Workshop on Raoul Walsh, by Tom Conley – Comparatistas

Date: April 10 – 11, 2014
Time: 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Venue: Anfiteatro IV, FLUL

Registration fee: €5

Synopsis:
It is said that the career of Raoul Walsh in cinema from 1908 to 1964 mirrors the destiny of Hollywood in the era of the studio system. It is said, too, that as a master of many genres–musical, gangster film, film noir, western, war movie, depression comedy–he qualifies, like Howard Hawks, to count among the great auteurs in the classical age of the seventh art. Yet if an auteur he is, what are some of his signature traits? And likewise, if these traits are salient, how do they relate to what would be the style, form and subtance of the cinemas from which they emerge? In this workshop we would like to gain insight onto the relation that defines auteur and genre within the context of an industrial cinema. As a bonus it is hoped that we see how Walsh’s work has remained a model and resource for generations of cineasts and critics alike, from Martin Scorcese to Bertrand Tavernier, and from Jean Louis Comolli to Jacques Rancière. Our workshop will focus on the halcyon days of the director’s affiliation with Warner Brothers (1939-49) while referring to the innovations he brought to cinema in the silent era.

Tom Conley:
Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures (Harvard University), Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media. Books include Film Hieroglyphs (1991, new edition 2006), The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (1992), The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (1996, new edition 2010), L’Inconscient graphique: Essai sur la lettre à la Renaissance (2000), Cartographic Cinema (2007), and An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (2010). He has published Su realismo (Valencia, 1988), a critical study of Las Hurdas (Luis Buñuel, 1932). His translations include Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1988 and 1992), and the same author’s Capture of Speech (1997); Marc Augé, In the Metro (2003) and Casablanca: Movies and Memory (2009); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993); Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map (2006). Among his 250 articles and book chapters are contributions to The History of Cartography 3: The European Renaissance, Cinema and Modernity, Michael Haneke, The Epic Film, Film Analysis, Opening André Bazin, Burning Darkness: A Half-Century of Spanish Cinema, Film, Theory and Philosophy, European Film Theory, etc. He has held visiting appointments at the University of California-Berkeley, UCLA, the Graduate Center of the City Univeristy of New York, L’Ecole de Chartes, L’Ecole en Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and other institutions. In 2003 he was a seminar leader at the School for Critical Theory (Cornell). Awards include fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a member of the Modern Language Association, The International Association for the History of Cartography, the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, and the United Handball Association.