Dawn or Doom
Lance Duerfahrd

Lance Duerfahrd

"Icons and Emoticons: Screen Wars"

STEW 214 AB: 4:30 - 5:30 PM

The cinema is being upstaged by a device paradoxically meant (in part) to transmit it: the iPhone. How do films change, how is their impact altered, when viewed on these devices? What aspects of the movie screen (and subsequently our movie experience) are lost or threatened when they are displaced by this new technological format? This is not an abstract war: it is going on (in the dark) every time we attend a screening. My paper will explore what is at stake in our decision to illuminate our faces with a light other than the one shining from the movie screen and investigate what part of us (our brains, our souls) that is implicated in using the phone (our "contacts" we text during projections) rather than undergoing the film screen. I will also address how contemporary movies utilize the iPhones, how they advertise and promote them.


Bio: Lance Duerfahrd is the director of the Film and Video Studies Program and Associate Professor of English at Purdue. He is the author of The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett's Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis, about the unconventional settings under which Beckett's work has been staged: during wars (Sarajevo), in prisons (San Quentin), and after floods (lower ninth ward, New Orleans). As part of his research for this book, Duerfahrd staged Waiting for Godot in Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests. Professor Duerfahrd has been a featured guest on NPR, BBC radio, the Chicago Tribune and New York Times. He is currently working on a book about how to learn from inept movies, A Semester of Bad Film.