The Centre for Film and Media Research (CFMR) warmly invite you to attend their first research event for the autumn term.<\/p>\n
“Prurience is Part of the Machine\u201d:<\/strong><\/p>\n Automation, Real Estate, and New York\u2019s Underground Screens<\/strong><\/p>\n Amy Herzog (Queens College\/The Graduate Center, CUNY)<\/p>\n Thursday 19 October, 5pm \u2013 Keynes Seminar Room 16<\/p>\n New York\u2019s Times Square underwent a radical transformation in the 1960s and 1970s, emerging as one of the most visible and vilified public marketplaces for pornography. Times Square also provided a critical site for connecting, working, and cruising for a diverse demographic: artists, queers, curious youth, sex workers, closeted professionals, and new arrivals to the city. Long a crossroads for commerce and sensationalized entertainment, the neighborhood\u2019s cinematic legacy is marked by a similar convergence of interests. Times Square\u2019s porn theaters and grindhouses offered a steady mix of sexploitation, pornographic, and experimental film works. This crosspollination between adult and experimental film cultures extends beyond the content and style of individual works to include spectatorship practices and innovative viewing architectures.<\/p>\n Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas were perhaps the most visible interlopers between the adult and experimental New York scenes, enthusiastically celebrating and critiquing the traffic between them. \u201cI really do think movies\u00a0should<\/em>\u00a0arouse you,\u201d Warhol argued, \u201cshould get you excited about people\u2026. Prurience is part of the machine\u201d (Bockris, 327). Using Warhol and Mekas\u2019s reflections as a point of departure, this talk will explore the rich connections between New York\u2019s experimental and underground film cultures and several core themes resonating between them.<\/p>\n Biography Amy Herzog is a media historian whose research spans a broad range of interdisciplinary subjects, including film, philosophy, popular music, urban history, pornography, gentrification, parasites, amusement parks, and dioramas. She is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College and Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Herzog is the author of\u00a0Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film <\/em>(University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and co-editor, with Carol Vernallis and John Richardson, of\u00a0The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media<\/em>\u00a0(Oxford, 2013). Her writing has appeared in numerous collections and journals (including Discourse<\/em>, Jump Cut<\/em> and Feminist Media Histories<\/em>), and she has presented her work at venues including the Guggenheim Museum of New York, The New Museum, Dixon Place, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Coney Island Museum. Her most recent research project explores the history of peep show arcades in Times Square, New York.<\/p>\n More about the Centre for Film and Media Research<\/u><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n The Centre\u2019s main objective is to support, produce and disseminate cutting-edge film and media research. A broad and welcoming church for the manifold approaches to our subject, we specialise in moving-image research that is collaborative<\/strong><\/em>, of high impact<\/strong><\/em>, international<\/strong><\/em> and interdisciplinary<\/strong><\/em> in scope.<\/p>\n We recognise that moving images are best understood comprehensively<\/strong><\/em> in terms of their aesthetic shapes, social roles, discursive formations, cultural meanings, psychological effects and\/or economic realities, and best explained through attention to both institutional imperatives and individual agencies.<\/p>\n Drawing together scholars from across the University \u2013 including Arts, European Culture and Languages, Digital Arts and Engineering, History, English and American Studies, Law, Sociology and beyond \u2013 the Centre furnishes a lively, member-led research culture that serves as a forum for Kent-based researchers and as a beacon for the international community.<\/p>\n
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