Artist Talk with Christine Sprengler

Please join us for a free public lecture about the movie 

Grease entitled: “Grease and The Jukebox Fifties”

Alan Wildeman Centre for Creative Arts (Freedom Way Building), Room 107.

About the Talk:

 

Grease’s vision of the Fifties responds to an already decade-long surge of 1950s nostalgia, including a range of cinematic representations, some quite complex and nuanced. In what Dr. Christine Sprengler dubs “The Jukebox Fifties,” music (and film musical) history is used to confront social history, opening up the past to new analyses. It is a vision of the Fifties that privileges the experiences of youth, popular music, and social spaces central to the articulation of youth identities.

 

Sprengler will consider a number of strategies including the film’s recourse to the classical musical genre, its casting, and elaborate use of star images. She will conclude with Grease’s legacy and shifts in 1950s nostalgic expressions, specifically how Grease Live! (2016), Badsville (2017), and Rockabilly style and culture have responded to Grease’s constructions of sexuality, race, and gender as well as the evolution of the Jukebox Fifties more broadly.

 
Christine Sprengler is Associate Professor of Art History at Western University. She is the author of Screening Nostalgia (2009), Hitchcock and Contemporary Art (2014) and Fractured Fifties, under contract with Oxford University Press, as well as articles on cultural memory, British and American film and television, contemporary art, and the relationship between cinema and the visual arts.