Dear all,
Some of you may be interested in the following conference organised by
postgraduate students as the University of Bath.
David Clarke
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Images at the Threshold:
A Postgraduate Film Conference
Hosted by the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages
University of Bath
Thursday 19th April 2007
PROGRAM
09.15 - 09.35 Arrival
09.35 – 10.50 Session 1. Chaired by Wendy Everett (1 WN 3.11)
“Go West, comrade: recollection, transposition and populist radicalism
in the New Left Westerns of Sergio Sollima”
Austin Fisher (Royal Holloway. University of London)
In 1966, Italian director Sergio Sollima adapted a treatment by Franco
Solinas concerning the oppression of Sardinian peasants into a Western,
entitled La resa dei conti (1967). By transposing this political tale
to Texas and Mexico, Sollima both escaped censorship by appropriating
the popular ‘Spaghetti Western’ tag, and appealed to Latin American
sympathies at a time when Third Worldist doctrine was de rigeur amongst
Italian militants. That the Western possessed political potentiality
was widely recognised, but Sollima’s radical parables are problematic
to such generic categorisation, since both here and in his second
Western, Faccia a faccia (1967), his primary aim was to appropriate
this century-old iconography from another continent to narrate his
personal experiences of politicisation during the Fascist period.
My paper will explore the temporal and geographical transposition of
Sollima’s memories, and ask why it was that this conceit found such
currency amongst the Italian student movement of 1967-8, above and
beyond his fashionable Third Worldism. I will suggest that the director
identified in the myth of the ‘Wild West’ a past charged with
signifiers which crystallised and illuminated contemporary politics,
brushing history ‘against the grain’ in an analogous agenda to that of
the Frankfurt School, whose doctrine had a profound influence upon the
emergent New Left counterculture to whom these films appealed.
Sollima’s fusion of memory and myth harnessed the energies of
recollection to stimulate revolutionary consciousness, and connected
with this young, ‘hip’ audience, disillusioned with Italy’s economic
miracle and enthralled by the teachings of Marcuse and Benjamin.
“Guts and glory: Redenecks, rebellion and the road in modern horror cinema”
Eimear Ballard (Warwick University)
The proposed paper draws on preliminary work from the author’s PhD
which involves the analysis of representation of citizens from the
American South, stereotyped in much recent American cinema as
‘rednecks’. In recent years, a spate of horror films have been released
which repeat the same pseudo-folkloric storyline: American teenagers
(often identified as ‘Yankees’) travel through wilderness backwaters,
where they encounter ‘redneck’ killers who bring about their doom. This
spate of stylistically and thematically similar films includes Wrong
Turn, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, House of 1,000 Corpses (all 2003),
2001 Maniacs and The Devil’s Rejects (both 2005), and The Hills Have
Eyes (2006).
I wish to examine the recent cinematic representation of the American
South as the ultimate marginal space, the modern retelling of the
crumbling households of Gothic fiction and the dwelling-place of
contemporary America’s greatest nightmare: a disenfranchised, isolated
and inbred rural poor thirsting for revenge. Considering the widespread
dismantlement of stereotypy in the latter half of the twentieth
century, it seems astonishing that the negative image of the ‘redneck’
continues to be propagated in popular cinema. I wish to examine the
representation of the ‘redneck’ as a scapegoat for modern America, and
the apparent triumph of the ‘Yankee’ teens as a complex image of a
positive future for the United States, dwindling in international
popularity.
The Sound of Exile: Music and Identity on the Road in Exils
Helen Thomas (University of Bath)
This paper aims to explore the role of music in representing the
affective impact of exile in film, focussing on Tony Gatlif’s Exils.
Exils is an overtly accented film, explicitly drawing upon multiple
musical references and contrasts in order to explore questions of
diasporic identity. Music frames Exils, illuminating the different
stages of Naïma and Zano’s journey as they retrace their parents’
journey of exile in reverse and gradually come to terms with their own
conflicted identities as second generation Pieds Noirs immigrants.In a
sense, the music functions as a narrator; the exiles’ story is told
through the film’s song lyrics, through the fusion and overlapping of
musical genres (from rap to Sufi, via flamenco) and through the
integration of music with sound, image and narrative.
