UQ seminar looks at role of things in cinema

A University of Queensland seminar on Thursday, August 9 will examine the role of "things" in cinema.

The University's Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies is organising the seminar entitled Paths that wind through the Thicket of Things: a meditation on some cinematic things.

It will be at UQ's Social Sciences and Humanities Library Conference Room, ground floor, the Duhig Building at 2pm to 3.30pm.

The seminar will be chaired by Centre director Professor Graeme Turner and the presenter will be the professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, Professor Lesley Stern.

She said in various disciplines - anthropology, literary and postcolonial studies, sociology and history - "things" were again soliciting attention, inviting a reorientation of critical thought and, possibly, critical method.

"My paper focuses on things in the cinema," she said.

"Critics have always been fascinated by the cinema's peculiar capacity to render the world of things, but this fascination has been largely suppressed by the dominant theoretical mode of the last 30 years."

Professor Stern is the author of The Scorsese Connection (1995) and The Smoking Book (1999) and editor, with George Kouvaros, of Falling for You: Essays in Cinema and Performance (1999). She is working on a book about Things in the Cinema.

The lecture will include slides and videos.

Media: For further information, contact Ms Andrea Mitchell, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, telephone 07 3365 7182, email a.mitchell@mailbox.uq.edu.au, Mobile 0412 474 978, Web: http://arts.uq.edu.au/cccs/events/seminars.html#Stern or Professor Lesley Stern, work telephone 3365 7182 or C/- Jeffrey Minson telephone 3254 0936.

She will be available for media interview on Tuesday August 7 to Thursday, August 9. (Email: lesley_stern@hotmail.com