The University of Pittsburgh Film Studies Program, with support from the Office of the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, will sponsor a March 14 appearance by internationally acclaimed actress Tilda Swinton, who starred as the witch in Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005). In conjunction with Swinton’s visit, the Film Studies Program will screen Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991) March 13 and Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) March 15. All events are at 7 p.m. in the Carnegie Museum of Art Screening Room, 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Admission is free.
Swinton will participate in a dialogue March 14 titled “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” with Colin MacCabe, University Distinguished Professor of English and Film, and Isaac Julien, visiting Andrew Mellon Professor in Pitt’s Department of English.
Swinton was born in London in 1960 to a Scottish aristocratic family. She attended West Heath Girls’ School with Lady Diana Spenser. After graduating from Cambridge University in 1983 with a degree in the social and political sciences and English literature, Swinton joined the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company as an actress. She left after a year to pursue a career in film, beginning by working with filmmaker Derek Jarman that led to a starring role in Caravaggio in 1986. For the next seven years she worked for Jarman, including her roles in Edward II and Orlando.
Following Jarman’s death in l994 and the birth of her children, Swinton withdrew from acting, but she returned to the screen in 1998 in Love is the Devil, directed by Muriel Belcher. In 2005, Swinton played Penny in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers and housewife Audrey Cobb in the Mike Mills film adaptation of the novel Thumbsucker, in addition to her role in The Chronicles of Narnia.
MacCabe teaches literature in the 17th-Century and Literature and Media in the 20th-Century courses at Pitt. His research interests include a history of English since 1500, psychoanalysis, James Joyce, and linguistics. MacCabe is the author of James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (2nd edition, Palgrave, 2002) Godard: Portrait of the Artist at 70 (Bloomsbury, 2002), and Diary of a Young Soul Rebel (British Film Institute, 1991), with Isaac Julien. MacCabe also is an editor of the journal Critical Quarterly.
A former head of research at the British Film Institute in London, MacCabe has been a producer, executive producer, or associate producer of more than 20 films. His A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies, a 1995 documentary of Scorsese’s role in Hollywood filmmaking, was commissioned for television by the British Film Institute. In addition, MacCabe co-organized and coproduced a world premiere media installation of the latest work by French filmmaker Chris Marker at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York last year.
Julien, a native and resident of London, is teaching at Pitt this term. A 1984 graduate of St Martin’s School of Art, Julien studied painting and fine art film. He founded Sankofa Film and Video Collective and was a founding member of Normal Films in 1999.
Julien was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 for his films The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), made in collaboration with Javier de Frutos, and Vagabondia (2000), choreographed by Javier de Frutos. Earlier works include Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996), the Cannes prize-winning Young Soul Rebels (1991), and the acclaimed poetic documentary Looking for Langston (1989).
A research fellow at Goldsmiths University of London and a trustee of the Serpentine Gallery, Julien was visiting lecturer at Harvard University’s Schools of Afro-American and Visual Environmental Studies and the Whitney Museum of American Arts’ Independent Study Program. In 2001, he received the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts and in 2003 won the Grand Jury Prize at the Kunstfilm Biennale in Cologne for his single-screen version of Baltimore.
