Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Panic!: Swoon (in 35mm)
- Tuesday, April 29, 2025 / 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 35mm film projection (93 minutes)
- With Tom Kalin (writer/director)
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Director: Tom Kalin
Starring: Daniel Schlachet, Craig Chester, Ron Vawter, Michael Kirby
Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) is a bold reimagining of the infamous 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case, in which two wealthy, highly intelligent young men from Chicago plotted and carried out the murder of a fourteen-year-old boy in an attempt to commit the “perfect crime.” Unlike traditional crime narratives, the film focuses less on the procedural details and instead explores the intense, manipulative relationship between Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, framing their actions through the lens of queer desire, social class, and societal repression. Shot in stark black-and-white, Swoon blends historical reconstruction with unconventional stylization and challenges traditional depictions of the case, exposing the ways in which Leopold and Loeb’s homosexuality was sensationalized and vilified in the media and courtroom. As part of the New Queer Cinema movement, the film critiques the historical tendency to conflate queerness with deviance, suggesting how moral anxieties around sexuality shaped public perception and legal discourse in the wake of one of America’s most notorious crimes.
The Carsey-Wolf Center is proud to present Swoon in 35mm film projection. After the screening, writer/director Tom Kalin will join moderator Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a discussion of Swoon and its legacy.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Writer/director Tom Kalin
Tom Kalin’s first feature film Swoon was awarded prizes in Berlin, Stockholm, Sundance, and the Gotham Awards. His second feature as a director, Savage Grace, stars Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne. The film premiered at Cannes and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. As a producer, his work includes the first feature films I Shot Andy Warhol and Go Fish. He is co-writer of Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer. Kalin’s experimental work and installations have been screened at MoMA; ICA London; Berlinale; Reina Sofia, Madrid; The Cartier Foundation; The Andy Warhol Museum; REDCAT; The Getty Museum; and the Whitney Museum, among many others. Kalin is also a founding member of the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury, known for its provocative public work. He is a Rockefeller and Guggenheim Fellow and has twice been included in the Whitney Biennial.
In 2021, he directed the first episode of Pride, a six-part documentary series for the FX Networks about LGBTQ civil rights in America. His episode concerns the 1950s and features actors Alia Shawkat and Raymond Barry. He is currently developing a limited television series with Killer Films for which he is writer and director. He is a major contributor to The Films of Andy Warhol, Volume 2, published by The Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press in 2021. That same year, he also contributed an essay to The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema. His writing has appeared in ArtForum, Afterimage, Talkhouse, and The Village Voice, among other publications. Kalin has been a member of the full-time faculty of Columbia University’s School of the Arts Film Program for the past 27 years and has worked as a visiting lecturer at Yale, Brown, and EGS.
Moderator Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
Bhaskar Sarkar is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009), a critical exploration of the cinematic traces of a particular historical trauma. He has coedited the collections Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017), and The Routledge Handbook of Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020). He has also coedited two journal special issues: Postcolonial Studies (2005), on “The Subaltern and the Popular” and BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies (2012), on “Indian Documentary Studies.” At present, he is completing a monograph titled Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture. He has also begun work on a monograph about piratical practices in the Global South, and a second monograph on queer underground club cultures in millennial Los Angeles.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Presents: Panic!
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2024-25 feature series Panic! explores the complex relationship between media, an anxious public, and the turbulent currents of social, cultural, and moral panic. The series will examine how such panics have appeared on screen over the decades, but also consider how the screen itself—as technology, as gathering space, and as a site of fantasy and desire—becomes the object of reactionary backlash. Panic! will be a yearlong showcase of the films, discourses, and cultural practices that have tested the limits of public acceptability, and that have much to teach us about the cycles of panic that define our own political moment.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.