As part of the Columbia University Libraries ADEI (Anti-racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) awarded program, "Affirming Queer Intimacies in Sinophone Cinema" will be held in Butler Library and the Lenfest Center for the Arts from Feb. 15-17, 2023. The program includes the screening of three critically acclaimed films of such leading independent filmmakers as Zi'en Cui, Popo Fan and Zero Chou, followed by panel discussions and roundtable dialogues with the directors.
The events are jointly sponsored by the Columbia University Libraries, the School of the Arts, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Global Center Beijing, the C.V. Starr East Asian Library/Dragon Summit Culture Endowment Fund, and the Lenfest Center for the Arts. The events are open to both members of Columbia and community members. For further information and to register click here.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2023
6:00 –7:30 PM Film Screening: Enter the Clowns/丑角登場 (80m., 2004) by Cui Zien
7:30 – 8:15 PM Q&A with the Director
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2023
6:00 –6:50 PM Film Screening: New Beijing New Marriage/新前門大街 (18min., 2009) & The Drum Tower/鼓楼西 (18 min., 2018) by Fan Popo
6:50 – 7:35 PM Q&A with the Director
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2023
4:00 – 5:40 PM film screening: Spider Lilies/刺青 (97min., 2007) by Zero Chou
5:50 – 6:35 PM Q&A with the Director
6:45 – 8:00 PM Roundtable Discussion
8:00 – 9:30 PM Catered Dinner
Ron Gregg is Concentration Head, Film & Media Studies MA and Senior Lecturer in Discipline, Film and Media Studies at Columbia's School of the arts. He writes and teaches about queer cinema (both Hollywood and experimental), classical and contemporary Hollywood, and the impact of globalization and digital technology on recent Hollywood film. His recent articles include "Fashion, Thrift Stores, and the Space of Pleasure in 1960s Queer Underground Film,” "Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends/Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975) and Gay Politics in the 1970s,” and “Sanitizing the Beatles for Revolution: Music, Film, and Fashion in 1960s A Hard Day’s Night.” He coedited a special issue on adaptation and appropriation for Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media (2020) and is coediting a book on “Queer Cinema” for Oxford University Press (forthcoming Fall 2021). Before moving to Columbia in 2017, he taught at Yale, where he co-chaired the conferences on “Postwar Queer Underground Cinema, 1950-1968” and “Secrets of the Orient: Costume, Movement, and Duration in the Cinematic Experience of the East” and co-organized the film series “Six Lesbian Filmmakers/Six Queer Films,” which brought six leading filmmakers of the last thirty years to campus. He has also curated film and video programming for the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, the South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and the University of Chicago Lesbian and Gay Studies Project.
Ying Qian is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia. Her forthcoming book, Becoming Reality: Documentary Cinema in Revolutionary China, studies the making of documentary cinema – broadly defined to include newsreels, educational, industrial and scientific films – in 20th century China, treating it as a prism to examine the role of media in producing and regulating the epistemological and emotional upheavals inherent to radical re-orderings of the society. Her new projects investigate theories and practices of creative labor in a variety of media production contexts, including film, television and digital media; and explore the ecological as a method to understand mediation as a fundamental operation underlying our (historically and politically specific) being in the world. At Columbia, she teaches on Chinese photography, cinema and other visual and media cultures.
