Inspired by Jim Jarmusch's 1991 film Night on Earth, the Night on Earth seminar is an exploration of the night, people who inhabit the night, their encounters, and the spaces they produce in major metropolitan areas, as mediated through film.
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La Haine: Your Right, Our City
Within a twenty-hour period, the characters of La Haine battle a private and a collective disruption. As day becomes night, three men’s desire to resist police…
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Urban Alienation and the Night in Crash (1996)
Introduction David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash follows a cast of characters who commune over their shared sexual fantasies surrounding car crashes. Based on J…
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Getting Out, Getting Lost A Formal Analysis of Lost in Translation (2003)
Introduction The notion of ‘getting lost’ is the occurrence of an individual losing their spatial reference, which consists of two elements: the feeling of…
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Cityscape of Trash : The Nocturnal Tokyo of Tokyo Godfathers (2003) by Satoshi Kon
Introduction Tokyo Godfathers is a film about waste, human resolution, and the night. Directed by Satoshi Kon and released in 2004, it is a Christmas film and…
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Staging Utopia: Queer Performance in Tangerine
Toyland, toyland / Little girl and boy land While you dwell within it / You are ever happy there Childhood's joy land / Mystic merry toyland Once you pass its…
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Surviving Los Angeles by Exercising Privacy
In queer film and television, the urban context often serves as a backdrop for portraying LGBTQ+ culture. In Sean Baker’s 2015 film “Tangerine”, set in the…