(apologies for cross posting)
Due to planned strike action in London next Wednesday 28th March, the following research seminar organised by the Centre for Research
in Film and Audiovisual Cultures (CRFAC) at the University of Roehampton, which had been scheduled to take place that day, has been postponed:
Speaker:
Professor Yosefa Loshitzky
Title:
"Popular Cinema as Popular Resistance: Avatar in the Palestinian (Imagi)nation"
This event will now take place as follows:
Date:
Wednesday 25th April 2012
Time:
4.15pm
Location: Queen's Building room QB.254 (Southlands College, University of Roehampton, London)
For travel details, see:
http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/contact-us/
All are welcome.
Please see the abstract and speaker biog below:
Abstract
Most of the readings of Avatar as a subversive film focus on the alleged critique provided by the film on predatory corporate capitalism, the destruction of the environment and the planet, the colonization and annihilation of indigenous people, and the
militarization of the globe through the security bubble generated by disaster capitalism. As such, the film has been read allegorically as anti-corporatist, anti-capitalist, anti-militarist and anti-colonialist-imperialist text which champions the environment
and the rights of indigenous people (and non-human animals) against the alliance of the military-industrial complex with science and technology. This presentation focuses on how the major interpretative frameworks of reading
Avatar against the grain of the Hollywood blockbuster resonate with the Palestinian condition and therefore made the film popular with the Palestinian non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation and colonization.
Speaker Biog
Yosefa Loshitzky is Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Arts and Digital Industries (ADI) at the University of East London. She is the author of
The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (1995), Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (2001),
Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema (2010), the editor of
Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List (1997) and a guest editor of a special issue of
Third Text on Fortress Europe: Migration, Culture, Representation (2006).
Dr Michael Witt
Reader in Cinema Studies
Co-Director, Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures
Department of Media, Culture and Language
University of Roehampton | London | SW15 5SL | United Kingdom
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