Date: November 16, 2010, 7:00 pm
Location: Bijou Theater, IMU

The Living Nickelodeon, A Film and Lecture by Rick Altman.

Professor Rick Altman, in his Living Nickelodeon, plays the piano, sings, schmoozes, explains early exhibition practices, and exhorts the audience to sing along, resulting in an unusual combination of learning and good clean fun. The Living Nickelodeon has played at the Chicago Art Institute, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the Buffalo International Film Festival, the Montreal Cinematheque, the Louvre Museum, the Bologna Cinema Ritrovato Festival, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and in universities around the United States.

The Living Nickelodeon offers current audiences a chance to relive the multimedia spectacles that characterized film exhibition during the two decades between the invention of cinema and the mid-teens rise of feature films. It recreates several short programs from this early cinema era, mixing song slides from the only major archive of song slides, the Marnan Collection in Minneapolis, with short films from the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Rick Altman is Professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa, where he has taught since 1974. He is an Angier B. Duke Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Danforth Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow, a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow, a University of Iowa Faculty Scholar, an NEH Fellow, an ACLS Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He has published extensively on film sound, his most recent book being A Theory of Narrative (Columbia University Press, 2008). He is also is currently working on a book entitled HOLLYWOOD SOUND, which will recount the process by which the Hollywood industry developed a standardized approach to film sound.