ICE-Vision: Venus in Furs (Jess Franco, 1969)
Thursday, April 12 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“Loosely adaptated from Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s famous novel, Jess Franco’s film stars James Darren as an American jazz musician wandering the beaches of Turkey. When a female aquaintance washes up dead on the beach, the musician suspects foul play by a sadistic playboy (Klaus Kinski) and his cohorts (including Dennis Price and Margaret Lee). Maria Rohm stars as the dead girl’s lookalike, who may be back for revenge from beyond the grave.”
-Facets

“Like a Marvel Team-up between Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Russ Meyer set loose in the Hammer Studios. Translation: It’s trippy and campy as hell”
-San Francisco Examiner

“The film’s Spanish director, Jesus Franco–an admirer of Orson Welles and the Marquis de Sade, surrealism, and jazz who frequently worked under such aliases as Clifford Brown, Dave Tough, and James P. Johnson–made so many films that an entire subculture was required simply to keep track of his activities . . . When questioned as to his ultimate intentions, Franco could well reply: ‘The cinema is not only my my livelihood but my life . . . [Movies] don’t interest me as a means but as an end”‘
-Geoffrey O’Brien, The Phantom Empire

Beg, Borrow and Steal: Poetics of the World Wide Web
Tuesday, April 17 at 7 PM
Cine, Downtown Athens

The symposium panelists are authors David Shields, Kenneth Goldsmith and Laura Mullen. As part of the English department’s Helen Spencer Lanier Lecture Series, the event is free and open to the public. Other sponsors include the Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) and the President’s Venture Fund.

Goldsmith is a poet and conceptual artist. He has served as a fellow of poetics and poetic practice at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and also is a host for WFMU radio in Hoboken, N.J. His work includes Fidget, a chronicle of every movement of his body over a 13-hour period on June 16, 1997, which serves as homage to the work of Irish writer James Joyce, specifically to Joyce’s Ulysses. According to Publishers Weekly, it is an “important book from Goldsmith, pointing the way to a rapprochement between poetry and conceptual and performance art-avant-gardists and art lovers of all stripes will want to experience its near-hypnotic pleasures.”

Shields is the author of 12 books, including Jeff, One Lonely Guy, which will be released in 2012 and was co-written with Jeff Ragsdale and Michael Logan; Reality Hunger: A Manifesto; The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, a New York Times bestseller; Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award.

Mullen’s work has been widely anthologized and is included in American Hybrid and I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Mullen’s recent prose appears in Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action and is published in Ploughshares and The Fairytale Review. Her most-recent work appears in Action Yes!, Cerise Press, Ghost Town, the Denver Quarterly, Viz Arts, OR and New American Writing. Mullen is the special interest delegate in creative writing for the Modern Language Association for 2012-2014 and is a contributing editor for online poetry site The Volta. Mullen is on the master of fine arts faculty at Louisiana State University.