PENN FILM-STUDIES DIRECTOR TO SPEAK ON ESSAY FILM

Bryn Mawr's Center for Visual Culture will host Tim Corrigan, the director of film studies at the University of Pennsylvania, at its weekly colloquium on March 1. Corrigan's talk, titled "The Forgotten Image Between Two Shots: Photos, Photograms and the Essayistic," will take place from 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. in Thomas 224 on the Bryn Mawr campus. Like all of the CVC colloquia, it is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be served.

The talk will focus on the work of Chris Marker, a filmmaker and multimedia artist who, Corrigan says, was profoundly influential in the direction of documentary film after World War II.

"Marker's films," Corrigan says, "looked forward to what is often called 'the new documentary,' a kind of film that explores the subjectivity of the cinematic perspective. But it also looked back to the literary essay in the tradition of Montaigne."

The history of documentary film, Corrigan says, extends back to the final decade of the nineteenth century. "Traditional documentaries are based on some notion of unmediated reality, and that tradition is very much alive today. What Marker did was to adapt the literary essay, first to photography and then to film."

"Marker created a cinema that aims beyond exposition, politics or entertainment — a more contemplative kind of cinema that is a provocation to thought."

Corrigan is a professor of English and director of film studies at Penn. His work in film studies has focused on modern American and international cinema, as well as pedagogy and film. His books include New German Film: The Displaced Image, The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, Writing About Film, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam, and Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. His most recent book is The Film Experience (co-authored with Patricia White), and he is presently concluding research on a book-length study titled The Essay Film.

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