Presentations
Marek Haltof (English) was interviewed for a National Public Radio program on Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's new film, Ida. The piece was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” weekend edition and broadcast on NPR affiliates throughout the country, including major metropolitan stations. Haltof teaches film and has written several books about cinema in his native Poland. He shed his expertise on Ida, which is the story of a young woman on the verge of taking her vows to be a nun when she learns her parents were murdered Jews. The film has received international acclaim and was released in the United States. The interview audio and transcript are available here.
April Lindala (Center for Native American Studies) presented a paper as part of a “Speaking the Law” panel at the Native American Indigenous Studies Association annual meeting in Austin, Texas. Her paper, “Membership Has Its Privileges? An examination of the Politically Gendered Body within the documentary, Club Native: How Thick is Your Blood,” discusses how filmmaker Tracey Deer (Kahnawake Mohawk) put the lens on her own community to question the band membership policies as it relates to Mohawk women of the community as a result of the Indian Act of 1876. Both the Indian Act and the current Kahnawake Band policies are distinctly counter to the traditional social structure of the Mohawk matrilineal society. Deer notes she grew up with two “firm but unspoken rules” that circulated throughout the community and were included in the film’s marketing materials: “These rules were very simple and they carried severe repercussions: 1) Do not marry a white person, 2) Do not have a child with a white person.” The repercussions were the loss of band membership and rights associated with that membership. The paper closely analyzes how Deer employs visual representations of the body (male and female) as rhetorical markers to help educate Mohawk and non-Mohawk alike. It also discusses the potential challenges in viewing the film, as the issues of identity are so complex, and questions whether Deer in fact succeeds at educating her viewers.