Born to Be Bad 2:
Trash Cinema Conference and Film Festival


May 9 -11, 2003

University of California, Berkeley

 

 

Speaker Biographies

Keynote speaker: Mikita Brottman
Maryland Institute College of Art

Prof. Brottman has written for many years in both journalistic and academic circles: she covers film festivals such as Cannes and the New York Film Festival every year for Indiewire magazine, and she has published articles in Film Quarterly, International Journal of Humor Research, Ethics and the Subject, Journal of Popular Culture, and Literature/Film Quarterly on topics such as pornography, laughter, David Cronenberg, and William Castle. These include "Risus Sardonicus: Neurotic and pathological laughter" in Humor (2002), "Everybody Loves Somebody": The AE "Rat Pack" Biographies in Biography (2000), "The End of the Road: David Cronenberg's Crash and the Fading of the West" in Literature Film Quarterly (2002), and "Ritual, Tension, and Relief: The Terror of The Tingler" in Film Quarterly (1997). Prof. Brottman’s books, which have dealt with snuff films, cannibalism, car crashes, and horror films, include Offensive Films: Toward an Anthropology of Cinema Vomitif (Greenwood, 1997), Meat is Murder! : An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture (Creation, 2001), Hollywood Hex (Creation, 1999), and her recent edited anthology, Car Crash Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Her keynote address, which will discuss Hollywood industry practices in relation to that of various “trash” and avant-garde film makers, is entitled, “Why I hate Gwenyth Paltrow: The Failure of Contemporary Cinema, from Hollywood to the Avant-Garde.”

Conference Director: Tamao Nakahara

Tamao Nakahara is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California at Berkeley. She is also co-director of "There's No Place Like Home": (Trans)nationalism, Diaspora, and Film; A Symposium with Hamid Naficy. Her research interests include Pee-Wee Herman, product placement, Italian Diva films, and she is completing her dissertation, "Busty Babes and Boiled Babies: Exploitation in Post-War Italian Cinema." Her forthcoming publications include "Barred Nuns: Italian Nunsploitation Films" in AlterImages: Journal of the Cult and Popular Images. Eds. X. Mendik and E. Mathis (Wallflower Press / Columbia UP), "Horrific Habits: Italian Nun Horror" in Exploiting Fear: The Art and Appeal of Horror on Film. Ed. Simon Wilkinson (Manchester UP), and "Habits and Habitats: Costume and Staging in Italian Nunsploitation" in Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema. Eds. Ian Conrich and Julian Petley (Verso). She is also currently editing Born to Be Bad: Production, Exhibition, and Reception of Trash Cinema with J. Karlsen.

 

Other Conference Speakers and Guests include:

Savas Arslan Arslan is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art Department at Ohio State University in Columbus. His publications and presentations in English and in Turkish include "A Response to Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy article on Turkish Cinema in Cinema and Nation," Turkish Cinema Conference, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey (2001), "Superman Returns: Ludus and Film," Turkish Cinema Conference, Bilgi University, Istanbul (2000), "Changing Identities and Shifting Religious Codes in Metin Erksan's Seytan," Annual Conference of Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association, San Diego, (1999), and "The Discourse of Art Cinema in Criticizing Popular Turkish Films" Kare (1997).

Jacques Boyreau Boyreau is author of the recent book on trash movie posters, Trash: The Graphic Genius of Xploitation Movie Posters (Chronicle Books, 2002). He is also Director of the Werepad, San Francisco, the site of performances, films, and other events. (http://www.werepad.com/)

Richard Burt (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Prof. Burt teaches in the Department of English at Amherst. He is the author of Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (1998; rev. ed. 1999) and Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship (1993). He is the editor, most recently, of Shakespeare After Mass Media (2002) and Shakespeare, the Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD (2003). Burt is currently writing two books, Ever Afterlives: Renaissance Remakes on Film and Video and Rechanneling Shakespeare Across Media: Post-Diasporic Citations and Spin-offs from Bollywood to Hollywood. More on Prof. Burt at http://www.umass.edu/english/eng/facProfiles/Burt.html

Shuli Chen (University of Washington, Seattle) Chen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature and is working on a dissertation on Chinese,Taiwanese, and Hong Kong cinemas. After Born Bad 2, Chen will be presenting on the Taiwanese film Yi Yi by director Edward Yang at the "Screen" Studies Conference at Glasgow in July 2003.

