The Cinema Studies Series at Duke University, in collaboration with AMI Showcase and the Triangle Film Salon, presents its inaugural event with a lecture by Devin Orgeron, who teaches film studies at North Carolina State University. Dr. Orgeron will explore the notion that the exclusion of the educational film—films that teach—from the larger nonfiction conversation is a product of our evolving assumptions about documentary’s capacity for artfulness. Artless, direct, unmotivated, and objective, films made for the classroom seem to exist outside of our humanistic talking points. Looking closely at a selection of classroom films focused on the natural world, this presentation aims to demonstrate the intentionality of golden-era educational films and their implications for our understanding of educational media more generally.

Tuesday, September 2, 6:30 p.m.
Richard White Lecture Hall, Duke University East Campus
1308 Campus Drive, Durham, North Carolina 

Devin Orgeron is associate professor of film studies at NCSU. He researches and writes about cinema and mechanical mobility, cinematic masculinity, contemporary American cinema, film authorship, realism, advertising and commercial images, educational films, and postmodernity. He also collects, shows, and writes about home movies from the 1940s–1960s. Dr. Orgeron is the author of Road Movies: From Muybridge and Melies to Lynch and Kiarostami.

The event is sponsored by the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, the Program in Literature, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.