The screening and panel discussion of Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded, co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, reflected the importance of “reloading” an analysis of popular representations of Asian women. The [...]]]> Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded: “Things Change A Lot”
New York University, 27 October 2011

The screening and panel discussion of Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded, co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, reflected the importance of “reloading” an analysis of popular representations of Asian women. The film covers a range of issues very succinctly, reflecting on the progress and/or lack thereof that might be seen in the decades between this and the original 1988 documentary, and presenting contemporary issues and strategies that have arisen in the period between the two films. The documentary was screened after a brief introduction from director and producer Elaine Kim, professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley; it was followed by a panel discussion, moderated by NYU’s Gayatri Gopinath, and featuring Kim, comics guru Jeff Yang, and Benjamin Han, a doctoral candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU.

Both films were produced by Asian Women United, a project-driven activist organization co-founded by Kim in 1981. While the original Slaying the Dragon, released in 1988, was produced with a $300,000 budget—now the equivalent of $800,000—the sequel was produced with $15,000. As Kim stated, they “couldn’t get any funding” for the sequel, because “race and representation of Asian women is kind of an old idea.” Of course, the irony of this statement reflects the intervention of the documentary, which demonstrates, as the saying goes: “the more things change, the more they stay the same”—and, as Kim put it, “things change a lot.” The film presents the prevalence of multiculturalism onscreen as one example of changes in representation in the last 20-odd years, and suggests that while the fact that there are “more brown faces” onscreen now than in the 80s might seem “comforting” in the context of the documentary’s interest in representation, the characters being portrayed are “still white characters,” whose cultural history and experience is erased in the service of presenting “universal” (read: white) experience, demonstrating the “interchangeability and commodification of race” in our current moment.

The tension between universal and particular experience was discussed as a perennial issue for Asian-American writers and performers, who struggle to, as Jeff Yang put it, “depict characters in a way that allows them to live in their skin without being defined by that skin.” Kim offered films like The Motel, Robot Stories, and Colma: The Musical as examples of films that “address and embrace race without being obsessed by it,” while Yang suggested the Harold and Kumar trilogy as another example—yet, as Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded suggests, and Kim reminded us, the strides in representation for Asian-American men onscreen are not yet similarly reflected in roles for women. Of course, these struggles are in large part due to the fact that such stories “haven’t yet been given the budget, the resources, or the freedom” for such complex depictions.

The lack of budget for Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded resulted in a DIY ethos, and led to a number of conceptual choices that differentiate the sequel from the original documentary, in ways that were both necessary and strategic, and reflect the film’s interest in the ways new media and technology productively complicate representation and the primacy of mainstream culture. While Slaying the Dragon was recorded on 16mm film and ran 60 minutes, the sequel is a concise 30 minutes. The shorter running time was certainly not due to a lack of content; rather, Kim wanted to ensure that the film was a functional length for use in classroom contexts, while still allowing time for discussion. Kim’s pedagogical focus can also be seen in the formal composition of the sequel, which was recorded digitally, rather than on film, and was put together on the filmmakers’ laptops. Kim described the process of making the original documentary on 16mm as ultimately finite: “as soon as you make it, that’s it.” In contrast, Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded is a dynamic site that welcomes commentary, response and contribution. Kim described it as an “agglutinative project,” because, ideally, the film will continue to expand through feedback and discussion in order not only to reflect the continued evolution in representation of Asian women, but also to keep such conversations alive.

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.

Read a review of this talk!

October 27, Thursday 6 to 9 pm

Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded 2011, 30 minutes, USA director Elaine H. Kim

Confirmed panelists:

Benjamin Han, Cinema Studies, NYU

Elaine H. Kim, Ethnic Studies and [...]]]> SLAYING THE DRAGON: RELOADED

film screening and panel discussion presented by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute

Read a review of this talk!

