Secrets of the Orient:
Duration, Movement and Costume in the Cinematic Experience of the East
11 - 12 November 2011, Yale University
DAY 1 – Friday 11th November
4.00pm Welcome
Becky Conekin (European Studies Council, Yale University)
4:15pm Selling Orientalism in the Global Film Market: House of Flying Daggers, Costume and Blockbuster Aesthetics
Ron Gregg (Film Studies, Yale University)
5:00pm Entertainment Goes Oriental-mental: costuming late-19th and early-20th century Stage Magic, Theatre and Early Cinema
Marketa Uhlirova (Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London)
8:00pm Screening of Michelangelo Antonioni shorts followed by Latcho Drom (dir Tony Gatlif, 1993)
Special thanks to KG Productions and the Embassy of France
DAY 2 – Saturday 12th November
9.30am The Art of Undressing: Automation and Exposure at the Margins of Cinema
Amy Herzog (Media Studies, Queens College, CUNY)
10.15am John Maybury and the London Underground
Alistair O’Neil (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design)
11.15am The Fabric of Film in Michelangelo Antonioni
Eugenia Paulicelli (Italian, Comparative Literature, Women’s Studies, Queens College, CUNY)
1.30pm What Happened to Khadi?: Fashion and Female Stardom in Contemporary Indian Film and Politics
Anupama Kapse (Media Studies, Queens College, CUNY)
2.15pm New Mimesis: Wearing the Epistemological Shift
Jane Gaines (Film, Columbia University)
3.15pm Screening of The Great Invisible (dir Leslie Thornton, current project)
4.15pm Keynote speaker, author and New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als
With an introduction by Louise Bernard (Beinecke Library, Yale University)
5.15pm Responses from John MacKay (Chair, Film Studies, Yale) and Moira Fradinger (Comparative Literature, Yale)
7.30pm Screening of Lupe (Jose Rodriduez-Soltero, 1967)
Introduced by Ron Gregg in conversation with star of Lupe, Mario Montez and actor Agosto Machado.
Borrowing the suggestive title ‘Secrets of the Orient’ from the 1928 German-French studio spectacular, the symposium will focus on the use of fashion, costume and mise en scène in the construction of an Orientalist imaginary in Western as well as Eastern cinema.
The symposium will bring together critics, historians, theoreticians and practitioners to discuss the crucial role that costume, sets and props have played in defining and illustrating Western visions of the East while at the same time pointing to films that unsettle, critique or reposition these fantastical visions. The symposium will consider how various aspects of “dressing” film (through movement, duration, texture etc.) or un/dressing in film construct cultural identity and “otherness” as well as a kind of “cosmopolitan body” that suggests a global vernacular erasing cultural difference.
Sponsors: Cultural Services of the Embassy of France; Calhoun College, Film Study Center, ITS Academic Technologies; Film Studies Program; KG Productions; the Museum of the Moving Image; and the Whitney Humanities Center. Of spe-cial note, this symposium was generously supported by the British Council, the Edward J. & Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund at Yale, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.