Jennifer Fay (Michigan State University) Prof. Fay is Assistant Professor and Co-director of Film Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. She received her degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has written on American Film Policy in Occupied Germany, 1945-1949. Her works includes "Welt im Film: The Newsreel and Everyday Life in Occupied Berlin," under review at Wideangle, "Constructing America for German Reconstruction: American Films and the Reeducation of Occupied Germany," Southern Quarterly, (Summer 2001), "Religion and the Media" in The Velvet Light Trap (Fall 2000), and "Casualties of War: The Decline of Foreign-Language Broadcasting during WWII," Journal of Radio Studies (Winter 1999).

Gius Gargiulo (University of Paris X Nanterre) Prof. Gargiulo is Professor of Italian at the University of Paris X Nanterre. He holds academic degrees from Italy and France, and he completed his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne et Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Ecole Superieure d’Hautes Etudes and Paris X- Nanterre University. He has taught a variety of courses and seminars on such diverse topics as "History of Italian Theater," "Images of Erotism in French and in Italian Cinema and Literature," "Gestalt of Italian Culture," "Italian Cinema," "History of the Italian Language," "Semiotic studies and philosophy of language," and "Italian Advertising." Gargiulo's publications include Cultura di Massa e cultura poplare nel fotoromanzo rosa (1976) and "Il Vampiro seduttore" in Vampiri e Don Giovanni. Ed. A. Neiger (1998). More on Prof. Gargiulo at http://penelope.u-paris10.fr/perso/gargiulo/

Donald Hedrick (Kansas State University) Prof. Hedrick is Professor of English at Kansas State University and is the Founding Director of the Program in Cultural Studies. His diverse research interests include movie trailers and movie advertising, theorizing entertainment value in the early modern period, Shakespeare and gender, masculinity studies, and horror and violence in film and literature, Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama, critical and cultural theory, and speech act theory and language philosophy. His publications include Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, ed. with Bryan Reynolds (2000) and "Framing O.J.: Trash Tragedy, Tabloid Canonicity, and Analog vs. Digital Racism," in Mediations (1996). Prof. Hedrick has also written reviews for movie trailers for many years.

Kevin J. Heffernan (Southern Methodist University) Winner of the Sundance Film Festival 1998 Filmmakers' Trophy for Documentary for the feature-length documentary on John Waters and Divine, Divine Trash, Prof. Heffernan also teaches and writes on film. He has presented much of his work on cult films including "Zontar, of Course! Cult Cinema and Canonicity," "Film Genre and Hong Kong 1997: The Gangster Cinema of John Woo," and "'I'm Gonna Ride You til You Can't Stand Up!'  Homophobia and Hegemonic Masculinity in The Sands of Iwo Jima."

Ian Hunter (De Montfort University) Prof. I.Q. Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, in England. He is co-editor of Routledge's British Popular Cinema series, for which he edited British Science Fiction Cinema (1999) and is currently co-editing British Spy Cinema. Among his other publications are six co-edited books in Pluto's Film/Fiction series, including Pulping Fictions (Pluto, 1996), Trash Aesthetics (1997), and Retrovisions (2001). His recent work has focused on Paul Verhoeven, British exploitation cinema, and Hammer's SF and fantasy films, on which he is writing a book for Manchester UP. Other recent works include "Beaver Las Vegas!: A fan-boy's defence of Showgirls" in Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and Its Critics. Eds. X. Mendik and G. Harper (FAB Press, 2000), "Banality as saviour: Bill & Ted and The Matrix," Film International (http://www.filmint.nu/pdf/english/121/banalityassaviour.pdf), "Even baser instincts: notes on Hollow Man," Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 3 (Spring 2003) (http://www.cult-media.com/issue3/CMRhunter.htm). More on Prof. Hunter at The Cult Film Archive (http://www.northampton.ac.uk/ass/cul/communicationsandmedia/cultfilmarchive).