October 27, Thursday
6 to 9 pm

Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded
2011, 30 minutes, USA
director Elaine H. Kim

Confirmed panelists:

Benjamin Han, Cinema Studies, NYU

Elaine H. Kim, Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies, UC-Berkeley

Jeff Yang, Asia Society, New York City

Moderated by: Gayatri Gopinath, Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU

Slaying The Dragon gets a reboot in Elaine Kim’s recent documentary Slaying The Dragon: Reloaded. Still exploring Asian images in Hollywood film, the documentary takes into account a new generation of viewers and films. While some Asian archetypes remain the same, others are being explored.

The post-screening discussion will feature director Elaine Kim; Benjamin Han, Cinema Studies NYU; and Jeff Yang, curator of the current A/P/A Institute exhibition “Marvels & Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986,” and will be moderated by Gayatri Gopinath, director of the A/P/A Studies Program at NYU. The discussion will address new and persisting images of Asians in the popular imaginary as well as some of the complexities of shifting archetypes and their psychological and developmental effects on Asian American youth.

Cantor Film Center
Theater 101
36 East 8th Street
between University Place and Greene Street

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.

To RSVP, email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu, call 212-992-9653, or visit A/P/A Institute.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

9/15/10-10/13/10

MoMA CELEBRATES BARBARA HAMMER, WITH A MONTH-LONG RETROSPECTIVE OF THE PROLIFIC ARTIST’S EXTENSIVE BODY OF WORK

Exhibition Includes the World Premiere of Hammer’s Newest Film, Generations, as well as Her Groundbreaking Experimental Short Films and Documentaries

Barbara Hammer from [...]]]> Barbara Hammer MoMA Retrospective

9/15/10-10/13/10

MoMA CELEBRATES BARBARA HAMMER, WITH A MONTH-LONG RETROSPECTIVE OF THE PROLIFIC ARTIST’S EXTENSIVE BODY OF WORK

Exhibition Includes the World Premiere of Hammer’s Newest Film, Generations, as well as Her Groundbreaking Experimental Short Films and Documentaries

Barbara Hammer from September 15-October 13, 2010 at 
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

NEW YORK, August 13, 2010— A retrospective of works by experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer (American, b. 1939) spanning from 1968 to today, including the world premiere of her new film Generations (2010), made in collaboration with Gina Carducci, will be shown at The Museum of Modern Art from September 15 through October 13, 2010. Hammer is renowned for creating the earliest and most extensive body of avant-garde films on lesbian life and sexuality, including Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976). Barbara Hammer is organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Full Press Release and Schedule:

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1107

September 20, Monday 12:30 to 1:45 pm

Jian Chen, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU

Prior to the multimedia convergence initiated by mass digitalization, documentary and pornographic film/video offered the experiences of communicability and interactivity now attributed to “post-cinematic” multimedia. Pornography and documentary are arguably anti-cinematic [...]]]> A Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Jian Chen

September 20, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Jian Chen, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU

Prior to the multimedia convergence initiated by mass digitalization, documentary and pornographic film/video offered the experiences of communicability and interactivity now attributed to “post-cinematic” multimedia. Pornography and documentary are arguably anti-cinematic forms that work through communicative relays between viewers and film/video, rather than immersive spectatorship, and through visible technological mediation, in contrast to aesthetic signatures or spectacle. Whether through claims to authenticity or the pleasure of fantasy, these two genres also initiate the kinds of cross-cultural contact celebrated more belatedly, and with more polished veneer, in global Hollywood cinema. Chen’s talk will focus on semi-documentaries on sex work and mainstream online pornography, which feature Asian feminine subjects. Chen contends that these docu/porn forms make potentially explicit the paradoxical relationships between autonomy and control, enjoyment and labor, shaping image consumption and cultural visibility within transnational neoliberal capitalism. And Chen’s talk will explore the racial, sexual fantasies that support the imagined free-flow circulation of images and information within multimedia public spheres.

41-51 East 11th Street, Room 741
between University Place and Broadway
(wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets)

Part of the Brown Bag Lunch Talk Series — bring your own lunch and we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

Jian Chen is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Chen’s current research explores new demands made on cultural consumption, representation, and politics, with the transnational circulation of sexed racial and ethnic images in post-cinematic film and media. Chen’s work brings into conversation the areas of queer and transgender critique; film, new media, and visual cultures; East Asian diasporas; and comparative racial politics. S/he received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine in 2009 and B.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies and English at the University of California, Berkeley. Chen’s article “Sex Without Friction: the Limits of Multi-Mediated Human Subjectivity in Cheang Shu Lea’s Tech-Porn” is forthcoming in the electronic journal Postmodern Culture.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute.

