CineCLACS hosts a lecture/video presentation by NYU University Professor Robert Stam on concepts related to Brazilian film aesthetics from his latest book Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics. The book offers a journey through the superimposed terrains of politically engaged art and artistically engaged politics in film and media. A major statement on subversive aesthetics, the book also embeds a lexicon of almost a 1000 concepts, all illustrated through filmic examples. Although the examples are drawn from global cinema generally, this talk will focus on Latin America and specifically on Brazil, highlighting the remarkable effloressence of innovatory aesthetic concepts that have emerged from Latin America. The chapters address the following themes: 1) An Aesthetics of the Commons; 2) the Upside-down World of the Carnivalesque; 3) Political Modernism and its Discontents; 4) the Transmogrification of the Negative; 5) Hybrid Variations on a Documentary Theme; 6) Hollywood Aristotelianism, the Fractured Chronotope. And the Musicalization of Cinema; and 7) Aesthetic/Political Innovation in the Digital Era. Although Latin America is not the exclusive focus of the book, Latin American concepts and films are featured throughout, moving from anthropophagy, sur-realismo, aesthetics of hunger, the aesthetics of garbage to hybrid authorship and tribal auteurism.
Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University. He has authored, co-authored and edited some seventeen books on film and cultural theory, national cinema (French and Brazilian), comparative race and postcolonial studies. His books related to Latin America include: Literature through Film (Blackwell 2005); Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke, 1997); Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (Johns Hopkins, 1989); Brazilian Cinema (Associated University Presses, 1982), and (with Ella Shohat), Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (NYU, 2012); Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers,2003); and Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994, 2 nd edition 2014). His work has been translated into French, Spanish, German, Italian, Greek, Farsi, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Estonian, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, and Arabic. Five of his books have been translated into Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Sao Paulo, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Universidade Federal de Bahia, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina and other insitutions in Brazil.
This event is free and open to the public. ID is required to enter the building.