Jane Young Spring 2025 Film Series: Films of Resistance and Revolt

Please join Professors Manya Steinkoler and Geoff Klock of the BMCC English Department for the Jane Young* Film Series, Spring Semester 2025. We are delighted to host highly distinguished guests to introduce this semester’s films.

All students, staff and faculty are welcome.

The films and discussions will be held on Zoom: https://bmcc-cuny.zoom.us/j/83710120636?pwd=1ivDre1aY2s7ntHsXTdZDmvTVxlbAr.1

Sunday, February 9 at 7 p.m.

Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang, 1927.

Guest Speaker: Meredith Randall, Adjunct, Art History Dept. BMCC,
Meredith Randall is an art historian, curator, and writer. She has lectured on art and museums and currently teaches at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She has organized exhibitions on four continents, including at the San Paulo Biennale, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, and the National Gallery in Cape Town.  Her writings include essays on photography, land art, architecture as well as contemporary painting and sculpture.

Sunday, February 16 at 7 p.m.

Mutiny on the Bounty, dir. Frank Lloyd, 1935.

Sunday, February 23 at 5 p.m. (note time change for this film)

Paisa, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1946.

Guest Speaker: Ernesto Pezzi, Italian scholar and film afficionado, author of The Fellini Handbook, joins us direct from Italy.

Sunday, March 2 at 7 p.m.

Caine Mutiny, dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1954.

Guest Speaker: Prof. Dexter Jeffries, English Dept. BMCC.
Dexter Jeffries grew up in New York City and has a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center that focused on African American Literature and Richard Wright. Ten years as a cab driver left him with a deep sense of the city and its people.  In addition to those extra-academic experiences, he has an Honorable Discharge from the United States Marine Corps and another one from the United States Army.  Since 1979, he has taught English at the City University of New York and has been an Adjunct Associate Professor of the Humanities at Pratt Institute since 1992.  In 1996, in conjunction with the film department of Pratt Institute, Dexter produced and directed a documentary film, What’s Jazz?  Irish bars, graffiti on the subway and caring for an elderly parent are topics that Jeffries has examined in his published writing.  In 2003, Kensington Press published his autobiographical memoir, Triple Exposure: Black, Jewish, and Red in the 1950s with paperback edition issued in 2004.  A member of The Dramatists Guild, his one act play, White Out, a short tale of war and peace, was produced by the Gallery Theater Players, Brooklyn, in the summer of 2018. Regarding other writers: “Baldwin taught me how to feel; Hemingway taught me how to write.”

Sunday, March 9 at 7 p.m.

Matewan, dir. John Sayles, 1987.

Guest Speaker: David Schoolnik, Classics ABD, film afficionado.
While studying philosophy in graduate school David Schoolnik discovered that it was more fun to watch, think and talk about movies than write papers on Kant.  He still watches, thinks and talks about movies while having switched his attention from philosophy to kinetic studies via pilates and gyrotonic, which makes sense, since cinema and kinesis are etymologically the same.

Sunday, March 16 at 7 p.m.

The Crying Game, dir. Neil Jordan, 1992.

Guest Speaker: Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalyst and author.
Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Winner of the Gradiva® Award and the Boyer Prize; Other Press: 2003.)  Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge: 2010) and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference  ​(Routledge: 2017). She published with Chris Christian Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious  (Winner of the Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Collection and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize; Routledge: 2019.) She edited with Manya Steinkoler, Professor of English at BMCC, Lacan On Madness: Madness Yes You Can’t (Routledge: 2015), Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press: 2016), and most recently, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans*  (Winner of the Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Collection; Routledge: 2023), and also with Prof. Steinkoler, the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Gender (Routledge, forthcoming in 2025.)

Sunday, March 30 at 7 p.m.

Sorry to Bother You, dir. Boots Riley, 2018.

Sunday, April 2 at 7 p.m.

Dogtooth, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009.

Guest Speaker: Jean Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, inaugural holder of the Vartan Gregorian professorship at the University of Pennsylvania.
He has authored and edited 48 books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce.  Recent books include Lacan Literario; 1913: The cradle of modernism; The Ethic of the Lie and Etant donnés: 1) l’art, 2) le crime. In 2013, he edited A Handbook of Modernism Studies and a new French translation of Joyce’s Exiles. In 2014 he published Crimes of the Future: Theory and its global reproduction,  Bloomsbury Publishing, and Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge University Press.  Editor of 1922: Culture, Politics and Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2015,  The Pathos of Distance (2016), Think, Pig! Beckett at the limit of the human (2016), Les Guerres de Derrida (2016). More recent titles include Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), After Derrida (2018), Rire au Soleil (2019), Understanding Derrida / Understanding Modernism (2019), Knots: Post-Lacanian Readings of literature and film (2020), Beckett and Sade (2020), Rires Prodigues (2021), Knots, Post-Lacanian readings of film, literature and culture, New York, Routledge, 2020, Beckett and Sade, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020. Rires Prodigues: Rire et jouissance chez Marx, Freud et Kafka, Paris, Stilus, 2021., With Angeliki Spiropoulou, Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics, Bloomsbury, 2022 and James Joyce, Hérétique et Prodigue, Paris, Stilus, 2022.

Sunday, May 4 at 7 p.m.

Suspiria, dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2018.

* This film series was named in honor of former BMCC English Professor and Department Chair Jane Young, who taught composition, literature, and film for 43 years.

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