An interdisciplinary symposium — Nature/Place/Cinema — will be spread out over two weekends and two campuses (Ƶ and Hamilton College) providing students with behind-the-scenes access to filmmakers and film scholars.
The series of screenings and lectures will draw attention to the depiction of place and the environment, as well as the history of the nature film. It will also examine cinematic manifestations of place, as it relates to contemporary culture, history, and habitat.
begins this Friday at 4:15 p.m. at Hamilton College with a screening of John Gianvito’s Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind.
Participants will then travel back to Ƶ in shuttles for the opening reception at 6:30 p.m. in Little Hall, followed by a lecture by Marina McDougall titled Fauna on Film: A Phylogenic Tree and a screening of Catherine Chalmers’ Safari.
“The basic premise of the symposium is to bring together filmmakers and film scholars in the same event to look at work and discuss it,” said Lynn Schwarzer, professor of art and art history and film and media studies, who worked with professors Luca Caminati, John Knecht, Masha Salazkina, and Hamilton College’s Scott MacDonald to organize the event.
“When you get that cross-pollination [of artists and academics], it makes for some really great conversation and good insight. It wouldn’t happen in any other way. Usually there is a conference for film scholars and a film festival for artists. This is kind of a hybrid model where cinema scholars can hear artists talk about their work and artists get to contribute to the conversation.”
“This is going to open up ideas for how cinema can represent landscapes in ways that they have never seen before,” Schwarzer continued.
With filmmakers travelling from Indonesia and California and rare films being flown in from Paris, students are lucky to have such a unique opportunity.
“At this conference we will have a Moroccan anthropologist, Tarek Elhaik, taking about Roberto Rossellini’s early science films,” said Caminati, an assistant professor of Italian. “These early films are a real rarity, so it is going to be very exciting to have them screened at Ƶ and Hamilton.”
“There are amazing artists out there engaging reality in all its forms and infinite possibilities,” continued Caminati. “Students will learn more creative ways to engage with pressing issues.”
Schwarzer too hopes that the event engages students, “Hopefully the life of the symposium goes well beyond these two weekends and that in a month, students are still talking about what transpired or what somebody said about their work.”