SEMINARS 2004

The Belly of the Mind: Memory at the Movies
How do we create memories? How do memories create us? Several films in the past few years — including the gritty indie hit Memento, the animated fish story Finding Nemo, and the goofy romance 50 First Dates - have touched on the role that memory plays in shaping our identities and our relationships. Other recent films, like Paycheck and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, have explored how people try to manipulate their memories to remove their pain or guilt, or, like The Man Without A Past, they have suggested that amnesia can even be a fit of grace that allows people to start their lives anew. This seminar will look at the recent wave of memory-loss movies - as well as older films like Dark City and Total Recall — plus the writings of Augustine and others to see how memory shapes our faith and our selves. Peter T. Chattaway is a freelance writer on film whose reviews appear in Christianity Today's online Movie Channel, Books & Culture and the British Columbia Christian News.

See Hear Now: Images, Language & Pop Culture
(or "Why Does the Sight of Christopher Walken Dancing Seem
So Strange and So Cool at the Same Time?")
The Image is the new lingua franca, the primary medium of cultural exchange in a media-driven world. But while we're all familiar with this language of images, many of us still aren't very fluent: we remain oblivious to its grammar and syntax, leaving us underequipped to grasp many meanings, and open to manipulation by many messages. Using clips from movies, tv commercials and music videos, this seminar will practice the reading of images and explore how one might "speak" in a visual culture so as to be "heard". In addition to reviewing films for the Hyde Park Herald and the Phantom Tollbooth, J. Robert Parks teaches courses on media and visual culture at Columbia College in Chicago.

It's A Wonderful Cosmos: Chesterbelloc & the Capra Science Films
George Bernard Shaw immortalized the literary partnership of G. K. Chesterton and his fellow English Christian writer Hillare Belloc by describing the duo as a mythical four-legged beast he called the Chesterbelloc. One place the two halves were in agreement was in believing wonder a byproduct of both (and hence a unifier of) faith and science. You might even say that the Chesterbelloc settled the notorious War between Science & Religion over seventy-five years ago! This idea was seized upon by a former CalTech science major turned Hollywood film director who knew a thing or two about wonder himself: Frank Capra, creator of such classics as It's a Wonderful Life and Lost Horizon, developed a series of tv science programs in the 1950s that embodied the Chesterbelloc's view that science, wonder and Christian faith were not mutually exclusive. This seminar explores the untold story of the Bell System Science films and offers fresh perspective on the interface of science and faith. The high-wire act that is the annual Rod Bennett Imaginarium seminar has thrilled audiences since this popular author and magazine editor helped found the venue.

Poetic Agonies and Ecstasies: The Yin & Yang of Romanticism
Out of the furnace of the French Revolution erupted an energy so powerful that British poet William Blake enshrined it as a mythic god he called Orc. This "orcic" energy promised many things: a liberation of the imagination, a new focus on self and subjective experience, a renewed vision of the world. But with that promise came dark side: the dangers of over-self-consciousness, of solipsism, of even insanity. This seminar follows the blessing/curse as it takes on different forms in the poetry of the first (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge) and the second (Byron, Shelley, Keats) generation of Romantic poets. In the visionary and tragic heroes these poets created, we find the origins of many a contemporary dream and nightmare: from the Oxford Romanticism of the Inklings - Tolkien, Lewis, et al) to the psycho-tragedies of Frankenstein, Dracula, Ahab, Nemo and the Highlander. Louis Markos (Lewis Agonistes: Wrestling with the Modern and Postmodern World) is professor of English at Houston Baptist University, teaching on literary theory, classics, myth and poetry.

Pop Labyrinths: Postmodernism, Relativism & Evil in Popular Culture
Be vewwy, vewwy quiet. We're hunting morwality. This series presents a wide-ranging exploration of various roots and precursors of postmodernism from that 18th century loony toon Tristram Shandy to the mind-twisting ficciones of 20th century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to the animated anarchy of Tex Avery. What we're after is an understanding of the concepts of Good and Evil as they play out in a popular culture gone as morally whack as any cartoon universe. Micah Harris teaches Literature and Film at Pitt Community College in Winterville, North Carolina. He wrote the graphic novel, Heaven's War, which pits the Inklings against Aleister Crowley — which he'll be talking about as well!

Brown Bag Special: Imaginarium 101
Grab your lunch and join us for a daily stroll down memory lane as we recall the origins and history of the Imaginarium, with a look at the influences and experiences behind this particular way of engaging culture, the lessons we've learned and evolutions we've experienced along the way. For those who were there, this will be a delightful review. For those who weren't, a way to catch up on the conversation. Mike Hertenstein has overseen program planning for the Imaginarium at Cornerstone Festival since Windows 95.