What Now?

On February 23 and 24, NYU will be hosting its annual Cinema Studies Student Conference. As part of the first year PhD cohort, I’ve had the pleasure of helping put this together, alongside fellow first-year students in the PhD, MIAP, MA, and undergraduate programs at the department.

The theme of the conference this year is What now?, it encompasses works of both theory and practice, and it is free and open to the public. Professor Anna McCarthy, chair of the department, will do the opening remarks, and Thomas Elsaesser – professor emeritus at the University of Amsterdam, and visiting professor at Columbia University – will be our keynote speaker. Make sure to check out the full program and join us if you’re around.

I’ll be presenting a paper on the 5 pm panel, on Friday, titled “What is now,” riffing on perceptions of time and space in two of the best new films I’ve seen this year: Ken Jacobs’ Shelley Duvall is Olive Oyl (2017), and Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames (2017). To put these thoughts into context, I will also be republishing here one or two previously published pieces I’ve written on Kiarostami, in the next few days.