Sundays in October through November 1st, at 2pm in AUX | Free screenings and lectures
Scroll down for this Sunday’s episode and lecturer info
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) was a television series created by Joss Whedon which aired on the WB network and later UPN from 1997-2003. It predominantly starred Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy), Anthony Stewart Head (Giles), Alyson Hannigan (Willow), Nicholas Brendan (Xander), Amber Benson (Tara), Kristine Sutherland (Joyce), David Boreanaz (Angel) and James Marsters (Spike). The series is most commonly known as subverting the horror genre as we follow Buffy the Vampire Slayer through battling vampires, demons and several apocalypses.
Please join us for a month long intensive Lecture & Screening series featuring Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Vox Populi member Beth Heinly has invited seven lecturers; Megan Carr, Jon McCabe, Homay King, Ann Cornell, James Myers, Lynn Dorwaldt and Kate Kraczon, each from a varied arena of expertise including academia, art, curation, geekdom, podcasting and writing to guide this very special Buffy ReWatch in a most scholarly fashion.
The Buffyverse, a term coined by the Buffy fandom describing the Buffy universe, is a frequently used springboard topic for discussion among academia from high school to college courses providing many articles, essays, and bibliographies for perusal on whatever sparks the Buffy fan’s curiosity. Watch along and immerse yourself in the world of Buffy Academia led by lectures unique to each season. Following the lecture there will be roundtable discussions that discuss specifications within the screened episodes covering character development, language, pop cultural references and fashion. Each week the series will be recorded for a podcast to air midweek, so if you have to miss a Sunday, tune in! Please check in closer to the premiere on October 4th for more details on our podcast.
This is a free event. We will have snacks à la Buffy and drinks to cure whatever ails you from your Saturday nights “patrolling”. Do be mindful that we highly encourage cosplay for attendees.
Happening every Sunday in October at 2pm with the finale on Sunday November 1st at 2pm. Scroll through our calendar to see what episodes we’ll be featuring, meet your teacher and check out links to suggested reading materials.
Lecturers (in order of appearance): Beth Heinly, Megan Carr, Jon McCabe, Homay King, Ann Cornell, James Myers & Kate Kraczon.
*Important to note that due the nature of this lecture series, there are spoilers. We recommend this event series as a ReWatch. If you would like to join us anyway as your first time watching the show keep in mind of spoilers. Alternatively, you can try to watch 22 episodes of television in one week.
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Sunday October 18th 2pm
Buffy ReWatch: Abridged Version, Screening & Lecture Series
Hush (Season 4, Episode 10) w/ Homay King
After reading critical response to the series in which the dialogue was praised as the most successful aspect of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon set out to write an episode almost completely devoid of speech. The result was Hush, which had only 17 minutes of dialogue. Hush was the only episode in the series to be nominated for an Emmy Award in Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series; it also received a nomination for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single Camera Series. The music includes an original score as well as Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre (1874).
This week’s rewatch of Season 4 will focus on the Buffyverse’s use of melodrama, in the original sense of the term: a drama set to music. We will discuss the mute (but not silent) Hush as case study.
Suggested readings:
Lynne Joyrich, “All that Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture,” Camera Obscura 6:1 (January 1988): 128-153.
Christopher Wiley, “Theorizing Television Music as Serial Art: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Narratology of Thematic Score,” in KP Leonard (Ed.), Buffy, Ballads, and Bad Guys Who Sing: Music in the Worlds of Joss Whedon (Scarecrow Press, ISBN 0810869454): 23-67.
Homay King is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Duke UP, 2010). Her essays on film, photography, and contemporary art have appeared in Afterall, Discourse, Film Quarterly, October, and elsewhere. Her book Virtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality is forthcoming from Duke in October 2015. She is a member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective.
