Category Archives: News

News

African Premiere of Welcome to the Smiling Coast at AfricanBamba

Tomorrow, Thursday March 3rd, Welcome to the Smiling Coast, the documentary produced by Film Faculty member Emiel Martens, will be screened at the AfricanBamba Human Rights Film Festival in Dakar, Senegal. After the world premiere at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles last month, tomorrow’s 7pm showing at Centre Culturel Jacques Chirac in Thiaroye (situated in the suburbs of Dakar) marks the African premiere of the film. Alhagie Manka, one of the Gambian crew members, will be present to do a Q&A after the screening: ‘these are exciting times for the film and I hope we are going to make Gambians proud by going out into the world.’

For more information: welcometothesmilingcoast.com.

The Secret of the Coen Brothers

A film by the Coen brothers is easily recognizable. The Big Lebowski, Fargo, No Country for Old Men and the new Hail Caesar! – it does not matter which genres the directors mix together, they are unmistakably Coen brothers movies. But what is it exactly that makes them like that? And how do the two filmmakers succeed in creating complete caricatures of their characters but get away with it? VPRO radio reporter Emmie Kollau spoke with Film Faculty member Gerwin van der Pol, director Michiel ten Horn (Aanmodderfakker, De Ontmaagding van Eva van End) and his cameraman Joost Wolf to answer this question.

Listen to the full interview here (in Dutch).

Book Launch and Seminar ‘Exposing the Film Apparatus’

On March 11th, 2016, the book Exposing the Film Apparatus – The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory will be launched at an international seminar in EYE. The book was compiled by Giovanna Fossati and Annie van den Oever and consists of a collection of essays on historical and contemporary film equipment and media technologies.

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Interview with Patricia Pisters in Folia

Today, an interview with Film Faculty member Patricia Pisters has been published in Folia, the weekly magazine of the University of Amsterdam: ‘Film scholar Patricia Pisters investigates the intersection of film studies and neuroscience. The director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis coined the term neuro-thriller for a new type of thrillers which works directly on our brains.’

Read the full interview here.

New essay on the neurothriller in Aeon

Today a new essay by Film Faculty member Patricia Pisters has been published in Aeon, a digital magazine of ideas and culture. The essay is entitled ‘Neurothriller’ and deals with the question why and how horror films are nowadays much more scary than they were in the past.

Read the entire essay here.

Welcome to the Smiling Coast on its way to Los Angeles

The documentary Welcome to the Smiling Coast: Living in the Gambia Ghetto is selected for the Pan African Film Festival (PAFF), the largest black film festival in the United States. The film, produced by Film Studies faculty member Emiel Martens, receives its world premiere at the festival, which will be held from February 4-15 in Los Angeles.

Continue reading Welcome to the Smiling Coast on its way to Los Angeles

Ways of Seeing in Theatre De Nieuwe Regentes

After a great success in Korzo last December, Ensemble Modelo62 will present Ways of Seeing in Theatre De Nieuwe Regentes in The Hague on February 7th at 17:00, during the Sounds of Silence Festival for silent film and live music. Ways of Seeing is a program of four works by different composers where sight, next to listening, plays a substantial role not only for the audience, but also for the musicians, who at some point play blindfolded on a darkened stage. Before the concert, at 16:00, trumpet player and music composition PhD Justin Christensen, along with UvA profesor of Media Studies Patricia Pisters, will present lectures on ‘The Synesthesia of Sound and the Moving Image’.

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Film Screening of Simondon of the Desert

On Wednesday February 24 at 4pm the film Simondon of the Desert (2012, 110 min.) will be screened for the first time in the Netherlands, in the presence of filmmaker François Lagarde and philosopher Pascal Chabot. The screening, which will be held at the Universiteitstheater (Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16,  1012 CP Amsterdam), will be followed by a discussion (Q&A). For more information and reservations, please contact Marie-Aude Baronian (lousbaronian@uva.nl).

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Special Issue on Caribbean Cinema Now Available

Today, after five years or so in the making, the special issue on contemporary Caribbean cinema has been published in  the open access Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. The issue consists of a combination of interviews and critical essays that provides a diverse and necessarily eclectic glimpse into recent developments in Caribbean cinema.

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PhD defense and expo opening ‘The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium’

The Webcams as an Emerging Cinematic Medium is the title of the first PhD in Artistic Research involving a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. This research combines theory and art practice to analyse video surveillance as form of filmmaking and the consequent impact on processes of subjectification in urban spaces.

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Dutch premiere of El botón de nácar in De Balie

Friday January 15th Cinéart in collaboration with NALACS and Fiesta Latinoamericana will host the Dutch premiere of the award-winning Chilean documentary El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, 2015) directed by Patricio Guzmán. The film will be screened at 21.00 hrs in De Balie in Amsterdam, after which there will be space to talk, network and dance in the bar area.  

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This is Film! Lectures on exceptional film restorations and film heritage projects

From February 4 to March 10, EYE and the University of Amsterdam present This is Film! Film Heritage in Practice, a series of public lectures at EYE reflecting on exceptional film restorations and film heritage projects. Giovanna Fossati (Chief Curator at EYE and Professor of Film Heritage at the UvA) addresses, in the course of six lectures, a wide range of restoration and presentation projects, spanning from pre-cinema to recent experimental films and Hollywood Classics. The topics include not only regular theatrical projections, but also film installations and exhibitions of film apparatus. Each weekly edition features a guest speaker, a Q&A session and film screenings, often also accompanied by live music.

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Special guest Errol Morris at IDFA: “Reality is a collective hunch”

By Bram Overbeeke and Nataša van de Laar, students at the Research Master in Media Studies.

Last Friday, November 20th, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) hosted American filmmaker Errol Morris for a masterclass in a fully packed Tuschinski theatre. The festival’s central guest discussed his work and his ideas on documentary film with moderator and prominent documentary scholar Bill Nichols. The dialogue focused mainly on the intersections between theory and practice of documentary filmmaking, in relation to the ground-breaking work of the director himself. Reality, truth, and their representations were recurring themes throughout the meandering discussion.

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EYE participates in MoMA’s To Save and Project Festival

The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) has invited EYE to compile two special film programmes for the annual MoMA Festival of Preservation. To Save and Project is an international film festival showcasing recently preserved and restored film works from November 4 through 25.

To Save and Project: the 13th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation. From November 4-25.

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Cross Media: Scientific Images

Departing from the “scientific image”, the three sessions of this semester will focus on the function of the image and its transformation as a resource in visualization, translation, control, manipulation and commodification. These functions, linked variably through history with knowledge production, expanded into fields as diverse as landscape painting, brain visualization, documentary film, and forensic television.

Starting in the first session with a focus on the scientific image’s multiple functions (data visualization, diagrammatization, on-screen  manipulation), the second and third sessions will look firstly at a genealogy of the conceptualization of the functions of the image across the fields mentioned above, while the final session will explore the crossmedial concretizations of these conceptualized functions including between film, television, photography, satellite imaging, etc.