Alison Griffiths will join the Film and Media Studies program for a public talk. She is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at Baruch College, The City University of New York and a member of the doctoral Program in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. 

What is an expedition film and what kind of knowledge does it valorize, suppress, or gloss over? What habits of seeing and thought does it privilege, and how does the extant footage, as well as thousands of field photographs, multi-volume diaries, letters, popular articles, and the reception of the film, disassemble and reassemble the experience of travel? Using the 1926 American Museum of Natural History sponsored Morden-Clark Central Asiatic expedition as a case study, and drawing upon tropes of travel writing from the Middle Ages, this lecture explores how the expedition film is defined by an anxious optic, its footage the equivalent of visual small talk, a mode of seeing that while lacking in anthropological depth, is surprisingly perceptive.