Cinema Studies Student Conference

Abundance / Scarcity
Friday, February 27 - Sunday, March 1
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor

Join us for a weekend of conversation with the annual Cinema Studies Student Conference. Schedule to be announced.

Keynote Speaker: Debashree Mukherjee, Columbia University

This is an in-person event, open to the public. Prior registration is required. Non-NYU attendees will receive emailed instructions for building access and may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID upon arrival. NYU attendees must present their NYU ID.

February 27th - FRIDAY OPENING DAY

2:00 pm - 5:30 pm

6 pm - Special Film Screening

2:00 pm Opening Speech by Dr. Dana Polan (Chair)

1.1 Affect and Sensorial Regimes

Respondent: Dr. Dana Polan

Participants

AJ Castle – “Just Keep Making Videos”: Forms of Numbness in We’re All Going to The World’s Fair

Xiaoyu Song – Autistic Spectatorship, Queer Violence, and Poetic Nonfiction in Ode to Orchid

Sayaka Miyauchi - Fat Ghost Theory: Weightless Fatness in Ghostbusters (1984) and Casper (1995)

1.2 (4:00 pm) Methodologies that refuse to speak for

Respondent: Dr. Toby Lee

Participants:

Hamin Jeong – Against Representation: Ethics of Unknowability in Making a Map about Invisible Mountain by Jinah Jeong

Shinyoung Kim – Regarding the Pain of Ours: Scarcity, Expressive Devices, and Shared Suffering in Ethnographic Film

Kaycee Hailey – EXXXcessive Beauty: The Paradox of Respectable Pinups in Jet, Ebony, and Duke

6 pm - SECRET ANALOG FILM SCREENING

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February 28th - SATURDAY

9:30 am - 6 pm

7 pm - Keynote Speaker

2.1. (9:30 am) Form I: Time & the Aesthetics of Insufficiency

Respondent: Dr. Laura Harris

Participants

Victor Omojola – Photographic Apokatastasis and the Insufficient Image

Justine Cheng – The Abundance of the Instant

Bernardita Cubillos –Excess of Power and Cinematic Space: Extensive and Intensive Monstrosity in Frankenstein and Nosferatu

2.2. (11:00 am) Counter-Archives and the Limits of Intimacy (Hybrid)

Respondent: Dr. Zhen Zhang

Participants

Adhila Abdul Hameed (Zoom presentation)  – Counter-Archival Abundance: Kamal Aljafari, Speculative Historiography, and the Mnemonics of Scarcity (Cancelled)

Rong-Han Shiao – Non-Translation and Collage as Taiwan Theory: Rethinking Taiwanese Marginal Cinema through The Thrilling Sword (1981)

Kelsey Moore – “Don’t Fence Me In”: The Aesthetics of Waiting in the Camp Family Photo Album

Ludovica Amaro – Looking for the Voids: Italian Internal Colonialism and Demartinian documentaries

2.3. (2:00 pm) Queer and Gendered Visual Cultures

Respondent: Dr. Robert Stam

Participants

Zhiyu Benjamin Li – Queer (In)Visibility and Movement in early 21st-Century Iranian Cinema

Ariana Martinez – Archiving the Apocalypse: Remembering Love at the End of the World

Ribamar Jose De Oliveira Junior - Fetish and BDSM in Brazilian Queer Cinema

2.4.      (3:30 pm) Institutional Archives, Bureaucracy & Governance

Respondent: Dr. Dan Streible

Participants

Leah Simon – Audits, Reviews Boards, and Their Discontents: Content Moderation in U.S. Post-War Religious Education Film Distribution

Daniela Nigri –Fragmented Landscapes: Montage and Reimaginings across Transnational Archives

Janay Joseph - The Sugar Situation: Tracing Communications Networks during Labor Movements on Sugar Plantations in South Florida

Zohra Benzerga – Shifting Sands: Unsettled Epistemologies and Atomic Catastrophe in the Sahara Desert

Yashmita – Monumental India / Everyday India: A Two-Channel Interruption — Varanasi

KEYNOTE SPEAKER 7 PM: DR. DEBASHREE MUKHERJEE (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY)

“Plantation Cinema: Abundance/Scarcity Across Environment and Archive”

March 1st - SUNDAY

9:30am-12:30pm

3.1. (9:30 am) Form II:  Time & the Aesthetics of Insufficiency

Respondent: Dr. Shawn VanCour

Participants

Jiaze Li – Between the Acres

Elstir Bazzoli – Resistance to Revelation, Revisited: Enigmatic Apparitions and Aestheticized Forgetting in Krasznahorkaian Cinema

Cecilia Kryzda –Editing the Crisis: Film, Genetics, and Making Decisions

3.2. (11:00 am) Infrastructure, Platforms, and the Political Economy of Media

Respondent: Dr. Anna McCarthy

Participants

Hazem Fahmy – "It Was Like a Crusade:" Epic Cinema & the Politics of the "Off-Shore" Production

Zhiyuan Tan - Curating Under Precarity: Independent Film Festival Survival in Contemporary China

Ankush Bhuyan – Cinema Made Otherwise: Videocinema and Film Production in Assam, Northeast India

12:45 pm After-Party Near Campus (TBA)