Ag Day

Alpha Zeta will host activities, contests and opportunities for students to get involved in agriculture on campus during Ag Day, Oct. 12, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on the Ag Quad.

The event includes live farm animals, free food samples, information on growing your own plants and sustainable agriculture practices; plus cow chip bingo, a grill-off, hay bale toss and other contests with prizes. Lunch will be available 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., with proceeds to be donated to Tompkins County 4-H.

For information or to sign up for a contest, email ml946@cornell.edu or stm93@cornell.edu.

The Tet Offensive, 50 years later

The biannual Voices on Vietnam Speakers Series presents “Rethinking Tet 1968: Fifty Years Later” with historian Lien-Hang Nguyen, Oct. 15 from noon to 2 p.m. in 374 Rockefeller Hall. The talk is free and open to the public, and lunch will be served. RSVP to VOVCornell@gmail.com.

Nguyen, the Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia at Cornell, will share insights from her upcoming book, a comprehensive history of the 1968 Tet Offensive that attempts to unravel the mysteries surrounding its origins. With newly declassified documents and the publication of “renegade” memoirs from Vietnam, Nguyen puts forward a new history of the strategy and deliberation surrounding the offensive.

Nguyen is the general editor of the three-volume “Cambridge History of the Vietnam War” and co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations series.

The talk will be followed by discussion and a Q&A session. The event is sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, Southeast Asia Program, the Departments of History and Government, the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Society for the Humanities.

Indigenous visual culture

Māori curator Ngahiraka Mason will give a talk, “What is More Traditional Than the Present,” Oct. 16 at 4:30 p.m. in the History of Art Gallery, Goldwin Smith Hall. The Visual Culture Colloquium talk is free and open to the public and cosponsored by the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program.

Ngahiraka is the former indigenous curator of Māori art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand. Her exhibitions relate to old knowledge and new understandings within indigenous sites of knowledge to generate awareness of historical, modern and contemporary art practice, exhibition-making, curating, writing and thinking. She lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, and curated the inaugural Honolulu Biennial in 2017.

Mason curated “Gottfried Lindauerʻs New Zealand: The Māori Portraits,” at Auckland Art Gallery from October 2016 to February 2017. She also collaborated with Nationalegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin on “Gottfried Lindauer Die Māori Portraits” (2014-15) and with the Gallery of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic, on “Gottfried Lindauer, 1839-1926: Pilsen Painter of the New Zealand Māori.”

French film, reception

Cornell Cinema’s French Film Festival presents Claire Denis’ “Let the Sunshine In” (2018), with Juliette Binoche and Gerard Depardieu, Oct. 17 at 7:15 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. The screening is preceded by a reception at 6 p.m., hosted by the Department of Romance Studies.

The 11-film festival of restored classics and contemporary features continues with “Felicité” (2017), Oct. 18 and 21.

Also showing: The 2018 Brazilian film “Araby,” screening Oct. 12 at 7:15 p.m. and Oct. 14 at 4:30 p.m., as part of Cine con Cultura 2018, Ithaca’s Latin American film festival commemorating Latinx Heritage Month. All tickets for the Oct. 14 screening are $5.50.

Artist talk

Photographer Meghann Riepenhoff will discuss her artistic practice creating cameraless cyanotypes, Oct. 18 at 5:15 p.m. in the Wing Lecture Room of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. The talk is free and open to the public and held in conjunction with the exhibition, “Object Lessons: Photography at Cornell, 1869-2018.”

Riepenhoff is the recipient of a 2018-19 Guggenheim Fellowship in photography. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Worcester Art Museum. She has exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Aperture Foundation and San Francisco Camerawork.

“Phantom” in Sage Chapel

Cornell Cinema presents the 1929 theatrical version of “The Phantom of the Opera,” starring Lon Chaney in his most famous role, Thursday, Oct. 18 at 7:30 p.m. in Sage Chapel, with an original live score performed by The Invincible Czars. Advance tickets ($10 general, $8 students, senior citizens and children age 12 and younger) are available at CornellCinemaTickets.com.

Restored from archival 35mm elements by Film Preservation Associates, the film features meticulously hand-colored sequences as well as a Technicolor sequence, in which the Phantom interrupts Bal Masque revelry wearing the scarlet robes of the Red Death.

The Invincible Czars are making their third visit to campus since 2016 after performing their instrumental soundtracks to “Nosferatu” and “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.” Among the acts that began creating new soundtracks for silent films at the original Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, the Czars have kept adding movies to their repertoire and mixing up their instrumentation, while creating custom artwork and wardrobe for each program and touring far from home each year.

Whale songs and chimes

Composer and senior lecturer in music Annie Lewandowski presents “Cetus: Life After Life,” combining recorded samples of whale songs with music on the Cornell Chimes Friday, Oct. 19, at 6 p.m. in McGraw Tower. Members of the community are invited to listen on the Arts Quad and Ho Plaza.

Bioacoustics researchers Katy and Roger Payne’s groundbreaking spectrograms of humpback whale recordings they made from 1969 to 1988 examined musical patterns of pitch, duration and rhythm in individual whales to identify the evolution of their songs over time. Samples of these archival recordings will be played over speakers in McGraw Tower while percussionist Sarah Hennies performs on the chimes.

The collaborative project is presented by the Department of Music and is part of the Cornell Council for the Arts 2018 Biennial.