

Fekete’s interest in “fiction, with a documentary attitude” culminated in two dense metahistorical feature-length works, BOLSHE VITA and CHICO. This May, Spectacle is pleased to present both in a rare program. Following a select screening of each film, the filmmaker will join us for a remote Q&A. The discussion following the May 24th screening of CHICO will be moderated by author and New York University Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, Michael B. Gillespie.

IDEOLOGICAL ADVENTURES: TWO FILMS BY IBOLYA FEKETE – Spectacle Theater IDEOLOGICAL ADVENTURES: TWO FILMS BY IBOLYA FEKETE Posted on April 12, 2024May 7, 2024 by Dan Scanlon Hungarian filmmaker Ibolya Fekete began making documentaries in the late’80s in an attempt to capture the radical changes happening around her. In the wake of the collapsing Soviet communist regim...

https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/orphan-film-symposium-abandoned-films-1234975636/

This NYC Symposium Gives a Rare Spotlight to Lost Films, from Jim Henson Obscurities to Bizarre Medical Shorts The NYU-produced Orphans gathered scholars, archivists, and preservationists for a range of media obscurities in April 2024.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAC_Qy3LK1o

Orphan Film Symposium 2024: L*D Dream Emulator presented by Sarah Bashir & Patrick Vonderau(2) Just a few of the many highlights from Day #1 of symposium at x . Starting with the highly anticipated L*D Drea...

Premiere of rediscovered Roman Vishniac films;
1930s amateur films by UK physicians;
Japanese movies made on PAPER preWWW 2;
Multicolor nitrate tests 1929;
16mm film from Nintendo FPS arcade games, 1970s;
And that’s just the morning.

Although the symposium is nigh, when you are on the website registering or reading the program, you might have a look at the long post about filmed eclipses at the dawn of cinema.

Women film eclipses, 1898-1901 Note:  This is a draft in progress, with additions, corrections, and other edits appearing as they become available. What I thought would be an addendum to an earlier post, “Capturing Ve…

From U of Minnesota Libraries.

“A Western Union Telegram sent to Arthur Kleiner inviting him to meet Carl Theodore Dreyer and film festival directors on September 18th 1965."

Amos & Marcia Vogel (recently having ended their run of NY's Cinema 16 film society screenings, 1947-63) invite MoMA's silent film accompanist Arthur Kleiner to meet Danish film director/ legend Carl Theodor Dreyer, at their apartment -- 15 Washington Place. Vogel and Kleiner were both from Vienna. The apartment building, still there, sits between Broadway and Washington Square Park -- next door to the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (now NYU).

Amos Vogel would've only had to stroll a few minutes to get to the site of Cinema 16 -- the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street. (Now NYU.) Midway he would have passed (or stopped into) the NYU Film Library, where many of those 16mm film prints were housed.

A small place, this Village.

The whole shmear. . . .

wp.nyu.edu

EXCLUSIVE: 100 years later, long-lost silent film found in Omaha parking lot It’s a movie that hasn’t been seen in decades — missing for so long, that many didn’t even know it existed. That is, until it turned up in Omaha.

Summer is right around the corner, which means our summer courses are too!

Info about the course offerings and registration: https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/summer

🎥: In the Heights (Jon M. Chu, 2021)

Our upcoming events are 🚀out of this world! 🪐

Check them out here: https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/events

🎥: Spaceballs (Mel Brooks, 1987)

"With the passing of David Bordwell, the discipline of cinema studies loses one of its iconic scholars indeed."

Read more from chair Dana Polan:

Remembering David Bordwell Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies Professor Dana Polan remembers film scholar David Bordwell.

Wikipedia has already recorded March 1 as the day David Bordwell passed away. It's bio photo is this amateur snapshot of DB with the CHC Major/Minor studios oligopoly chart, which so many of us have drawn in Intro to Film classes. Somehow a fitting lo-fit representation of his significance in the field.

His Vimeo site has one of these basic PowerPoints, with his VO.
But of course https://davidbordwell.net
with its 1,000 + blog posts is the rich resource, with substantive essays by both B & Kristin T.

And a new 500-page book published a few months ago. So prolific. On a broad range of topics, near and far from Hollywood. Eisenstein, Ozu, Dreyer, Hou, Nolan, Wong; poetics, style, narration, cognitivism, lighting, staging, DCPs. . . .

Humbling.