(Conference in English)

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of French, the Institute of French Studies, the Department of Cinema Studies, and the CNRS/NYU International Research Center.

New Wave Cinema created a new image of woman which is inseparable from modernity and auteur cinema. However, this image [...]]]> Wednesday, April 14
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

(Conference in English)

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of French, the Institute of French Studies, the Department of Cinema Studies, and the CNRS/NYU International Research Center.

New Wave Cinema created a new image of woman which is inseparable from modernity and auteur cinema. However, this image is largely shaped by patriarchal culture. This talk explores how the image of woman that is constructed in New Wave films is essentialized and associated with passion, and thus embodies an image of the feminine that combines sexual freedom with death.

Geneviève Sellier is a professor of Film Studies at the Université de Caen (France); she is a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France and currently a Visiting Professor at the MIT (Cambridge, Mass.) She is the author of Masculine Singular : French New Wave Cinema (Duke University Press, 2008) and the coauthor (with Noël Burch) of La Drôle de Guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930-1956 (Nathan, 1999).

Location: NYU La Maison Francaise, 16 Washington Mews, NYC

Click here for more information.

Lauren Berlant, English, University of Chicago

“After the Good Life” works with two films of Laurent Cantet [Ressources humaines/Human Resources (1999) and L'Emploi du Temps/Time Out (2001)] to engage the new affective languages of the contemporary economic atmosphere across Europe: languages of anxiety, contingency, and precarity that [...]]]> April 8, Thursday
7 to 8:30 PM

Lauren Berlant, English, University of Chicago

“After the Good Life” works with two films of Laurent Cantet [Ressources humaines/Human Resources (1999) and L'Emploi du Temps/Time Out (2001)] to engage the new affective languages of the contemporary economic atmosphere across Europe: languages of anxiety, contingency, and precarity that take up the space where social democracy, upward mobility, and meritocracy used to reign. What happens to optimism when futurity splinters as a prop for getting through life? How to understand the emergence of this felt crisis in relation to transformations of the good life fantasy? The question reaches broadly, but the archive focuses on a variety of crises in the professional classes, which no longer can delegate precarity to the poor or the citizen sans papiers; its interest is in exploring how a new cinema of precarity stages the end of an era of social obligation and belonging by focusing, microhistorically, on what happens to manner and manners.

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Developing concepts of affective publics since The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago, 1991), she has completed a trilogy on national sentimentality, with The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke, 1997), and The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke, 2008). She is also editor of Intimacy (Chicago, 2000), Compassion (Routledge, 2004), On the Case (forthcoming) and, with Lisa Duggan, Our Monica, Ourselves (2001). This talk is from her next book, Cruel Optimism.

NYU Lipton Hall
108 West 3rd Street
between MacDougal and Sullivan Streets

Seating is on a first-come basis; no RSVPs.

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible, but please let us know in advance if you need access.

If you need sign language interpretation services or other accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

For more information, please call 212-992-9540 or email csgs@nyu.edu.

Jointly sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women at Barnard College

Co-sponsors: NYU’s Department of Performance Studies; Department of Social and Cultural Analysis; and the Office of LGBT Student Services

Wednesday, March 17 at 7pm

5 Washington Place, Room 101 (NYC)

Free Admission (but limited seating)

For more information, please call CLAGS at 212-817-1955 or visit them online.

HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and [...]]]> Presented by Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS)

Wednesday, March 17 at 7pm

5 Washington Place, Room 101 (NYC)

Free Admission (but limited seating)

For more information, please call CLAGS at 212-817-1955 or visit them online.

HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life is the first book by influential filmmaker Barbara Hammer, whose life and work have inspired a generation of queer, feminist, and avant-garde artists and filmmakers. The wild days of non-monogamy in the 1970s, the development of a queer aesthetic in the 1980s, the fight for visibility during the culture wars of the 1990s, her search for meaning as she contemplates mortality in the past ten years—HAMMER! includes texts from these periods, new writings, and fully contextualized film stills to create a memoir as innovative and disarming as her work has always been. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema, and this event celebrates her life and work with clips of past work, a Q&A and a reading from her forthcoming book, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life.

A reception will follow.

For more information, please call CLAGS at 212-817-1955 or visit them online.

April 1, Thursday 4 to 6 PM

David T. Mitchell, Institute on Disabilities, Temple University

Sharon L. Snyder, Brace Yourselves Productions

In this co-presentation, Mitchell and Snyder analyze the ideological, aesthetic, and pedagogical effects of disability film festivals. Mitchell and Snyder are particularly [...]]]> A joint presentation by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder

April 1, Thursday
4 to 6 PM

David T. Mitchell, Institute on Disabilities, Temple University

Sharon L. Snyder, Brace Yourselves Productions

In this co-presentation, Mitchell and Snyder analyze the ideological, aesthetic, and pedagogical effects of disability film festivals. Mitchell and Snyder are particularly interested to explore the way such festivals, by screening an array of international films, manage to respond to newly evolving concepts of “being disabled” even as they resist articulating a shared identity based on collective coherence of experience, affect, or diagnosis.

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

This event is free and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible. If you need sign language interpretation services or other accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

For more information about this event, please contact Julie Elman at 212-992-8305 or julie.elman@nyu.edu.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Council for the Study of Disability; Department of Social and Cultural Analysis; Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies; and Center for Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Presented by the CUNY Center for the Humanities

Marianna Torgovnick is Professor of English at Duke University and Director of the Duke in New York Arts and Media Program each Fall and Summer. Torgovnick is the author of six books, including the acclaimed Gone Primitive, its sequel, Primitive Passions, and [...]]]> Marianna Torgovnick at CUNY

Presented by the CUNY Center for the Humanities

Marianna Torgovnick is Professor of English at Duke University and Director of the Duke in New York Arts and Media Program each Fall and Summer. Torgovnick is the author of six books, including the acclaimed Gone Primitive, its sequel, Primitive Passions, and an award-winning memoir called Crossing Ocean Parkway. Her most recent book The War Complex explores the memory of World War II and the imagination of destruction at the heart of modernity.

Friday, February 19th, 4:00 pm

The English Lounge (Room 4406)
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave (btwn 34th and 35th)
New York City

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

No registration. Please arrive early for a seat.

212-817-2005

Co-sponsored by the CUNY PhD Program in English

MIX 22: November 17-22, 2009

The 2009 MIX Festival serves up queer cinema, art, and performances.

MIX22: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival pulls into the MIX Factory Tuesday, November 17th, where the train dispatcher will hold it until Sunday, November 22nd. So pull up a seat and pass the time with [...]]]>

MIX 22: November 17-22, 2009

The 2009 MIX Festival serves up queer cinema, art, and performances.

MIX22: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival pulls into the MIX Factory Tuesday, November 17th, where the train dispatcher will hold it until Sunday, November 22nd. So pull up a seat and pass the time with the latest in vanguard film, video, art and performances!

On Thursday, November 19th, we’re holding a special screening of John Greyson’s 2009 Teddy Award-winner, Fig Trees, an experimental, operatic documentary feature in which an albino squirrel, an amputee busker, and St. Teresa of Avila use Gertrude Stein’s 1934 avant-garde classic Four Saints in Three Acts to tell the stories of historic AIDS activists like Zackie Achmat, who, in 1999, risked his own life in the fight to make AIDS medication available to all South Africans.

After Fig Trees, stay for Luminous Darkness, guest-curated by Daniel McKernan, and featuring a kornukopia of satanic queers and psychedelic wild boys. Watch Luigi & Luca trap themselves in each other’s affection, beer-soaked documentary footage of Gio Black Peter’s international tour with the Black Peter Group in I Got No Strings, and Zackary Drucker’s stripped body plucked of hair in The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. For extreme tastes.

