Interrupted Dialogues: Les vampires (episodes 8 & 10) with Jennifer Bean

Les vampires continues with episodes 8 & 10 of Louis Feuillade's famed crime serial with a talk by Jennifer Bean, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Washington. Les vampires established a vocabulary of thriller techniques later used by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. Professor Jennifer Bean will discuss silent cinema and the politics of space.

Jennifer M. Bean is Associate Chair of Comparative Literature and Director of the Cinema and Media Studies programs. She has published widely on silent-era cinema, including her recent collections Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (forthcoming, Indiana UP), Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s (Rutgers UP, 2011), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Duke UP, 2002) and a special issue of Camera Obscura on "Early Women Stars," (2001), both with Diane Negra. She is currently writing a book on the geopolitical implications of an "imagination of mass culture" shaped by multi-media interactivity in the early twentieth century. At the University of Washington, she teaches courses in film theory, genre, historiography, documentary, and analysis.

Presented in conjunction with Michelle Handelman's Irma Vep, The Last Breath, "Interrupted Dialogues" presents four talks paired with four screenings. Rather than serving as introductions to the films, the talks present topics that dialogue with the screenings in unpredictable ways.