Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia Jane and Harry Willson Center for Humanities and Arts will hold a cinema roundtable—and film screening—on “Science / Fiction / Time Games: Watching Chris Marker’s ‘La Jetee'” on Jan. 25 at 3:30 p.m. in Room 150 of the Zell B. Miller Learning Center.
This is the first Willson Center Cinema Roundtable to include a screening of the film being discussed, a 27-minute narrative featurette from 1962. Marker, a French filmmaker also known for experimental essay films such as “A Grin Without a Cat” (1977) and “Sans Soleil” (1983), was a contemporary of Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda and other filmmakers of the Left Bank cinema movement whose work was tangential to the French New Wave. He died in 2012 at the age of 91.
The roundtable “offers a rare opportunity for students and faculty to discuss this important avant-garde film, which was later reworked as Terry Gilliam’s ‘12 Monkeys’ in 1995,” said roundtable moderator Richard Neupert, who is the Wheatley Professor of the Arts and a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of Theatre and Film Studies in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
“‘La Jetee,’ named for an airport jetty or gate area where a fateful event takes place, is one of the most famous experiments in science fiction cinema,” he said. “The film, composed of still black and white images, explores time travel and mental subjectivity in a poetic, cinematic format.”
The roundtable panel will include UGA faculty members Andrew Zawacki, associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program, and Jed Rasula, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English, and Clayton State University’s Virginia Bonner, associate professor of film and media studies and a Marker specialist, according to Neupert.
The Willson Center Cinema Roundtable meets to discuss topics of film history, criticism and theory. Neupert, the coordinator of UGA film studies, organizes and moderates the roundtables.
Willson Center for Humanities and Arts
The Jane and Harry Willson Center for Humanities and Arts is a unit of the Office of the Vice President for Research at UGA. In the service of its mission to promote research and creativity in the humanities and arts, the Willson Center sponsors and participates in numerous public events on and off the UGA campus throughout the academic year. It supports faculty through research grants, lectures, symposia, publications, visiting scholars, visiting artists, collaborative instruction, public conferences, exhibitions and performances. For more information, see http://willson.uga.edu/.