As the film travels south, the emotional distance between the
protagonists and the music narrows, until the music has become a pure,
simultaneous expression of their subjective experience of exile. The
tension built up from the very first frame/ beat of the film leads us
to seek the catharsis of the film’s musical and emotional dénouement: a
Sufi ritual in which Naïma and Zano participate. Shot in a single,
ten-minute long take, this key scene transcends the boundary between
fiction and documentary, creating a space within the narrative in which
to engage directly with what Naficy refers to as “the acousticity of
exile.” It could be argued that the effect of the music on the viewer,
from a neurological point of view, increases our empathy with the
characters’ emotional trajectory, as well as offering a form of release.
10.50 – 11.05 Tea Break
11.05 – 12.00 Session 2. Chaired by Dr. David Gillespie (1 WN 3.11)
“Russian Dolls: Russian Puppet Theatre and Early Russian Animated Film”
Ulrike Hartmann (University of Bristol)
In this paper I shall discuss the overlapping areas between the
tradition of Russian puppet theatre and early Russian cinema as
representative of modernity in the field of animation.
Puppet theatre as an art form is deeply rooted in Russian folk art and
mass culture. With their set of stock characters and relatively static
plot lines, touring puppet theatres have dominated the cultural
experience of the mostly peasant and illiterate Russian masses from the
17th century until about 1900, thus preparing an audience that, at the
turn of the century, was confronted with an entirely and radically new
art form: cinematography. Cinema soon replaced other forms of touring
entertainment and proved immensely popular because of its stunning new
technology.
I shall explore in this paper how – despite cultural shifts – the
motifs, characters and plotlines of traditional puppet theatre were
transferred via the means of cinematography into ‘modern’ Russian
culture. The development from puppet theatre to animation constituted a
transition from three-dimensional tactility to two-dimensional
immaterialness. I will discuss the merging and colliding of these art
forms, using the films of Wladyslaw Starewicz, Russia’s first animator,
as an example. Focussing on The Cameraman’s Revenge (1911), and The
Lily of Belgium (1915) I will analyse how he employed stuffed beetles
and small animals to appeal to an audience shaped by puppet theatre.
Intervention of the prosthetics in Sex is Comedy(2002)
Ming-jung Kuo (University of Bath)
This paper intends to explore the interface between the human body and
artificial prosthesis and with it the collapsing of the symbolic and
the literal. My focus will be Catherine Breillat’s film-within-a-film,
Sex is Comedy.
The inclusion of the prosthetic penis within the film’s diegesis
simultaneously makes visible the explicit sex act and disguises the
organic real with an inanimate object. This realistic prop is
introduced as a means to stand in for the Actor’s physical/performing
unreliability at the requirement of an erection during shooting.
Initially having difficulty incorporating the prosthetic he labels
“vampire,” he subsequently appropriates the symbolic power of this fake
penis to turn the tables against the woman in charge, the director
Jeanne. In parallel, Jeanne is forced to rely on a crutch for a leg
injury sustained; an auxiliary object that puns on her position as a
female director struggling for control in a masculine context.
Following theoretical discussion of the prosthetic in art, it may be
argued that the body long passes as an ‘unmarked canvas’ that is made
visible by the addition of the prop. The prosthetic penis and the
crutch work metaphorically to unveil the sexed bodies in performance,
furthermore, opening a space to mediate the overlapping and blurring of
boundaries between the real and the constructed, the subject and the
object.
12.00 – 12.10 Break
12.10 – 13.05 Session 3. Chaired by Miss Hilary J. Potter (1 WN 3.11)
The Mirror has Two Faces: a Clandestine Resistance versus the Fallen Woman
Eylem Atakav (Southampton Solent University)
This paper aims to textually analyse one of the most unconventional
films of modern Turkish cinema (Masumiyet/ Innocence, Zeki Demirkubuz,
1997) from a feminist point of view, by focusing on the use of silence
and violence in the film, in specific; and its representation of women
and their experiences in general, whilst arguing that although the film
may be regarded as one of the few feminist films in Turkish cinema, it
still employs and deploys patriarchal structures.
