A reception precedes this event at 5:30 p.m. in the Heimbold Visual Arts Center Atrium
Join us for a discussion of Gilberto Perez’s final book, The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film. James Harvey, film critic, and former Sarah Lawrence College faculty members Dan Kleinman and Malcolm Turvey will be in conversation, moderated by current Sarah Lawrence film history faculty member Michael Cramer, about Perez’s time as professor of Film History at Sarah Lawrence, his book, and his contributions to cinema scholarship.
"The book is a testament to a lifetime spent thinking about cinema, and demonstrates how the writer approached the most dominant ideas in film culture with deep curiosity and engagement, as well as a refreshing skepticism...Perez was always aiming for a grander philosophy of the art, one mindful of not only other arts (of which his knowledge seemed to be encyclopedic) but also resonances with the world beyond the screen."
-Andrew Chan, film critic, Film Comment magazine
Gilberto Perez (1943-2015) held the Noble Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College and was author of The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. He was film critic for The Yale Review and his essays on film have been published in The Nation, The New York Times, and the London Review of Books.
James Harvey is a film critic, essayist, playwright, and author of numerous books on film, including Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar and provided the foreward to The Eloquent Screen.
Dan Kleinman is a special lecturer in film at Columbia University. His most recent film, Tel Aviv on Fire, had its world premiere at the 2018 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Interfilm Award and Best Actor. He has also taught at NYU, Princeton, RITS in Brussels, La Femis in Paris, and Sarah Lawrence College.
Malcolm Turvey is director of flm and media studies and Sol Gittleman Professor of Film and Media Studies at Tufts University, and was formerly professor of film history at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition, The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s, and the forthcoming Play Time: Jacques Tati and Cinematic Modernism.
Michael Cramer is professor of film history at Sarah Lawrence College, and the author of Utopian Television: Rossellini, Watkins, and Godard Beyond Cinema.