"From High Noon to Black Orpheus"

Kevin Hagopian, a teaching professor in the Department of Film Production and Media Studies, will present the annual First-Year Lecture, a requirement for all first-year students, titled "From High Noon to Black Orpheus: Self-Framing Modern Presidential Character Through Film Taste.”

About the lecture: Publicizing our tastes in popular culture — music, games, TV and movies — on social media is one of the most powerful ways we have of shaping others’ perceptions of ourselves. U.S. presidents and presidential candidates have long used their personal choices of favorite movies to shape a positive understanding of their “presidential character.” Presidential character fuses personal and leadership attributes in the same person — and invoking a shared and compelling narrative experience makes the claims about character as concrete and compelling as the movie itself. We’ll look at the public (and private) movie choices of presidents and presidential candidates from Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump as keys to the narratives these political figures have sought to tell about themselves.