Border Incidents Roundtable Discussion
The Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival hosted a roundtable discussion as part of the abridged virtual edition of its annual festival. The discussion explored issues related to film noir and the U.S.-Mexican border as witnessed in three films: Border Incident (1949), Where Danger Lives (1950), and Touch of Evil (1958). All films were available to stream for free as part of the festival.
This free discussion took on Zoom on Thursday, March 18 at 7pm ET. You can find the video down below.
Panelists for the roundtable discussion included:
Jonathan Ryan: CEO / President, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES)
Homi K. Bhabha: Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
Jonathan Auerbach: Emeritus Professor of English, University of Maryland
Margarita de Orellana: Editor, Artes de México
Rob King: Professor of Film, Columbia University (moderator)
Co-presented by the Film Program and Office of Public Programs and Engagement at Columbia University School of the Arts; and Columbia Global Centers.
Jonathan Ryan
Jonathan Ryan has served as the Executive Director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) since 2008. RAICES provides free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families and refugees in Central and South Texas. Previously, he worked as a staff attorney at American Gateways where he helped to establish the Legal Orientation Program for adults in DHS detention. Jonathan received his B.A. from Columbia College in New York and is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law.
Homi K. Bhabha
Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the English and Comparative Literature Departments at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, contemporary art, and cosmopolitanism. His books include Nation and Narration (1990) and The Location of Culture (1994), which was reprinted as a Routledge Classic in 2004. He is a member of the Academic Committee for the Shanghai Power Station of Art, advisor on the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (CMAP) project at the Museum of Modern Art New York, and Curator in Residence of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He also holds honorary degrees from Université Paris 8, University College London, and the Free University Berlin.
Jonathan Auerbach
Jonathan Auerbach is Emeritus Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland. In addition to publishing a variety of articles on American literature and film, and editing numerous volumes, he is the author of five books: Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion (Johns Hopkins, 2015); Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship (Duke, 2011); Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (California, 2007); Male Call: Becoming Jack London (Duke, 1996); and The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (Oxford, 1989). He has been a Fulbright scholar in Hungary, Portugal, Cyprus, and Tunisia.
Margarita de Orellana
Margarita de Orellana has been editor of the journal Artes de México for thirty-three years. She received her Ph.D. in Contemporary and Comparative History in the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her books include Imágenes del pasado: El cine y la historia (1985), Filming Pancho Villa: How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution (1991; English translation, 2009), and La mano artisanel (2002), among others. She has also worked as a historical consultant on films and a scriptwriter for a series of documentaries on the Mexican Revolution.
Rob King
Rob King is a professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University and the programmer of the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival. He is the author of Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (2017) and the award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (2009). He is currently working on a critical study of the career of Radley Metzger.