Spring 2008 Program
Manufactured Landscapes
dir. Jennifer Baichwal (2006, 90 min.)
Monday, February 4, 2008
7pm | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
7pm | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
Manufactured Landscapes is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.
http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/
Hilton Als, theater critic and staff writer for The New Yorker
“Two Views: James Baldwin”
Postponed due to illness, please check back for new time and date
Ever since he reviewed Baldwin's Collected Works for The New Yorker, Hilton Als has been fascinated by the spectacle of the writer as spokesman. Als will read from two approaches he has taken to Baldwin's life and oeuvre: one critical, the other fictional. In creating a fictional portrait of the writer, Als focuses on the bohemian world where Baldwin made his name in the 1950’s. Als' response to Baldwin's life and work is an overall portrait of the celebrated essayist's importance and failure as a spokesman for "the race."
Click here for more information about Hilton Als
Strange Culture
dir. Lynn Hershman Leeson (2007, 75 min.)
Monday, March 3, 2008
7pm | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
7pm | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
Strange Culture follows the surreal nightmare of acclaimed artist Steve Kurtz that began when his wife Hope died in her sleep of heart failure. Local police who responded to Kurtz's 911 call deemed his art -- which explores germ warfare and genetically-modified foods -- to be suspicious and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected bioterrorist, and dozens of federal agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his wife’s body. Today, Kurtz and a long-time collaborator await a trial date for charges of mail fraud. A renowned media artist herself, Hershman Leeson employs novel techniques that not only uncover and subvert the tenuous politics and legality of the case, but also the conventions of documentary cinema itself.
Click here for more information about Strange Culture
Una's Lecture: Greil Marcus, cultural critic
“Blackface Then and Now”
Thursday, March 6, 2008
7:30pm | Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall
"Somebody has to black hisself / For somebody else to stay white." So wrote Melvin B. Tolson in the 1930s in A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. Though we may think of blackface performance as a relic of the past ("I saw one of the last blackface minstrel shows," Bob Dylan writes of his boyhood in Hibbing, Minnesota, in the early fifties), cultural critic Greil Marcus will take up the persistence of blackface in contemporary culture, as bad conscience, yearning dream, and indecipherable joke.
Click here for more information about Greil Marcus
Bruce Ackerman, Law and Political Science, Yale University
“The Death of Citizenship?”
Thursday, March 13, 2008
5pm | Geballe Room, Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall
The practice of American citizenship is disintegrating before our eyes. The citizen army was killed by Vietnam. The citizen jury has not yet completely disintegrated, but has become a momentary nuisance. The public school remains the only significant institution that still invites involvement by ordinary people, and it too is under attack. And while the internet is providing twenty-first century tools to fill the gap, it is naïve to suppose that this techno-fix will suffice. Are we fated to sit by passively as we witness the lingering death of Tocqueville's America?
The major works of political philosophy of the past generation have neglected this question. They have tended toward a Utopian exploration of liberal political ideals. Over the past decade, Bruce Ackerman has been working with colleagues on a series of practical proposals that aim to reconstruct the political and economic foundations of citizenship in ways that make sense in a liberal market society. In presenting The question is whether these proposals, or similar ones, provide a path toward the reinvigoration of the practice of American citizenship in the twenty-first century.Click here for more information about Bruce Ackerman
Avenali Lecture: Elaine Pagels,
Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
7:30pm | Wheeler Auditorium
Who wrote the Book of Revelation, when, and why? What other “books of revelation” — Jewish and Christian — were written at the time but left out of the Bible? What accounts for the enduring appeal of this book over the past two thousand years, and even still today? Religious Studies scholar Elaine Pagels will discuss these questions at the 20th Annual Avenali lecture at UC Berkeley.
Click here for more information about Elaine Pagels
Avenali Lecture follow-up panel discussion
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
4-6pm | 315 Wheeler Hall, Maude Fife Room
A panel discussion of Elaine Pagel's lecture on "The Book of Revelation."
Discussants: Daniel Boyarin (Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric) and Susanna Elm (History)
Moderator: Anthony J. Cascardi, Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities
Leon Fleisher, pianist and conductor
In Conversation
Thursday, April 3, 2008
7pm | Museum Theater, Berkeley Art Museum,
2621 Durant Avenue, access via Sculpture Garden
The Townsend Center is pleased to present renowned pianist, conductor and teacher Leon Fleisher in conversation with Professor Anthony J. Cascardi, offering a unique opportunity for audiences to hear Fleisher’s candid thoughts on music, ability, and pedagogy.
Click here for more information about Leon Fleisher
What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann
dir. Steve Cantor (2006, 85 min.)
Monday, April 7, 2008
7pm | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
7pm | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
One of the world’s preeminent photographers, Sally Mann first came to international prominence in 1992 with “Immediate Family,” a controversial series of complex, enigmatic, and sensual pictures of her own children. What Remains follows the creation of Mann’s new seminal work: a photo series revolving around various aspects of death and decay. Never one to compromise, Sally Mann reflects on her own personal feelings toward mortality as she continues to examine the boundaries of contemporary photography. Shot over five years at her family farm in Virginia, the film contains unbridled access to the many stages of Mann’s work, and is a rare glimpse of an eloquent and brilliant artist.
Click here for more information about What Remains
Homi K. Bhabha, English, Harvard University
“On Global Memory: Thoughts on the Barbaric Transmission of Culture”
Friday, April 18, 2008
2pm | Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall
Many of the issues concerning identity in global discourse are issues related to memory. In this talk, Homi Bhabha will explore the complex and difficult constellations of history and memory as they are transmitted through various cultural practices, asking how may an aesthetic of barbaric transmissions be defined?