Indeed, the film, on one hand, identifies a feminist intervention to
culture, by employing the idea of disassociation of sound and image;
and dislodging the female voice from the female image, which may be
considered as a method of feminist resistance; on the other hand,
reiterates the norms of patriarchy whilst repeating, thus mythologizing
the subordination of women in film as well as in Turkish culture; in
other words, it depicts women’s suppression as the systematic denial of
their subjectivity both through silence and violence.
Overall, the paper attempts to overview the conditions of possibility
and impossibility of a feminist discourse in Turkish cinema in
specific, and a patriarchal culture in general, by a close textual
analysis of Innocence.
‘Deep Thrust’ : Gender-bending on the path to Justice
Philippa Thomas
I will focus on the transgressive viewing pleasures of the actions of
female protagonists in Asian Chambara (Japan) and Wu Xia Pian (Hong
Kong/China) movies. Pleasure subjectively viewed from the perspective
of a female, white, British student of performance studies growing up
surrounded with the images of Hollywood.
Informed by Bakhtin, Kristeva and Foucault, and drawing on the
interpretation of transgression as an act which widens the borders of
an art form, rather than an act which makes the form’s very existence
impossible, this exploration takes as its foundation notions of radical
pleasure in identifying both with the paths of violence taken in these
films, and the characters that take this course of action.
I will suggest that there are possibilities for vicarious play of
skill, power and sex within the transgressive utopia of these violent
films, and suggest that this ‘Bermuda Triangle’ of concrete meanings is
where the power of these films lies.
The Colonial fantasy of ‘porcelain kitten’ is considered, as is the
status of female-to-male transvestites and the complex and much
maligned ‘camp’ worshipping, Western ‘fanboy’ gaze. I will also examine
the device of female protagonists using ‘womanly’ fragility as a trap,
literally exploding sexual and cultural stereotype with their skill.
Far from claiming a hard-line feminist/ transgressive standpoint for
these films, the speaker proposes that the meticulous and rhythmically
edited ‘violence’ is inherently liberating to a sympathetic viewer,
operating on a level of kinetic empathy.
13.15 – 14.15 Lunch
14.20 – 15.35 Session 4. Chaired by Dr. Axel Goodbody (1 E 3.6)
Ghosts in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955)
Alanna Donaldson (University of Kent)
In Les Diaboliques, the suggestion that Michel has returned as a ghost
culminates in his ghostly appearance at a window in the school
photograph. The image is dismissed by Monsieur Raymond as merely a
trick of the camera, ‘a kind of shot-silk effect - the reflection of a
cloud that looks like our headmaster’. Later in the film, another trick
of the camera, this time the film camera, momentarily renders Nicole
ghostly, when a shot of her in a corridor is slowly cross-faded with an
identically-framed shot of the empty corridor.
But it is Christina’s ghost, and how it can be understood as a trick of
the camera, a trick of cinema, that is the subject of my paper. Despite
the fact that the ghost of Michel was only ever a fiction concocted by
the lovers, the ghostliness of those earlier scenes lingers on in the
final scene, when a schoolboy announces he has seen Christina’s ghost.
It is as though, at this late stage in events, the film is no longer
able to distinguish between the lovers’ plot and its own, and this
strange scene is in the overlapping space between the two.
My paper takes up James Monaco’s argument that ‘the screen image is
vested with an immutable aura of validity’ in order to discuss the
problematic nature of the plot twist, in Les Diaboliques and elsewhere,
which seeks to invalidate all that has come before it.
Fragmenting Reality: The Tangible Imaginary and Chrono-Form in Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
David Shaerf (University of Exeter)
The proposed paper will explore the fragmentation of what I am
referring to as ‘chrono-form’: the relationship between the
chronological events within a story and the projection line of the
sequence of events within the film as shown to the spectator. While
non-linear storytelling techniques have been perceptible for many years
within the European Art Film tradition and also apparent in American
independent film, experimentation with chrono-formatic fragmentation in
mainstream American cinema is still, in essence, in its early stages.
One such example of this appearing in contemporary American cinema is
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004), where
screenwriter Charlie Kaufman actively plays upon and subverts linear
narrative time and space in order to inflict a sense of disorientation
upon spectators; a conscious effort on behalf of the scriptwriter to
challenge and confront the conventions of Bordwell’s Classical
narrative Cinema.
