Associate Professor Elena Gorfinkel will be giving the annual Dennis Turner Memorial Lecture at Wayne State University on Friday, April 22, 2016.  The lecture, “Walking Still: Vulnerable Endurance in Tsai Ming Liang’s Walker Series,” is part of an exciting project on slowness, stillness, and endurance in contemporary global cinema. Tsai’s “Walker” is an astonishing piece of slow filmmaking from one of the masters of contemporary global art cinema.

The Annual Turner Lecture and scholarship was introduced by the generous donation of the Turner family in memory of Dennis Turner, who was an Assistant Professor of Film in the Department of English from 1981 until his untimely death three years later. Dennis was born in NY in 1946 and received his BA from Columbia in 1973, and was a visiting fellow at the Sorbonne from 1977 to 1978. He received his MA from Indiana University in 1977 and his PhD in 1981. Dennis had a wide knowledge of film with special interests in French and German cinema, particularly in the work of Godard, Herzog, Fassbinder and Truffaut. He was the author of seven articles on film, and was also working on a book on New German cinema, and a screenplay at the time of his death. As a teacher Dennis inspired devotion in his students who have written of his intelligence and the warm rapport that he established with him. Each year the annual Dennis Turner Lecture is given by a prominent film scholar or practitioner, to honor the memory of this extraordinary scholar and teacher.