Movies’ cultural role to be examined

The cinema flickered to life more than 100 years not so much as art or philosophy, or even science, but as a form of mass entertainment.

Scholars from around the world will investigate film’s mission as cultural amusement through a three-day symposium at UW–Madison Feb. 4-6.

“Popular Cinema — The Very Idea: Understanding Film as Entertainment” is sponsored by the UW–Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities as its 22nd Burdick-Vary Symposium. The event will probe the medium’s entertainment implications both through time and across cultures. Screenings will include Maurice Tourneur’s The Whip, a 1917 melodrama set at a race track; Volga-Volga, a musical from Stalin’s Soviet state; Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future (1985), Fireworks, Kitano Takeshi’s Venice Film Festival Grand Prize winner of 1997 and more.

Peter Chan, an acclaimed director from Hong Kong who is just finishing The Love Letter for Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, will be a special guest at the symposium. Two of Chan’s seven-film canon will be screened at the symposium: He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (1994), about Hong Kong’s pop music industry and Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996), about Chinese refugees in Hong Kong. Chan will introduce Comrades Feb. 6 at 2 p.m. He’ll also take questions from the audience at the end.

Symposium organizer David Bordwell, UW–Madison’s Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, says students and members of the community-at-large will enjoy a rare opportunity to talk with one of East Asia’s leading directors.

“Most directors from Hong Kong who make the transition to Hollywood specialize in action movies. Chan is one of the few directors of romantic comedies to come to this country,” Bordwell says. “His visit is a chance for us to see cultural differences in the way love is represented and to think about ways those portrayals cut across cultures. One thing that makes Chan’s movies so accessible is that people all over the world have had experiences with love and popular culture akin to those he shows in his movies.”

The symposium also will present such noted guest scholars as:

• London-based filmmaker and critic Tony Rayns, producer of several BBC documentaries on East Asian film and author of several books on the subject.
• Henry Jenkins of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of The Children’s Culture Reader and the forthcoming Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasure of Popular Culture.
• Robert C. Allen of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who has written widely on film and television.
• Yale University’s Katerina Clark, a specialist in 20th century Russian culture and the European avant-garde between 1910-1930.

The UW–Madison scholarly contingent will include:

• Honorary fellow Kristin Thompson, who will discuss her forthcoming book, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique.
• Lea Jacobs, associate professor of film studies, whose essay on Howard Hawks will be published soon in Style magazine.
• Vance Kepley, professor of film studies, who is an expert on Soviet cinema.

Bordwell hopes the symposium will encourage scholars from many disciplines to explore seriously the critical role entertainment plays in the evolution of culture.

“Cinema began as mass entertainment, and virtually all the important early filmmakers — Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Lubitsch, Hitchcock and others — worked for a popular audience,” he says. “If we want to understand popular culture, we need to take entertainment seriously, as a business, a cultural force and a source of artistic pleasure.”

The symposium will be free and open to the public. All screenings be in 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Lectures Feb. 4 and 5 will be held in 130 Elvehjem Museum of Art, 800 University Ave. The lecture venue switches to 4070 Vilas Feb. 6.

For a complete schedule, contact Loretta Freiling at the UW–Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities, (608) 262-3855.