Mark Berrettini
Thursday, September 17, 7-9pm
Stan Douglas has reinvented significant works of cinema, from his looping six-minute, 16-mm work Subject to a Film: Marnie (1989) which follows closely from Hitchcock’s 1964 original, to Suspiria (2002/2003), a recombinant video mix of elements borrowed from Dario Argento’s cult classic of the same name. Tonight’s event begins with a 26 minute screening of Douglas’s film Klatsassin (2006). Mark Berrettini discusses the debate about the relationship between American Westerns and Japanese Samurai films that has circulated through film scholarship related to popular film genres for several decades. The talk will draw on this context and genre/narrative methods to consider how Stan Douglas's Klatsassin moves the Western-Samurai relationship into another arena as he radically reinterprets Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) set outside eleventh-century Kyoto within a Pacific Northwest(ern) period film.
Dr. Mark L. Berrettini is the Director of the School of Theater + Film and Professor of Film Studies at Portland State University. His book Hal Hartley (2011) is included in the Contemporary Film Directors series published by the University of Illinois Press and his essays on animal studies, the western, film noir and social difference have been published in Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Great Plains Quarterly and Scope. He recently published an essay on the HBO program Deadwood in The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). He holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Rochester and a B.A. cum laude in Film, Television & Theatre from the University of Notre Dame.
Reception will follow with libations, eastern and western
Stan Douglas has reinvented significant works of cinema, from his looping six-minute, 16-mm work Subject to a Film: Marnie (1989) which follows closely from Hitchcock’s 1964 original, to Suspiria (2002/2003), a recombinant video mix of elements borrowed from Dario Argento’s cult classic of the same name. Tonight’s event begins with a 26 minute screening of Douglas’s film Klatsassin (2006). Mark Berrettini discusses the debate about the relationship between American Westerns and Japanese Samurai films that has circulated through film scholarship related to popular film genres for several decades. The talk will draw on this context and genre/narrative methods to consider how Stan Douglas's Klatsassin moves the Western-Samurai relationship into another arena as he radically reinterprets Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) set outside eleventh-century Kyoto within a Pacific Northwest(ern) period film.
Dr. Mark L. Berrettini is the Director of the School of Theater + Film and Professor of Film Studies at Portland State University. His book Hal Hartley (2011) is included in the Contemporary Film Directors series published by the University of Illinois Press and his essays on animal studies, the western, film noir and social difference have been published in Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Great Plains Quarterly and Scope. He recently published an essay on the HBO program Deadwood in The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). He holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Rochester and a B.A. cum laude in Film, Television & Theatre from the University of Notre Dame.
Reception will follow with libations, eastern and western
Stan Douglas, "Klatsassin" (film still), 2006. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, New York/London and Victoria Miro, London