Description

– Free lecture is preceded by City of Sadness (1989) | Directed by Hou Hsio-Hsien | 160 min. [film registration a must]

3:40 – 4:30 LECTURE
Hou Hsiao-hsien and CITY OF SADNESS as Taiwan’s Cultural Ambassadors Professor James Udden (Film Studies, Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania)

JAMES UDDEN is Associate Professor of film studies at Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania. He has lived and researched in Taiwan resulting in his book, No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Hong Kong University Press, 2009), the first English-language book on the filmmaker in English. He has also published widely on Asian cinema in various journals and anthologies, including two in separate upcoming volumes on Chinese cinema to be published by BFI and Blackwell press. His current book project concerns how Iranian cinema managed to penetrate the international film festival circuit.

– Lecture is followed by a free symposium

5:00 – 7:00 SYMPOSIUM | Contemporary Taiwan Cinema

Professor Lee Carruthers (Cinema and Media Studies, University of Calgary)
Mr. Shelly Kraicer (Curator, film programmer, and freelance film critic; Beijing based)
Professor Bart Testa (Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto)

LEE CARRUTHERS completed her doctoral degree at the University of Chicago in 2008 and is now Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Calgary (AB, Canada). Her teaching focuses on film theory, American cinema and the European art cinema; she has published and presented work on film theory, film noir, and contemporary directors such as François Ozon, Steven Soderbergh and Tsai Ming-liang. Carruthers’ current book project is called Doing Time: Timeliness and Temporal Rhetorics in Contemporary Cinema; informed by philosophical hermeneutics, this study considers the rich experiences of temporality that contemporary film generates for viewers. Her ongoing research also pursues questions related to time and ambiguity in the writings of André Bazin as well as constructions of space in the cinema of Mike Leigh.

SHELLY KRAICER is a Beijing-based writer, critic, and film curator. Born in Toronto, Canada, and educated at Yale University, he has written film criticism in Cinema Scope, Positions, Cineaste, the Village Voice, and
Screen International. Since 2007, he has been a programmer of East Asian films for the Vancouver International Film Festival, and has consulted for the Venice, Udine, Dubai, and Rotterdam International Film Festivals.

BART TESTA is senior lecturer at the Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College, University of Toronto. His teaching includes courses on Chinese cinemas, European art films, urbanism and film, avant-garde cinema, Science Fiction movies and other popular film genres. He has authored two books on experimental films, Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde (1993) and Spirit in the Landscape (1989) and edited an anthology on Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as journal articles and anthologized essays.