Kaufman’s script, moreover, plays on what I refer to in this paper as
the ‘tangible imaginary’; the world within the mind of the protagonist
as a tangible space, a place where the characters have the ability to
change the linearity of the film in direct contrast to that of the
conventional use of the flashback in classical filmmaking. In breaking
from this conventional model, Kaufman permits a development of
narrative form creating a world wherein the deus ex machina principle,
rather than seen as being contrived, is an entirely plausible
convention.
With the inspection of these two counter-classical devices as used in
mainstream Hollywood product, I will conclude this paper by showing how
they have re-defined the notions of temporal structural parameters
within the American mainstream.
Speaking for Her: Almodóvar's Critique of Film
Anna Sloan (University of Warwick)
This paper contends that it is a primary aim of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk
to Her to expose film's subversion of the boundaries between objective
and subjective. Through a study of Benigno's role in the authorship of
the very film in which he is a character, it will argue that Almodóvar
implicates the filmmaker in this subversion. Almodóvar shows the
filmmaker to be a solipsist: one who constructs the inner lives of
others from his own delusional fantasies. Because all fictional
characters spring from the filmmaker's mind—as well as because of the
camera, and the conventions of the medium—it appears unproblematic and
effortless in film to traverse the boundaries separating minds from
each other, to go inside the heads of other people, to speak their
thoughts for them. But, Almodóvar implies, to do so is a violation of
the agency and privacy inherent to personhood. The objective narration
of a film intrudes upon the subjective voices of its own characters—and
thus all film characters are exploited, violated, even raped.
15.35 – 15.50 Tea Break
15.50 – 16.45 Session 5. Chaired by Dr. David Clarke (1 E 3.6)
Halos, Heavens, and Light at the End…
James Callow (University of Bath)
This paper proposes a short genealogy of cinema’s relationship between
violence and the sunset, death and the final image. From the
genre-defining frame of the Western, via its revisionist
re-application, to its contemporary addendum to high-school shootings
the final image of sun and sky presents a liminal coda to a messianic
historiography in American cinema. Always existing as a threshold
beyond the conclusion of ‘plot’, it presents a supplemental image, both
loaded and emptied, that suspends any visible revelation.
Via three films, Shane (1953), Dead Man (1995), and Elephant (2003),
this paper contemplates the inference of Thomastic ‘halos’, Benjaminian
historiography of catastrophe and Derrida’s dialogue with Jan Patocka’s
Heretical Essays to suggest an American parallel to Patocka’s European
destiny through a evolving final frame of meaning, non-meaning and
searching.
City of Angels: Towards a Cinema of Mourning...
Richard Armstrong (University of Cambridge)
The 1990s saw the collapse of Communism, the end of Thatcherism, the
loss of Hong Kong, the end of stability in eastern Europe, the death of
Lady Di, the ’Death of Cinema’. How did films come to terms with these
endings?
After Life, City of Angels, Festen all explore bereavement. All are
visually experimental, and all appeared in 1998. Why did three films
from very different places all appearing in the same year all take
death and transcendence as their themes?
Pushing at the boundaries between interiority and the world, realism
and trickery, these films negotiated the reconciliation of life and
loss. All involved experimental attitudes towards acting. The plots of
all three films invite comparisons with allegory.
In 2003 American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote of “the
simultaneous appearance of the same apparent tastes, styles and/or
themes in separate parts of the world, without any signs of these
common and synchronous traits having influenced one another - all of
which suggest a common global experience….” Mortality is a perennial
topic in cinema, but why did so many 1990s films treat this topic?
Indeed, one of the biggest box office hits of its or any year - Titanic
- revolved around mourning.
Films about grief are ritual spaces where audiences work through
feelings once processed in church or at wakes. My work focuses on the
strategies and devices with which filmmakers have articulated
grief-stricken interiority. I shall trace these devices back to a
subgenre which I term the mourning film.
17.15 – 17.45 Talk ‘Intellect’ (3 W. 3.9)
17.45 – 18.30 Wine and nibbles (3 W. 3.9)
For further details, see http://www.bath.ac.uk/esml/conferences/film/index.htm
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