Illuminating the Shadows: Film Criticism in Focus

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Join us on May 4 for another installment of our focus on film criticism featuring a free, afternoon panel discussion on film criticism and its relationship to academia. Special guests include Adrian Martin, Girish Shambu, and Elena Gorfinkel. The discussion will be moderated by Nick Davis. The 6pm panel will be followed by a free film screening of Exposed (1983) selected and introduced by Adrian Martin.

Critics and Scholars

Friday, May 4, 2012 6:00 PM FREE

Please join us for a sequel to last year’s widely publicized conference on film criticism. This year’s panel will delve further into the relations between film criticism and academic film studies. Relations between these fields have ranged from intimate to estranged, from alliance to antagonism. Still, critics and scholars often speak to overlapping audiences, and in many cases work across both endeavors, whether by practicing both forms of writing, circulating esoteric ideas to a wider readership, or using criticism as an archive of aesthetic, cultural, and historical knowledge about the movies. Join us as we probe and debate these and other aspects of the complex symbiosis between criticism and scholarship. Panelists will include Adrian Martin, professor of film at Monash University, Australia; Girish Shambu, blogger and professor of Management at Canisius College; and Elena Gorfinkel, professor of art history and film studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The discussion will be moderated by film blogger and Northwestern University English professor Nick Davis. The 6pm panel will be followed by a free film screening at 8pm of Exposed (1983), selected for this occasion and introduced by Adrian Martin.

Unfortunately, Kristi McKim, professor of English and film studies at Hendrix College, Arkansas, is unable to take part in the panel, as previously announced.


 

Exposed

Friday, May 4, 2012 8:00 PM FREE
(James Toback, 1983, USA, 35mm, 95 min.)

Although some audiences howled with derisive laughter on its initial film festival screenings in 1983, Exposed is a flamboyant and quite unique movie. Writer-director James Toback, who made Fingers (1978) and scripted Warren Beatty’s Bugsy (1991), wildly mixes and matches his genres—florid romance, existential art film (shot, in large part, across Europe), paranoid thriller—as he puts Nastassja Kinski in the anguished leading role he usually reserves for his male heroes. In the quest for personal identity, all the guys Kinski encounters (from Rudolf Nureyev as a visionary violinist to Harvey Keitel as a charismatic terrorist) are in equal parts erotic, dangerous and duplicitous. —Adrian Martin

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu