The Carolyn Benton Cockefair Chair continues to play an influential role in the cultural and intellectual life at UMKC and in the Kansas City community.
The Community is invited to join us for the latest lecture, featuring Richard Pena, a Professor of Professional Practice at the Columbia University School of The Arts and formerly program director of Film at Lincoln Center, organizers of the New York Film Festival and the New Directors/New Films Festival.
About the Lecture
If the 20th century was indeed, “the American Century,” as Henry Luce put it, American cinema was certainly a large part of that. Yet despite the enormous success of the industry at home and especially abroad, there was always a lingering suspicion about the movies. Much of the earliest writing on cinema was about measuring the movies’ impact on peoples’ ideas and lifestyles. What in fact were the lessons that movies were teaching their audiences—and how in fact did they communicate those lessons? Who was controlling the industry, and what was their responsibility to the country that produced it? As Alfred Hitchcock once famously quipped, American films were “so universal because they’re made by foreigners.” In this illustrated talk, the role of film (and the moving image in general) in shaping ideas about America both in the US and abroad will be explored, and what might its growing impact be in an increasingly mediatized world.
