Museum-Sponsored Expedition Film From the Silent Era

Focusing on the 1920s expedition filmmaking of William J. Morden, field associate in mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History, this talk considers the expedition film, a relatively unexplored cinematic mode defined by restlessness and networks of transportation, in the light of an eclectic mix of interdisciplinary theory.

Alison Griffiths is a Professor at Baruch College, CUNY and a member of the doctoral faculty in Theater at the CUNY Graduate Center where she teaches film history, visual and media studies, and corporate representation in media. Griffiths is an interdisciplinary media scholar whose research spans the fields of Cinema Studies, Cultural Theory, Museum Studies, Anthropology, Penology, Medieval Visual Studies, and New Media. Her second book, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View(Columbia, 2008), constructs a genealogy of immersive ways of seeing, tracing them to such spaces as medieval cathedrals, panoramas, planetariums, and the Imax movie theater. Her third book, Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prisons in Early Twentieth Century America is forthcoming.