Sarah Ann Wells, “Strike-Time: The Strike as World Cinema Form”

Speaker Name: Sarah Ann Wells
Speaker’s Website: Faculty Profile
Department: English
University or Organization: University of Wisconsin Madison

The Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop (UGA’s ModSquad) invites you to a workshop presentation and roundtable discussion with Professor Sarah Ann Wells (University of Wisconsin-Madison). A pivotal tool of 20th- and 21st-century labor resistance, the strike has long been a vital topic for political cinema, even as it pushes the limits of filmic representation. How can filmmakers capture the unpredictable unfolding of collective resistance when they are often positioned outside the community of striking workers? How does one depict the withholding of labor, which might seem to institute a “dead time” in which “nothing happens”?

Examining case studies from Brazil, France, and beyond, this workshop presentation explores the cinematic construction of strike time as a radical break with the temporality of the working day that opens up new possible futures.

A shared reading from Prof. Wells’s research will be pre-circulated approximately two weeks in advance of the workshop via the modsquad listserv. Contact Prof. Rielle Navitski rnavitsk@uga for more info or to be added to the listserv.

The UGA Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop (UGA ModSquad) is a Faculty Research Cluster sponsored by The Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts and co-directed by Professors Nell Andrew (Art History), Rielle Navitski (LACSI & Film Studies), and Susan Rosenbaum (English).