This talk considers an enduring question in media theory and practice: how have adult imaginings of childhood perception shaped moving image aesthetics, thought, and culture? It does so through the intertwined histories of a series of institutions founded after World War II to study children’s relationship to the moving image and to make films for young audiences: Yugoslavia’s “Film and Child” commission, the East German National Center for Children’s Film and Television, France’s Institute of Filmology, and Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon). Via research by sociologist Edgar Morin and “film pedagogue” Miroslav Vrabec, and films by directors Dušan Vukotić and Abbas Kiarostami, the talk illuminates the links between social-scientific investigations of the “modern child” and formal techniques frequently associated with the avant-garde.

Alice Lovejoy is a media and cultural historian and comparatist whose research examines governmental and institutional media in transnational perspective. Her first book, Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indiana University Press, 2015), was named co-winner of the Modern Language Association’s 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures. With Mari Pajala, she co-edited Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations (Indiana University Press, 2022), and she has published widely on East European, particularly Czech and Slovak, film and literature. Lovejoy has worked as a film critic, curator, and filmmaker, including as an editor at Film Comment magazine. Her research has been supported by, among others, an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) postdoctoral fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, two Fulbright fellowships, and the University of Minnesota's McKnight-Land Grant Professorship and Talle Faculty Research Award.

This lecture will be presented in person in 555 Weiser Hall and on Zoom. Webinar registration required at http://myumi.ch/e6RAV

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