Candace Joy Lewis and Doron Galili (University of California, Los Angeles) Lewis and Galili are currently completing their degrees in the Moving Image Archive Studies Program in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies/ Department of Film and Television at UCLA.

Ernest Mathijs (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK) Prof. Mathijs is lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and is currently writing a book on the international reception of David Cronenberg, and editing Alternative European Cinema (Wallflower Press). Recent publications include "The 'wonderfully scary monster' and the international reception of horror: Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001)", in Kinoeye (http://www.kinoeye.org/02/19/mathijs19.html), "Reel to Real: Film History in Pynchon's Vineland" in Literature/ Film Quarterly, and forthcoming "The Making of a Cult Reputation: Frames of Reference in Shivers Criticism" in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste. Eds. M. Jancovich et al. (Manchester UP), "Man bites Dog and the Critical Reception of Belgian Horror (in) Cinema" in Horror International. Eds. S.J. Schneider & T. Williams (Wayne State UP), "It may be not such a bad disease after all: AIDS References in the Critical Reception of Cronenberg" in Cinema Journal, "Born/Raised to Be Bad: Daughters of Darkness and the Reception of Trash Cinema" in Born to be Bad: Production, Exhibition, and Reception of Trash Cinema. Eds. T. Nakahara and J. Karlsen. More on Mathijs at http://www.aber.ac.uk/tfts/eeb.shtml

Adilifu Nama(California State University, Northridge) Prof. Nama is Assistant Professor in the Pan African Studies Department, College of Social and Behavorial Sciences, at Cal State Northridge. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Southern California and his area of expertise is Race and Media Studies. His publications and presentations include "Codes of Race", Los Angeles Times (2002), "The Othering of Post-Industrial Decline: Representations of Detroit as the Nexus of Social Trauma in Hollywood Films" presented at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting (2000), and "2001 A Space Oddity: Representation of the Black Body in Science Fiction Cinema," presented at the Annual Conference on "Figuring the Body," (2000). He also wrote, directed and produced a documentary short for the television newsmagazine show Impact (1999).

Annalee Newitz (Knight Science Fellow, MIT) A Berkeley alum, Newitz is currently completing a fellowship at MIT to research the history of sex machines and the invention of cyber-warfare. She writes about technology, pop culture and sex, although not necessarily in that order. Her work appears regularly in Wired, Salon, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and she writes a nationally-syndicated column about technology and science called Techsploitation. She is the editor of White Trash: Race and Class in America (Routledge Press) and The Bad Subjects Anthology (NYU Press). Currently, Newitz is Knight Science Fellow at MIT and is at work on two books on monster movies, capitalism, sex and machines. More on Newitz at http://www.techsploitation.com

Amy Abugo Ongiri (University of California at Riverside) Prof. Ongiri's current research project is a study of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 70s including articulations of the Black Power ideology found in Black Arts poetry, soul music, and Blaxploitation film. She has done extensive work on blaxploitation films including "'You better watch this good shit!': Black Spectatorship, Black Masculinity and Blaxploitation Films" and "He Won't Bleed Me!: The Project of Masculinity in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasss Song!"

Anna Powell (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) Prof. Powell is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her published and forthcoming books include The Representation of Women in Powell and Pressburger's Films (PAVIC Press, 1993), Psychoanalysis and Sovereigty in Popular Vampire Fictions (Mellen Press, Jan 2002), Deleuze and the Horror Film (Edinburgh UP), and Trance Formations: Altered States on Film (Flicks Books). Her articles include "Blood on the Borders: Near Dark and Blue Steel", Screen (1994), "Women's Vampire Fictions" in Metropolitan (1998), "Blood is the Drug: Narcophile Vampires in Recent Fiction" in The Body's Perilous Pleasures. Ed. Michele Aaron (Edinburgh UP, 1999), "A Torch For Lucifer: Kenneth Anger and the Occult", in Moonchild: The Films of Kenneth Anger. Ed. James Williamson (Creation, 2001), "Kicking the Map Away: Psychoanalysis, Deleuze and The Blair Witch Project", Spectator (2002), and "Something Came Leaking Out: John Carpenter and the Occult", in The Technique of Terror: The Films of John Carpenter. Ed. Ian Conrich (Flicks Books, 2002).

