Past Events

Panel Discussants: Wang Hui, Martin Jay (History), Pheng Cheah (Rhetoric) and Colleen Lye (English)

Panel Discussants: Kaja Silverman (Rhetoric and Film Studies), Larry Rinder (Berkeley Art Museum) and Mark Rosenthal (Norton Museum of Art). Moderated by Anthony J. Cascardi (Townsend Center Director)

With an innovative use of charcoal drawing, prints, collages, stop-animation, film and theater, South African artist William Kentridge’s work continues to attract international recognition. Especially distinctive are his hand-drawn films, which are created using a technique he calls "stone-age filmmaking.”

In conjunction with Townsend’s 2008-2009 Avenali Lecture by South African artist William Kentridge, Depth of Field will feature two short documentaries on the artist and his work. Included in the screening will be Alex Gabassi’s 2007 biography of the artist, Certain Doubts of William Kentridge, and Kentridge’s interview with Dan Cameron, which focuses specifically on Kentridge’s animated short film, Automatic Writing.

Formerly the principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, Adam Phillips writes regularly for the New York Times, The Observer, and The London Review of Books.

Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. His extensive fieldwork has spanned topics of slavery; hunger; commodity fetishism; the impact of colonialism on folk healing; the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual; and the making, talking, and writing of terror.

Quickly becoming one of the hottest documentary directors working today, Alex Gibney turns his lens in Gonzo toward Hunter S. Thompson, one of the icons of the American margins. Utilizing nearly every tool available to the medium, Gibney weaves together found footage, re-enactment, and interviews to create a convincing and compelling portrait of the film's larger-than-life subject.

Anna Deavere Smith's work in the theater explores American character and national identity by combining the journalistic technique of interviewing subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance.

War Dance follows a group of Ugandan school children competing in an annual nationwide dance competition. As the group works its way toward the championship, the film weaves each child’s biography together with performance footage.

Worlds collide and tempers flare when Mr. Vig, an 82-year-old recluse who has never known love, and Sister Amvrosija, a headstrong nun, join forces to transform Mr. Vig's run-down castle into a Russian Orthodox Monastery.