The Film Study Center and Critical Media Practice program are delighted to announce our 2021 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellows, who will attend the seminar in July.
Parker Hatley (CMP student and 2021-22 FSC-Harvard fellow)
Chrystel Oloukoï (CMP student)
Julia Sharpe (CMP student and 2021-22 FSC-Harvard fellow)
Daphne Young Xu (2021-22 FSC-Harvard fellow)
This list includes our fellows from 2021 and 2020 as last summer’s seminar was canceled.
OPACITY
Programmed by Janaína Oliveira
Uncertainty, fragmentation, opacity. We live in a time when the transparency of convictions and definitions and the desire for total understanding of differences that historically guided the Western world of images no longer holds. In cinema, the boundaries between center and margin have been loosened and dissolved. Today, the critical issue may no longer be to relocate the center but our perceptions of the margins. More than ever, the traditional geographical boundaries of cinemas have proven unsatisfactory, as cultural and historical connections are continually reworked. Moving images require both filmmakers and viewers to negotiate what is not understood: there is no such thing as a blind spot; there never was. The spots are opaque, and they compel us to shape new tools for describing what we see, feel, and think.
The 66th edition of the Flaherty Film Seminar will inspire us to look defiantly at the opaque places of cinema. As suggested by the writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the works presented will “clamor for the rights to opacity for everyone” in their irreducible singularities. Opacity is an unfolding force that creates openings and endless possibilities of cinematic existence, especially for subjects that have been excluded or are less valued on conventional screens. The Seminar will be an opportunity to experience the moving image in its power, beauty, and, most of all, ordinariness. As an invitation for displacement or provocation, it points to an open future, to cultural, formal, aesthetic freedoms, where questioning is prioritized over finding answers.