Cinema & Comparative Literature
Faculty News
Spring 2007
RICK ALTMAN has won the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and is one of 189 artists, scholars and scientists the Guggenheim Foundation selected for the 2007 awards from almost 2,800 applicants. The award will support research for his new book, "Classical Hollywood Sound," an examination of Hollywood's use of new sound technology. The new book will be a follow-up to Altman's award-winning "Silent Film Sound," published in 2004.
Spring 2006
FRANKLIN MILLER'S early 35mm feature film "Spring Night Summer Night" enjoyed a revival at festivals and independent screening venues, culminating in a screening at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
SASHA WATERS' 2005 film "The Waiting Time," a meditation on mid-life motherhood, screens in early 2006 as a part of the "Vital Voices: Women's Visions" group show at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and in competition at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, CA, and the Magnolia Film Festival in Starksville, MS.
Fall 2005
LEIGHTON PIERCE'S VIDEO VISCERA won Best Experimental Video at the 2005 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival and will also be screened in the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Pierce's video Fall (three parts) was broadcast on ARTE in France in September 2005.
LEIGHTON PIERCE'S video installation WARM OCCLUSION will be on display at the University of Iowa Museum of Art from September 30, 2005 to March 12, 2006.
Fall 2004
RUSSELL VALENTINO'S current publications include: (1) Between Exile and Asylum: An Eastern Epistolary, by Predrag Matvejevic. Translated from the Croatian. Central European University Press. First Author. (2) A Castle in Romagna, by Igor Stiks. Translated from the Croatian, with Tomislav Kuzmanovic. Autumn Hill Books.
RICK ALTMAN'S SILENT FILM SOUND just appeared from Columbia University Press. Weighing in at 462 double-column pages, including over a hundred black-and-white illustrations, plus an eight-page color spread, it is the first extensive study devoted to this topic.
KATHY EDWARDS (UIMA) is organizing a traveling exhibition "Acting Out: Invented Melodrama in Contemporary Photography" with a catalogue distributed by University of Washington Press. The exhibition will be on view at the UIMA April 8 - June 5, 2005. Also in the works for Fall 2005 is a major Leighton Pierce installation and publication. Faculty interested in integrating these shows into their curriculum should email Kathy.
STEVE UNGAR is coauthor--with former Iowa colleague Dudley Andrew--of Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005). Forthcoming and recent research publications include: (1) Writing in Tongues: Thoughts on the Work of Translation, in ACLA State of the Discipline (2005); (2) Saussure, Barthes and the First Wave of Structuralism in France, in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press (2005); (3) The Third Term: Literature Between Philosophy and Critical Theory, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture (2003); (4) V Signs: Visuality as Vision in the Expanded Field, in Julian Wolfreys, ed., Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords (2003); and (5) In the Thick of Things: Rouch and Morin's Chronique d'un ete Reconsidered, French Cultural Studies (2003). Future projects include a commissioned article on Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, a book-length study of Agnes Varda's Cleo de 5 a 7, and a monograph on the films of Marcel Carne.
SASHA WATERS, http://www.room135.com, is currently completing work on a short 16mm film entitled THE WAITING TIME, a personal documentary exploration of desire, conception, gestation and first-time motherhood. She is also serving as Editor on LUCKY GIRL: RETURN TO LEARNING, a documentary look at the effort to re-open Afghanistan's schools following the fall of the Taliban, produced & directed by Sarah Price.
Spring - Summer 2004
RICK ALTMAN'S Current/upcoming events and lectures include: (1) A lecture entitled "Early Film Themes: Roxy, Adorno, and the Problem of Cultural Capital," at the "Beyond the Soundtrack" conference of Film Music at the University of Minnesota, 22-25 April 2004; (2) A one-man performance of "The Living Nickelodeon" (as pianist, singer, master-of-ceremonies, and lecturer), as the opening event in the "Le Muet a la parole" ("The Silents Speak") conference at the Louvre Museum, Paris, 11 June 2004; and (3) A lecture entitled "Du Nouveau sur l'accompagnement sonore aux USA:Ê Quelques idees recues qu'on ne saurait plus maintenir" ("New Research on Silent Film Sound in the US:Ê A Few Well-known Truths that Don't Seem So True Any More"), at the "Le Muet a la parole" conference at the Louvre Museum, Paris, 11-13 June 2004.
