Hi All,
The last candidate for the CMS position will be giving a talk tomorrow
at 2:15pm. Jen has already expressed an interest in affiliating with
AIMS so if you have some time tomorrow it would be awesome if you
could drop by. Her background is in film, but she also is also doing
work on YouTube (and other online, video documentaries) while
branching out to study video games. If you can't make her talk, you
can also meet her during a faculty drop-in session in Williams Hall
112 at 1:15-1:45pm. Hope to see some of you there!
Best,
Braxton
Jen Malkowski, Smith College
A Negative Pleasure: The Sublimity of Suicide in The Bridge
2:15-3:15pm
160 Williams Hall
Talk: Drawn from the book manuscript "Dying in Full Detail": Mortality
and Digital Documentary, this talk centers on the documentary display
of Golden Gate Bridge suicides in The Bridge (2006, Eric Steel).
Composed from 10,000 hours of digital surveillance footage at the
site, the film claims that suicide prevention is its goal in showing
people jumping to their deaths. Placing The Bridge in the context of
documentary history, aesthetic theory, wider media representations of
suicide, and suicide prevention activism, I challenge this claim and
argue that the film's ethical transgressions are inextricably linked
with its aesthetics--particularly with its evocation of the sublime.
Jennifer Malkowski received her Ph.D. in Film and Media from the
University of California, Berkeley in 2011 and is currently the
McPherson Post-doctoral Fellow in Film and New Media at Smith College.
There, she writes and teaches about new media (especially Internet
video and electronic games), gender and sexuality, and documentary.
Her dissertation, “‘Dying in Full Detail’: Mortality in Digital
Documentary,” focuses on documenting death, how the development of
video and digital technologies has altered that practice, and how the
temporalities of death and digital media are mutually informing. She
has published on ethnographic documentary in Film Quarterly and on
YouTube parodies of Brokeback Mountain’s theatrical trailer in the
anthology Queers in American Popular Culture.
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