Skadi Loist

January 28 @ 4 pm

Sponsored by the Center for European Studies and the Department of Communication Arts. Introduced and organized by Kelley Conway, Chair of the Department of Communication Arts.

Major festivals like Cannes, Berlin and TIFF have not only been significant as cultural taste- makers but have long become part of the film industry mechanisms, be it as market hubs, project incubators, producers or distributors. Thus far, festival research has largely been limited to focus on major market festivals and employed qualitative case studies. When considering the festival network as distribution window in its own right, the focus shifts to the long tail of festival runs, to the small audience festivals and a global scale. In this talk, Dr. Loist proposes to adopt the concept of «circulation power» for film festivals in an attempt to untangle the hierarchies on the circuit and to discuss the positioning of the film festival circuit as a significant, yet understudied, exhibition window alongside classical theatrical release and streaming services. These considerations are supported by initial results from the 3-year BMBF-funded project “Film Circulation in the International Film Festival Network and the Impact on Global Film Culture”, which is the first empirical study concerned with complex temporal and spatial patterns of film movement within festival circuits (festival runs) and to employ Digital Humanities (DH) methods on the subject.

Dr. Skadi Loist is Assistant Professor for Production Cultures in Audiovisual Media Industries at the Film University Babelsberg ‘Konrad Wolf’ in Potsdam, Germany, and PI of the research project “Film Circulation on the International Film Festival Network and the Impact on Global Film Culture” (BMBF 2017–2021) as well as Lead-PI of the international research project “GEP Analysis: Assessing, Understanding, and Modeling the Impact of Gender Equity Policies (GEP) in the Film Industry” (DFG/ESRC/SSHRC 2021–2024). Skadi co-founded the Film Festival Research Network (FFRN) in 2008, serves as Steering Committee member of NECS and Editorial Board member of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies. Skadi has published widely on film festivals, queer film culture, and equity, diversity and inclusion in media industries, and (co-)edited Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice (with Marijke de Valck and Brendan Kredell, 2016); “Teaching European Cinema: The European University Film Award (EUFA) Project” a dossier in Alphaville 14/2017; “Queer/ing Film Festivals” a special issue of Studies in European Cinema (15:1, 2018, with Leanne Dawson), and “Gendered Media Production” a special issue of Media Industries (6:1, 2019, with Deb Verhoeven).

To register for this event contact Clara Schanck at cschanck@wisc.edu.

See the event listing on the European Studies calendar.