Steven Jay Schneider (Harvard and New York University) Schneider is a Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy at Harvard University, and in Cinema Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He is the author of Designing Fear: An Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror (Routledge); editor of The Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud's Worst Nightmares (Cambridge UP), New Hollywood Violence (Manchester UP), and Fear without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe (FAB Press); and co-editor of Understanding Film Genres (McGraw-Hill), Traditions in World Cinema (Edinburgh UP), and Horror International (Wayne State UP), all forthcoming 2003-05. Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (co-edited with Xavier Mendik) was published by Wallflower Press in 2002. More on Schneider at http://members.bellatlantic.net/~sschneid/

David Sterritt (Long Island University and Columbia University) Prof. Sterritt is Professor of Theater and Film at Long Island University and Co-Chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation. His books include Screening the Beats: Essays on Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility (Southern Illinois UP), Terry Gilliam: Interviews, ed. with Lucille Rhodes (UP of Mississippi), Robert Altman: Interviews, ed., (UP of Mississippi), The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible (Cambridge UP, 1999), and The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge UP, 1993). His articles include "Fargo in Context: The Middle of Nowhere?" in The Coen Brothers' Fargo, ed. William Luhr (Cambridge UP), "Representing Atrocity: From the Holocaust to September 11," in Film After 9/11, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon (Southern Illinois UP), "Hitchcock, Bakhtin, and the Carnivalization of Cinema," in Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual, eds. Sidney Gottlieb and Christopher Brookhouse (Wayne State UP, 2002), and "Thanatos ex Machina: Godard Caresses the Dead," in Car Crash Culture, ed. Mikita Brottman (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2001).

Shirley Lynn Tatum (True crime television writer, Court TV and Discovery Channel) Shirley Lynn Tatum is Senior Scriptwriter for a California television production company. Her most recent projects include the Court TV series I, Detective, Discovery Health's series Serendipity: Great Medical Mistakes and Accidental Discoveries, and the Discovery Civilization series Ties That Bind. She has also written/contributed to many Discovery Channel specials, including "Ghost Detectives," "Dungeons of Alcatraz," and "Extreme Funerals." Prior to writing for television, she was a regular writer for the popular true crime website, The Crime Library (www.crimelibrary.com). She received a B.A. in Art History from U.C. Santa Barbara, and a Masters in English from Sonoma State University, and has presented her work at the Sorbonne University.

Manuel Yang (University of Toledo) Yang is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toledo, Ohio. Having grown up amidst the cacophonous reruns of Ultraman TV series and miscellaneous cascades of other post-1960s Japanese pop culture, Manuel Yang has found himself over the years mutating slowly into an academically lumpen-proletarian reader of these symptomatic moments of the postwar Japanese political and cultural unconscious. His publications include "An Historical Sketch of B-Movies from 1945 to 1999" for the Toledo Film Society (1999), "Contemporary Japanese Pornography and the Image of Dynamic Labor-Power in Post-Keynesian Capitalism: Toward a Marxist Hermaneutics" in Eiga riron [Film Theory] (in Japanese, 2000), "King Kong and Godzilla: Cultural Representation of Monstrous Proletariat in Contemporary Capitalism" in Inpakushon [Impaction] (in Japanese, 2001), and "Japanese Monster Movies, Ultraman, and the Structure of Cultural Relations and Forces of Production in Postwar Nuclear Imagination" in Hihan kukan [Critical Space] (in Japanese, 2002).


back to main page

For problems, please contact the webmaster: TAMAO@socrates.berkeley.edu