“Screen Encounters: Strike Memory and the Moving Image”
4:45 PM on Tuesday March 19th, 2024
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Modernities.
Abstract
This talk examines the production of memories of labor resistance in contemporary South American and global documentary through an analysis of what I call the screen encounter, where documentary subjects are filmed witnessing and reflecting on archival images of their own strike activity. Navigating superimposed temporalities — the original footage, the filmed moment of the encounter with images, and the present moment in which the spectator views the film — this strategy queries the relationship between moving image production and the strike as collective praxis today. The screen encounter emerges as a fraught response to the radical viewing practices of militant cinemas of the 1960s-1970s, an apex of the strike film as world cinema form.
Biography
Sarah Ann Wells is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and author of the book Media Laboratories: Late Modernism Authorship in South America (2017) and co-editor of Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema (2015). Her research focuses primarily on South American and comparative modernisms and their relationship to both social movements and critical theory. A 2023-2024 SHUM Fellow at Cornell, she is currently writing a book entitled The Labor of Images: Strike Films and World Cinema Form.
