Elena Gorfinkel is giving a talk titled “Skin Flick Cinephilia: Sexploitation Cinema’s Scenes of Looking” on March 12 at the Offscreen Festival in Brussels, Belgium.

Elena’s talk surveys the 1960s US sexploitation cinema, exploring its location between low budget filmmaking and art cinema, pausing to analyze some of its aesthetic and reflexive fixations. It will offer a cinephile account of the aesthetic value of the sexploitation image as an archive of bodily gestures, textures, faces and places (including the scene of the grindhouse and film theater itself).

For more information, visit the conference website.

On March 10th, Elena Gorfinkel will deliver a keynote at a symposium, “Quality Trash” held by the Visual Studies Department at the University of California-Irvine. Her talk is titled “Coy Leericism: Sexploitation between Trash and Art Cinema.“

On April 29, Professor Miriam Petty (Northwestern University, Radio/Television/Film) will be coming to UWM for a public lecture. Professor Petty’s book, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood, about to be released by the University of California Press in March, studies African American actors including Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Hattie McDaniel to reveal the “problematic stardom” and the enduring, interdependent patterns of performance and spectatorship for performers and audiences of color. Professor Petty’s work in general focuses on American film history and Black popular culture.

Professor Petty’s lecture will be at 2 PM in Curtin 368; prior to that, there will be an informal gathering for graduate students (breakfast will be provided) at 10 AM in CRT 368 with Professor Petty. This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Film Studies; the Departments of English, Africology, and Urban Studies; Cultures and Communities; and a grant from UWM’s Year of the Humanities.