Join us for the inaugural Environmental Humanities Center lunch lecture of the 2024/2025 academic year to learn more about the organic material components of film production history from Dr. Marek Jancovic.
This lunch lecture takes place on Thursday the 19th of September 2024 from 12:45 until 13:30 in the Environmental Humanities Library Room (HG-13B-04) at VU Amsterdam.
For more information regarding what the lecture will cover, see the abstract below.
Please sign up for this in-person event through this form: https://forms.office.com/e/YE71ixky3c
The “raw nature” of cinema: Rethinking technological histories of film through plant and animal materials
Historically, celluloid film stock – the first medium of cinema – was made from a range of plant and animal materials like cotton, animal hide and tree bark. While scholars have recently turned to the processing of these agricultural “elements of cinema” in Europe and North America, much less known are the supply chains that grew, reared and transported them to celluloid-producing countries. Tracing their global movements will dramatically change how we understand the cartography of cinema and its entanglements with the living world. New tools such as generative AI can aid in such historical supply chain research, but also present their own ethical dilemmas.
Leave a Reply