Upcoming Pollock Theater Events | |
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CWC TV: Carol for Another Christmas (in 35mm)
Thursday, November 20 / 7:00 PM
From The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, Carol for Another Christmas (1964) adapted Charles Dickens’s holiday classic A Christmas Carol for Cold War television audiences. The film presents a powerful postwar narrative invoking the horrors of Hiroshima and the pressing risk of Cold War atomic annihilation.
The Carsey-Wolf Center is thrilled to present Carol for Another Christmas in 35mm. Curator Mark Quigley of UCLA’s Film & Television Archive will join moderator Ross Melnick (interim director of the Carsey-Wolf Center) for a post-screening discussion of Carol for Another Christmas.
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Connectivity: Moviegoing and Film Exhibition in Flux
Saturday, November 22 / 2:00 PM
This panel brings together filmmakers, exhibitors, distributors, historians, and cultural advocates to explore how independent cinemas, distribution companies, and filmmakers are navigating unprecedented challenges by creating new opportunities for movie theaters, moviegoers, and moviemakers.
In this special panel discussion event, we will be joined by filmmakers Brad Silberling and Jason Reitman (members of the group of prominent directors who acquired the Fox Village Westwood Theater near UCLA), Maggie Mackay (Executive Director of the Vidiots Foundation in Eagle Rock), Jackie Brenneman (Co-founder of The Fithian Group and the Attend platform), and Ross Melnick (Interim Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, Professor of Film & Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and Co-founder of Cinema Treasures).
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CWC: Antidote
Tuesday, December 2 / 7:00 PM
Antidote (2024) is an immersive and chilling documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, following three whistleblowers and activists who risk everything to reveal the inner workings of Vladimir Putin’s regime: an anonymous scientist from Russia’s secret poison program who attempts a daring escape; Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent political activist who survives two poisonings only to face trial for treason; and Christo Grozev, the investigative journalist whose reporting on state-sponsored assassinations places him in mortal danger and forces him into hiding.
Documentary participant Vladimir Kara-Murza will join moderator Sara Pankenier Weld (German and Slavic Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Antidote.
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Connectivity: The Last Picture Shows (preview screening)
Thursday, December 4 / 7:00 PM
Ten states. 10,825 miles. 123 theaters. In his latest feature The Last Picture Shows, filmmaker Rustin Thompson journeys into the American West on a search for traces of what was once a center of small-town life: the movie theater. On the trip, he finds long abandoned and forgotten cinemas; movie houses that have fallen into disrepair; theaters recently closed, theaters struggling to hold on, and theaters that are not only surviving but thriving.
The Carsey-Wolf Center is pleased to present a special preview screening of The Last Picture Shows. Filmmaker Rustin Thompson and documentary participant Ross Melnick (interim director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, UCSB) will join moderator Rich Farrell (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion.
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CWC Presents: Connectivity
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-26 feature series Connectivity examines the evolving meaning of connection in our contemporary moment. While the term "connectivity" often invokes our ever-increasing entanglement with digital infrastructure and social media networks, this series reimagines the term not only as a technical feature of media, but as a humanistic value and a condition of social and public life. This series embraces connectivity as a framework for thinking critically about the ways in which people use media to connect with ideas and with one another, from the shared experience of moviegoing to the collective bonds forged through storytelling and public dialogue.
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Media Industries and AI
Read about our funded research projects!
The Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara has assembled a team of academic researchers for a new initiative on Media Industries and AI led by Professors Jennifer Holt, Ross Melnick, and Lisa Parks. The initiative has funded fourteen groundbreaking projects from twenty-one scholars who represent universities in fifteen countries and three continents. Researchers will be meeting at UCSB in spring 2026 to discuss their work and then return in fall of 2027 to present their findings.
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Media Fields Special Issue: Media Inside Out
The latest issue of Media Fields is an archive and critical distillation of the work presented at the Media Inside Out conference (April 2024) honoring the distinguished careers of UCSB Film and Media Studies professors emeriti Constance Penley, Janet Walker, and Charles Wolfe. The conference was supported by a Faculty Research Award from the Carsey-Wolf Center.
The Media Fields research collective was formed by Film and Media Studies graduate students at UCSB in 2007 to advance scholarship on the spatial aspects of a range of media forms, including film, television, radio, and digital media.
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