Canadian artist Daniel Barrow makes a return to the festival Friday, November 20th, after a successful and amazing performance of Looking for Love in the Hall of Mirrors at MIX20. In his newest piece, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, Barrow combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city…What he doesn’t yet realize is that a deranged killer is trailing him, murdering each citizen he includes in his book, thus rendering his cataloging efforts obsolete. Barrow is known for his innovative performances, in which he projects, layers and manipulates drawings on mylar transparencies to form what he variously refers to as “graphic performance,” “live illustration,” and “manual animation.” This is not to be missed!

Never Satisfied answers many questions and curiosities that may exist in the viewer’s head: Project B*mbi reveals the similarities between Bambi, The Deer Hunter, and Debbie Does Dallas; Lezzieflick bombards the senses with pulsating sonograms of kisses and fractal vaginal fisting; and Mariah Garnett’s Untitled Peter Berlin Project dons the cruisy aesthetic of the titular gay porn icon and shows the viewer what it’s like when someone gendered female takes on the coded outfits of gay male hyper-sexuality.

Speaking of sex, sexy, and sex-related things, Saturday, November 21st, will be a treat for porn enthusiasts who attend Bigger Than Life: Experimenting with Sex. Join author and scholar Jeffrey Escoffier and his guests, gay erotic pioneer Wakefield Poole (Boys in the Sand, Bijou); Bob Alvarez who, with his partner the late Jack Deveau (1935-1982), made erotic movies heavily influenced by experimental filmmaking; Joe Gage, director of the classic LA Tool and Die; and Owen Hawk, founder of Dark Alley Media and continuing the tradition of experimental portrayals of gay male sexuality. It’s sure to be a night of insight into the early and current visions of gay male sexuality. Escoffier presents a clip show and interviews these overlooked figures from history.

Afterwards, stay for Saturday’s Creepy, Dirty, Girlie show. One heroine in Sarah Stuve’s and PJ Linden’s My Dead Brain will be stuffed and torn apart by society’s bodily expectations. Heather Woodrich’s and Sadie Lune’s Pop provides a feminist riff on some of Andy Warhol’s early films, and 120 Secondi captures a moment of intense desire between an older and younger woman, courtesy of Philrouge. Viewers will be treated to explicit images including various sex acts, fetishes, menstrual blood, nightmarish weddings, pissing in public, excessive make-up, gender bending, food, death, decay, household chores, and pornography. You know, girlie stuff.

Before the doors close, we hope you squeeze in a historic event on Sunday, November 22nd. Cary Cronenwett’s Maggots and Men is a utopian re-visioning of the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921, featuring film history’s first cast of over 100 transgender actors, painting a portrait of formerly pro-Soviet sailors at the Kronstadt naval garrison who rebelled against the perceived failures of the new Bolshevik state

And that’s just a few of the cars on the MIX train. Visit our A Different Take screening and watch the developing visions of queer youth. Stop by Bulldozed! and traverse the burning neighborhoods of yesteryear. Go over the Williamsburg Bridge and across the East River to Union Docs and see Travel Queeries, a feature-length documentary about what it is to be an alternative queer in urban contemporary Europe, where the trains go way damn faster. Come for the screenings, stay for our wild and sexy after-parties–you won’t mind the late night schedule. With MIX 22, don’t just get a single ride, go for the unlimited.

For more info about our line up: http://www.mixnyc.org

Admission (Suggested Donation, Sliding Scale, Give What You Can)
Opening Night — $20
Regular shows — $11
Closing Night and Special Events — $15
Travel Queeries — $7
A Different Take — Free to Youth 23 and Under.

The MIX Factory
125 W. 21st St. (btw. 6th and 7th Ave.)

Subway: 1, C, E, F, V, R, W to 23rd

PATH Train: 23rd Street stop on these lines:
Journal Square – 33rd St
Hoboken – 33rd St

CONTACT:
Devon Gallegos
Festival Assistant, MIX NYC
212-742-8880
hospitality@mixnyc.org