David E. James: Twenty-nine Pictures Like That: The Elvis Movie

The talk will overview Elvis Presley’s film career, including its punctuation by television, and examine the changes in its relation to the social meaning of rock'n'roll in the fifties and sixties. It will pay particular attention to the -- usually reviled-- movies he made in the 1960s after his return from the army, approaching them as a distinct genre.

Co-sponsored by the Bryn Mawr College Program in Film Studies and Center for Visual Culture and the Philadelphia Cinema and Media Studies seminar at Temple University, and hosted by the University of Pennsylvania

David E. James is on the faculty of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton University Press, 1989), Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popular Culture (London: Verso Books, 1996), and The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2006).

For more information:http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/events/2012/February/TalkDavidEJames