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All presentations on Tuesdays, 7.30 p.m. Kino Achteinhalb, Nauwieserstraße 19, Saarbrücken.
No entrance fee.
09 November 2021
The Terror (2018-2019)
Creators: David Kajganich, Max Borenstein and Alexander Woo
Referent: Marc-Oliver Frisch (UdS)
In May 1845, an expedition under the command of Captain Sir John Franklin, consisting of 134 men aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, set sail from England. Its objective: to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. By October 1846, the ships were trapped in the ice. By May 1848, Franklin himself was dead and Erebus and Terror had been abandoned by their crews. And by 1852, both vessels and the men that had sailed upon them had vanished. In the following years, the remains of several of the sailors were found, but it was not until 2014 and 2016 that the wrecks of the ships were located. What happened to the expedition remains largely unknown and has been a subject of speculation. In 2018, the critically acclaimed first season of the American television series The Terror, developed by screenwriter David Kajganich and based on a 2007 novel by Dan Simmons, offered a fictional account of the expedition’s fate. Starring Jared Harris, Tobias Menzies, Adam Nagaitis, and Nive Nielsen, The Terror combines classic horror and adventure tropes into the chilling, often literal dissection of the Franklin expedition as Western civilization in a nutshell – or two nutshells, as it were: a civilization that stops at nothing to indulge its imperialist ideology, seeks to defy the forces of nature even in the face of certain doom, and finally turns on itself when there is nothing else left to devour.
Marc-Oliver Frisch is a freelance critic and translator and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of North American Literature at Universität des Saarlandes.
16 November 2021
Love, Death & Robots (2019 –)
Creator: Tim Miller
Referentin: Isis Luxenburger (UdS)
The adult animated Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots (since 2019) unites stand-alone episodes of animated shorts. These independent episodes are produced by different animation studios from all over the world and have different directors. They vary strongly in runtime and style but all of them present either a utopian or a dystopian setting—can be characterized as science-fiction. Within the sci-fi genre, many links to other works can be found—reaching from recent Disney/Pixar productions like WALL•E (2008) over Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). While some episodes contain implicit or explicit social criticism, others are merely meant to entertain, to explore the medium of animated film or to stand for themselves as works of art. While the format of very short individual and fully independent episodes seems like an invitation to binge-watch Love, Death & Robots, many episodes—as animated shorts—offer food for thought, creating a contradiction. Hence, despite this invitation, the series also questions the commonplace practice of non-stop consumption of streamed series without taking time to digest and reflect the cinematic input.
Isis Luxenburger is a doctoral researcher in the International Research Training Group ”Diversity. Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces” at Saarland University, the University of Trier and the University of Montreal. Her research interests include the cultural studies of (industrial) films and, in general, investigating research subjects rooted in other disciplines—especially Film Studies, Game Studies, Border Studies and Translation Studies—from a Cultural Studies perspective. She is currently working on her interdisciplinary dissertation project on the mediation of industrial culture in films on the heavy industry in the Canadian province of Quebec and the Greater Region Saar-Lor-Lux.
30 November 2021
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018-2020)
Creator: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
Referentin: Svetlana Seibel (UdS)
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina premiered on Netflix in 2018, a much-anticipated release in which the audience invested great expectations. Created by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the show is based on an Archie Comics comic book series of the same title, also written by him. At the same time, however, the new series has entered a much-beloved franchise established by the 90s sitcom Sabrina, the Teenage Witch that set the tone for the Sabrina storyworld and influenced its reading for a generation of viewers, which had an impact on the show’s reception. Yet Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is not so much a remake of the 90s version as it is a reinterpretation of the entire storyworld as a dark coming-of-age story. Interviews with the show’s cast and creative team as well as the promotional teaser material released in advance of the show stipulated a series that has closer ties to the horror tradition of the 60s and 70s than to teenage comedy, which is evident not only in the show’s storylines, but also in its visuals and aesthetic. In addition, the show stands out by virtue of its eclectic engagement with the topic of witches and witchcraft, in terms of historical events such as the Salem witch panic of 1692 as well as contemporary occultism and lore based on the ideas of Wicca and their ties to discourses on gender, sexuality, and social justice. Although generally well-received, particularly in its first two seasons, the show also garnered considerable criticism, especially for its unexpected and problematic finale. These and other aspects of the show will be the subject of this talk.
Dr. Svetlana Seibel is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University and an adjunct lecturer at the American Studies Institute at the University of Konstanz. She studied North American Literary and Cultural Studies, British Literary and Cultural Studies, and Classical Archaeology at Saarland University. She completed her PhD on the topic of Indigenous popular culture as a member of the International Research Training Group ”Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces.”
07 December 2021
Pose (2018-2021)
Creators: Steven Canals, Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy
Referentin: Astrid M. Fellner (UdS)
Pose is a period drama that focuses on ballroom culture and queer/trans culture in New York City in the late 1980s. Reclaiming the heritage of LGBTQ people of color, it focuses on the competitive relationship between ball houses Abundance and Evangelista. Picking up the thread where Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) left off and offering a powerful queer/trans of color perspective to Judith Butler’s treatment of this documentary in her Bodies that Matter (1993), Pose, with its trans cast and crew, helps boost trans visibility and representation on TV.
Prof. Dr. Astrid M. Fellner is Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University. She is Vice-President of the German Association for Cultural Studies (KWG). Her main research areas are Latinx Studies, Border Studies, Gender/Queer Studies, and Popular Culture. |
