“Means and Ends in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, or Kant You See?”

This paper offers an original reading of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Using the Kantian categorical imperative, also known as the principle of dignity, the plot is interpreted from the viewpoint of means and ends.  This theme of dignity and dignity violations is juxtaposed with discoveries about the choices of the names “Madeleine” and “Judy” and the two ends of the film.  The significance of the names is explored in relation to the novel on which the film was based and to a recently uncovered interest of Hitchcock.   Through a psychoanalyst’s attention to language and images, this essay explores means and ends from philosophical, psychological, and artistic perspectives.

Associate Professor of Spanish
Bryn Mawr College

“Restaging the 23-F: Transitional Memories in Spain”

The dominant historical account of the transformation of Spain from a dictatorship into a democracy is one of change and political success. The key political event that helped to forge this view was the failed coup d’état by Colonel Antonio Tejero on February 23, 1981. This attempt at a military uprising, when King Juan Carlos firmly stood by the constitutionally elected government, has been hailed as the culminating moment of the Transición and a clear demonstration of the arrival of democracy in the country. In this talk I explore how this narrative has been recently depicted in television and film questioning and reframing this story behind the triumph of democracy in Spain.

Adjunct Faculty
Film and Media Arts Department
Temple University

For more information about Benjamin Tiven–

Fall Break

Professor, Department of Art History
Tyler School of Art, Temple University

“The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt”

“Between Body and Environment: Carolee Schneemann’s Kinetic Theater”

Carolee Schneemann’s Kinetic Theater developed alongside happenings and Judson Dance Theater in the mid 1960s. This talk looks at how these performance works developed to engage the conditions and limits of becoming involved during the Vietnam era, as a participant in protest, but also as an embodied subject responsive to the demands media make on one’s attention and capacity to connect. 

Melissa Ragona is an Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Art History in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Her book, Readymade Sound: Andy Warhol’s Recording Aesthetics, is forthcoming from University of California Press, Berkeley and her essays and reviews have appeared in October, Frieze, Art Papers and in the edited collections Women’s Experimental Cinema (2007), Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (2008), Andy Warhol Live (2008), and Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image (2013).

Associate Professor of Art History
Department of History, Villanova University

“’Ussire da le cose de putti et fare le cose de homo’: Material Culture, Courtly Gifts, and Masculinity in Early Renaissance Italy”

For a Renaissance boy to become a lord – and “leave behind childish things and do manly things” as Francesco Sforza duke of Milan instructed his son Galeazzo – required that he perform and embody values which were, at once, martial and amorous, enthralling and violent, domineering and charismatic. This demanded not only models to follow, but objects to possess, wear, and command. Attentive to the agency and even volition of material culture, we will investigate the sorts of things – brocaded garments and hunting animals in particular – that lords wielded, gave, and displayed to fashion and demonstrate ideals of courtly masculinity in fifteenth-century Italy.

Lecturer, Department of History of Art
Bryn Mawr College

“On the Decorative Edge: Function and Form in Western Han Eave Tiles (206 BCE-9 CE)”

During the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE-9 CE), the skyline of its capital at Chang’an was composed of lines of eave tiles—circular ceramic fixtures that hang off the edges of roofs. This talk examines eave tiles with writing as their main decorative feature to argue that the ways in which these characters were designed, manufactured, and replicated reveals how Han designers blurred the grammars of ornament and writing in order to produce a unified decorative skin for Western Han imperial architecture.

Thanksgiving Holiday