Super stoked that our panel on independent film exhibition was accepted! 🎉 See you all in Chicago in a few months!

Publication day! Just got the new issue of Film History in the mail, which includes my article on high frame rate projection and the way contingent formats get held up as inviolable aesthetic norms. Certainly a good way to welcome the new school year!

Meanwhile, George has forcefully taken over my grading

Nuclear tests were obsessively filmed, and many used the latest film technologies. Partly for their increased "transparency," but really for their spectacle. Fox's Hell and High Water proudly touted its CinemaScope format by superimposing the logo over real CS footage of the '53 Upshot-Knothole test

One of the more provocative factoids I've come across is that the Trinity blast was so hot that it burned a hole through the camera negative. Not a distortion to the emulsified image—a physical hole. You can briefly see it as a small black spot in the extant footage.

A bizarro recent archive find: Movie theaters can be built to withstand nuclear bombs!

I've been finishing up a chapter draft and was thinking about this comment Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder made in a New Yorker interview a few years back. One of the best bits of writing advice I've gotten

Could it be?? Noooo haha. Unless.....?

Had a great time hosting the 2nd Midwest Graduate Film and Media Studies Symposium this weekend! Was so glad to have such a sharp, fun, energetic group of scholars at UWM

Life has been a whirlwind lately so I haven't had much time or motivation to bake, but I just took these guys out of the oven this morning

Recovering from a fun weekend at #scms25 and shifting focus to the next event: The 2025 Midwest Graduate Film and Media Studies Symposium is in just two weekends, with keynote talk from sound studies scholar Neil Verma!

Midwest friends, I'm co-organizing this regional film and media studies graduate symposium this April, feat. keynote presentation from Prof. Neil Verma! Abstracts due February 16th. Please recirculate and forward to anyone you know who might be interested!

First came across this passage from Svetlana Boym's 'The Future of Nostalgia' ~5 years ago and was struck then by its prescience. Worth revisiting at the start of a term 2

A bit at a loss for how Damon took first (glancing at my diary, mainly from supporting roles and cameos) but can't complain about repping Haynes

This afternoon's excitement: George and Oliver discovered that the countertop gets warm when the dishwasher is running, then immediately found a bug

Watched the 1954 CinemaScope film 'Green Fire' last night. Largely a tired production whose widescreen aesthetics reinforce the project's coloniality — though the climactic landslide set piece is still impressively spectacular

See also the DePaul Schmidt Academic Center

Curtin Hall, my darling