VMU Vytautas Kavolis Interdisciplinary Professorship welcomes Gabriel M. Paletz, a guest of the Dana Gedvila Fund, a graduate of Yale University and the first PhD in film criticism and theory to minor in film production at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, who is film professor, scholar, programmer and critic of Lithuanian origins from Czech Republic.
Dr. Paletz teaches cinema courses including “Learning from Awful Films” to students from five continents in Prague. Among his publications, he has won the best essay prize from the Screenwriting Research Network for his article “Writing Sound in the Screenplay: Traditions and Innovations” and his book The Reinventions of Orson Welles is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He has penned film criticism for Variety and the magazine of the Cinémathèque Française while his latest film programs include a tribute to the great female screenwriters of Hollywood silent movies and “The Eastern European Cinema of the Absurd,” a series screened around the world that features restored films from eight national film archives, including Lithuania’s.
Gabriel is delighted to return to Kaunas after speaking at its film festival with a series of lectures on film history, screenwriting, media adaptation and an original talk that celebrates the importance of Lithuanian “cultural smuggling”.
From May 10th to 16th, G. M. Paletz will be lecturing at the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences, Informatics and Humanities of Vytautas Magnus University. On May 10th, he will participate in events of the Kaunas Literature Week.
As a guest under the Vytautas Kavolis Interdisciplinary Program dedicated to the Lithuanian diaspora, Dr. Paletz has designed creative exercises for each talk and invites the participation of Vytautas Magnus University’s teachers and students.
All lectures are conducted in English and open to students from other Lithuanian universities as well as the general public.
Dr. G. M. Paletz teaching visit at VMU runs under the VMU Vytautas Kavolis interdisciplinary Professorship program. Professorship scholarship has been established by the Dana Gedvila Fund, which is administered by the Lithuanian Foundation. Kavolis Interdisciplinary Professorship is a cooperation program dedicated to the visits of Lithuanian diaspora lecturers at Vytautas Magnus University (VMU). It aims to strengthen both the interdisciplinary approach in the study programs and the ties with the Lithuanian diaspora academic community.
