Come join us for a wild day of screenings and lightning papers. All events take place at the Whitney Humanites Center, 53 Wall Street on 12 September 2015. It is free and open to the public. If you would like lunch, let us know at interstellarmax@gmail.com. (Poster by Mariah Xu, mariah.xu@yale.edu)

9:00 Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015, 120mins, DCP)

11:10 Opening Remarks

11:15 Panel: Manual Transmissions: Legacies and Consequences

Ron Gregg – Mad Max Meets Avenging Dykes on Bikes: Radical Lesbian Feminism Overruns the Post-Apocalyptic Action Blockbuster

Phoenix Alexander – Mad Max: Fury Road, ‘Feminism,’ and the Depravity of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster

Maddie Whittle – Parenthood at the End of the World: Daddy Issues, Baby Mamas, and the Post-Apocalyptic Hollywood Epic

Bilge Ebiri – “A World without Me in It”: On Self and Sacrifice in Interstellar and Mad Max: Fury Road

12:15 Lunch

1:30 Panel: Liquid Spaces: Alternate Architectures and Ecologies

Cristian Oncescu – Wasteland Baroque: Mobile Cities and Wagnerian Valkyries in Mad Max: Fury Road

Surry Schlabs – A Phenomenology of Forgetting: On the Uses and Abuses of Architecture in Aeon Flux

Jordan Brower – Post-Apocalyptic Solutions

J.D. Connor – Forms of Insurance: The Face, the Franchise, and the Deferred-Action Movie

2:45 Panel: Kill Switches: Programs for the Present and Future

Ila Tyagi – Cowboys and Spacemen: Post-Carbon Futures in the Mad Max Tetralogy

Andrew Vielkind – Nolan’s Technophobia: The Romanticization of Space Travel in Interstellar

Ittai Orr – Interstellar: Humanist Miracles for a Disastrous Age

Debra Fischer – Living at the Edge of a Black Hole. Alternative Worlds in Interstellar

4:00 Panel: Endtimes, Endspaces: Medium Exhaustion and Renewal

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson – Where the Sun Never Sets: Imperial Anxiety and the British Special Effects Film

Sophia Nguyen – The Gargantua of Manifest Destiny

John MacKay – The Novelty of Film

5:00 Reception/Dinner Break

6:30 Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014, 169 mins., 35mm)

We would like to thank The Film Study Center courtesy of Paul L. Joskow, Films at the Whitney supported by the Barbakow Fund for Innovative Programs at Yale, Public Humanities at Yale, The Yale Center for British Art, History of Art, and Film & Media Studies for their generous and swift support.