SABINE GOLZ'S photography project, titled FACE VALUE, will be shown in its entirety at Legion Arts CSPS in Cedar Rapids from May 19th-July 4th, 2004. Selections from the series were on exhibit at Dartmouth College for all of fall semester and for a month at Johns Hopkins University earlier this academic year. FACE VALUE is a playful photographic exploration of an accumulation of old newspapers, and it creates surprisingly poetic effects out of such mundane matter. Insofar as it engages the relation between writing and photography, the series continues Prof. Golz's work in literary theory with different (i.e. photographic) means. The printing and mounting of the images for this exhibit was generously supported by the Office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. There will be an opening reception on Friday, May 28, 5-7 p.m. The reception will also include a short concert of music for the Russian seven-string guitar by Matvei Pavlov-Azancheev, performed by Oleg V. Timofeyev. The concert will begin at 6:30 p.m. Address: Legion Arts | CSPS 1103 Third Street SE Cedar Rapids http://www.legionarts.org/index.htm There will be an opening reception on Friday, May 28, 5-7 p.m. The reception will also include a short concert, beginning at 6:30 p.m., of music for the Russian seven-string guitar by Matvei Pavlov-Azancheev, performed by Oleg V. Timofeyev. She also presented a paper titled "Lichtung im Ahnlichen: 'Heute' bei Bachmann und Benjamin" at a conference on Ingeborg Bachmann, held at Trinity College in Dublin, spring 2004. VIEW IMAGE
Prof. Golz presented a paper on the relationship between the works of the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann and the German-Jewish theorist Walter Benjamin at an international conference held from April 30 ö May 1st, 2004 at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. The presentations from this conference will be published in a conference volume in the near future. (Travel to this conference was supported in part by International Programs conference travel grant.)
LEIGHTON PIERCE'S video "Fall" won the Ghostly International Award for Best Sound Design at the 42nd Ann Arbor Film Festival in March 2004. During March 2004 he also participated as a member of the international jury of Cinema du Reel, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Currently he has a looped video installation ( The Back Steps) included as part of "The Disembodied Spirit" at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary, Austin Museum of Art (September 03-04).
RUSSELL VALENTINO'S Current/upcoming publications and lectures include: (1) A book-length translation, introduction, and commentary (with Cinzia Blum and David Depew) of Carlo Michelstaedter's 1910 Persuasion and Rhetoric, from the Italian, will be published in Fall 2004 by Yale University Press (New Haven); (2) A book-length translation of Predrag Matvejevic's 1994 Between Exile and Asylum: An Eastern Epistolary, from the Serbo-Croatian, will be published in 2004 by Central European University Press (Budapest and New York); (3) An invitation to present an essay entitled "Sweet Commerce and Dead Souls" at a conference entitled "Critical Exchanges: Economy and Culture in the Literature of Russia," to be held at Northwestern University on May 7-8, 2004; and (4) Leading a panel on the use of distance technology in Iowa's REEES Distance Learning Consortium, at a conference entitled "Distance Education, Distributed Learning & Language Instructuion" to be held at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, from July 27-30, 2004.
SASHA WATERS' documentary video "Razing Appalachia," which aired nationally on PBS in May 2003. most recently screened at Electric Eye Cinema in Madison, WI.
Fall 2003 and Earlier
RUSSELL VALENTINO received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for the translation of Predrag Matvejevic's Between Exile and Asylum: An Eastern Epistolary
SABINE GOLZ had an exhibition of photographs up in Gallery PIROGI on Bol'shaya Dmitrovka Street in Moscow. (Dates: March 4-April 8, 2002.) The title of the show: "Moskva Vodostochnaya."
LEIGHTON PIERCE Current/upcoming events and screenings include: Rockefeller Media Artist's Fellowship to produce a series of video letters and an accompanying installation (2003-2004 ); Selected works retrospective screening of film and video at The Pompidou Center (Sept '03), Retrospective screening of film/video and sound design workshop at the Montreal Festival of New Media/New Cinema Paris (Oct '03); Two screenings: a retrospective screening of film and a recent digital works Êscreening at the Lisbon Biennial, Center for Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal (Oct.'03); Two videos, 37th & Lex and Water Seeking its Level in the Mill Valley Film Festival (October '03); A new digital video, A Private Happiness programmed in the Torino, Italy Film festival (Nov.'03);.
STEVEN UNGAR'S 2003 research publications include: (1) an article in French Cultural Studies on Jean Rouch and Edgar MonrinÕs Chronicle of a Summer; (2) a chapter on the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Culture coloniale, la France conquise par son Empire; (3) "The Third Term: Literature Between Philosophy and Critical Theory," in The Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture; and (4) "V Signs: Visuality as Vision in the Expanded Field," in Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords. Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture, coauthored with Dudley Andrew, is due to appear late in 2004.
SASHA WATERS It's not easy to blow off the top of a mountain. But in Blair, West Virginia, the last remaining residents find it may be even harder to stop it. Sasha's RAZING APPALACHIA chronicles a remarkable grassroots effort to fight against a massive strip mining project and the second largest coal company in America. "RAZING" is screening at the United Nations Association Film Festival in October. http://www.unaff.org/2003/, and Waters will be presenting the film and giving a keynote address titled "Justice, Environment, Engagement: The Role of Independent Media in Sustaining a Progressive Collective Imagination" at Western Illinois University for their 7th Annual Ethics Day Conference.
FRANKLIN MILLER'S LAST DANCE, a 2-minute digital animation piece played at the 2003 Black Maria Festival. The just-completed DEXTERITY was programmed for the 2003 Athens Festival.
