 |
     |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Lecture investigates the impact of film on East German history An expert on East German cinema will explore film as an intervening force in history, particularly as it impacted Germany over the past 60 years, in a lecture in Graham Hall at Smith College's Brown Fine Arts Center on Monday, April 21, 2008 at 7:30 p.m. Barton Byg, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor who founded the DEFA film library of East German cinema at UMass, will present "Lives of Others: Film, Memory and German Unification" as the 2008 Five College Jackie M. Pritzen Faculty Lecture, which is free and open to the public, with a reception immediately following. The lecture takes as its starting point the Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others, in which an East German Stasi surveillance officer spies on two theater artists and turns his superior knowledge of their activities and the State's motives into a modest intervention into events with unforeseen and dramatic consequences. Byg suggests that even academic inquiry into East German history and culture -- as he has undertaken for the past 30 years -- involves just such an unpredictable intervention into "the lives of others." Exploring other films that deal with knowledge, complicity and memory, the lecture proceeds to explore the contradictions of film's role in fixing a "master narrative" of the history of German division and unification. How do films involve us in historical processes, help us to remember, or in the same process allow us to forget? Barton Byg is a professor and graduate program director in German and Scandinavian Studies and a founding member of the faculty of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies at UMass. As a Five College 40th Anniversary Professor from 2005 to 2008, he has also been teaching at Hampshire and Smith Colleges. His publications focus on the cinema and cultural legacy of the former German Democratic Republic, the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, documentary film and Cold War culture. Dr. Byg studied as a Fulbright Fellow in East Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Established in 1995 as a tribute to a former member of the Five College staff who retired after 25 years of service, the Jackie M. Pritzen Faculty Lecture is an annual event that celebrates the spirit of cooperation by giving special recognition to a faculty member whose contributions to collegiality and to scholarship have been exceptional. Page orignally created 4/10/08 Home
| About
Us |
Academic
Programs |
Administrative
Programs ©2003
Five Colleges, Inc. | 97 Spring Street, Amherst MA 01002 | 413.256.8316 |
