Flickering Landscapes Conference - The Image of Migration: Landscapes and People
March 28-30, 2019
The Gallery at Center for Emerging Media: 500 BentleySt, Orlando, FL 32801
The public is invited to attend this conference and all events associated with it free of charge. The conference brings together scholars and filmmakers to address how moving images depict the relationship between human migration and place. Our definition of migration encompasses any movement of peoples, including migration within nations or across national boundaries. The variety of the spaces migrants move across demands that we define place in the broadest terms possible: land, and sea, and the built environment. For more details visit our website: flickeringlandsc.cah.ucf.edu/. Registration is free and is requested to help us plan for seating and refreshments.
Keynote Speaker Chris Lippard: "Film as Refuge: Alternative Aesthetics in Contemporary Migration Films"
The Bridge at The Gallery at Center for Emerging Media: 500 Bentley St, Orlando, FL 32801
Friday, March 29, 9:00-10:30 am
Chris Lippard: In the face of increasingly dangerous paths of migration in today’s transnational world, film has frequently been seen as having the potential to break down borders, eliciting sympathy and understanding for migrants—an extension of traditional views of the humanizing capacities and functions of the Arts and Humanities more generally. Consequently, perhaps, realist approaches to depicting the journeys and arrivals of migrants are the norm in cinema, while melodramas highlight the trials and trauma of the migrant experience, especially as it affects families—epitomized by El Norte and Sin Nombre. Several recent films have attempted alternative aesthetics, including the high budget Human Flow (2017) and The Last of Us (2016). In the first, Ai Weiwei attempts to link a sentimental personal commitment with technical flourishes epitomized by drone shots that depict the magnitude of migration whilst detailing the landscape. More powerfully, Tunisian experimental director, Ala Eddine Slim’s The Last of Us defamiliarizes the migrant experience by suddenly diverting his narrative from a realist trajectory through the introduction of an improbable, perhaps magical, landscape and events within it that metaphorize the migrant experience and can provoke, I contend, new thinking about the problem. A second filmic approach for questioning migration is provided by those films that emphasize destination over journey. Referring back to Anthony Mann and John Alton’s Border Incident (1949), this presentation will assess alternative notions of the landscape of work in such depictions of the struggles of migrant labor in Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, 2007) and reenactment documentary Bisbee ’17 (Robert Greene, 2017).
Chris Lippard holds a Ph.D. in Film, Literature, and Culture from the University of Southern California and is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Utah. His research interests include transnational cinematic identities and aesthetics. He has published work on Abbas Kiarostami, Derek Jarman, F. W. Murnau, Jorge Sanjinés, Michael Moore, and the Sundance Film Festival. He is a past chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Middle Eastern Caucus and is co-editor of The Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema (2010).
PRESENTED BY:
The Center for Humanities and Digital Research, The Nicholson School of Communications and Media, and the Texts and Technology Doctoral Program at the University of Central Florida
SPONSORED BY:
The Office of Research, The College of Graduate Studies, CREATE (Center for Research and Education in Arts, Technology and Entertainment), The Department of English, The Department of History, The College of Arts and Humanities, FIEA (Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy), The Center for Humanities and Digital Research, The Nicholson School of Communications and Media, The Puerto Rico Research Hub, and The Texts and Technology Doctoral Program at the University of Central Florida