Monthly Archive for February, 2011

Miriam Bratu Hansen died on February 5, 2011. She had been Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in the Department of English and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, which she founded, shaped and guided for two decades.

She was born in Germany in 1949, the daughter of Jewish parents who had met in exile during the war and returned to Germany. Miriam received her PhD in 1975 from Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, Germany, studying with Jurgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno during a turbulent era. She worked in English and American Literature and wrote a dissertation on Ezra Pound, but soon was drawn to the realm of film, writing on Alexander Kluge, with whom she closely interacted.

Coming to the United States, she worked at the Whitney Humanity Center at Yale and taught at Rutgers University before coming to Chicago in 1990. Her research moved to the history of early American cinema and to the work of the Frankfurt school and its satellites on cinema. Both of these areas were evident in her book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Cinema published in 1991, a work which gave shape to the research that had been emerging in the eighties on early American cinema, seeing it through the lens of Negt and Kluge’s concept of the public sphere, and providing a magisterial analysis of D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance through the criticism of Walter Benjamin, and new work on gender. More…

Dairmuid Costello interviews Hannah Starkey for The Telegraph:

‘Hannah Starkey:Twenty Nine Pictures’ is showing at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, until 12th March 2011.

This exhibition is the first major solo show by the internationally renowned photographer in ten years. It will examine the development of a remarkable body of work, marking the transfer of her image-making from film to digital photography.

Starkey infuses scenes from everyday life with the stylisation typical of cinema. Her compositions often pivot on a pensive, pre-occupied figure within environments that toy with reflections and other visual puzzles.

The exhibition was curated by Diarmuid Costello of the Philosophy Department of the University of Warwick who, with Margaret Iversen, is Co-Director of the AHRC funded research project, ‘Aesthetics after Photography.’ The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Margaret Iverson and a conversation between Hannah Starkey and Diarmuid Costello, of which the following is an extract:

DC Could we start by discussing ideas about time in relation to your photographs? Although photographs depend on time and the exposure time of a photograph can be longer than the running time of a film, photography isn’t a temporal art. If you close your eyes in front of a photograph, you don’t – unlike film – miss part of the work. Even if one works in these ‘cinematic’ or ‘directorial’ ways, this is a defining constraint. The result will be a static image, even if it implies a narrative.

HS From my perspective this is the challenge, because you have to build the image so that it can allude to movement. I suppose this is naturally how we think about narrative. I have to make it so that the picture isn’t a set of contradictions. It has to be nothing and everything. It’s a fleeting moment, yet it’s a scene that is so still that it seems to continue. It’s trying to get the balance of those contradictions into the single image that evokes some of the references to film, or painting I suppose.

For more…