Events Calendar

Alice Lovejoy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, will present this year's annual European Studies lecture:  A Military Avant Garde: Experimentation in the Czechoslovak Army Film Studio, on Monday, May 8th, 3:30-4:30 pm, Leighton 304.

Czechoslovakia's Army Film studio is remembered primarily as a producer of propaganda and training films. Yet by the late 1960s, the studio had transformed into Czechoslovakia’s most permissive space for film production, rivaling the country’s New Wave in its aesthetic innovations, while challenging political orthodoxies and military regulations. This talk explores the history of this “military avant garde,” tracing its links to historical and contemporary experimental media practices, and to the culture of its parent institution.

Alice Lovejoy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and the Moving Image Studies Program at the University of Minnesota, and a former editor at Film Comment magazine. Her book, Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indiana University Press, 2015) was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2016 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies (ASEEES), and longlisted for the 2016 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Screen, The Moving Image, and East European Politics, Societies, and Cultures, and she is currently working on two book projects: one examining exile and the war economy of cinema during World War II, the other exploring the intertwined histories of a series of children’s television and film institutions during the Cold War.