Dear All,

Please find below, and attached, the  Centre for Film Studies' programme (St
Andrews University). 

Speakers include Prof. Janina Falkowska (University of West Ontario, Canada)
on Michael Haneke, and Bernard Bentley (Senior Lecturer, St Andrews
University) on Spanish Cinema. 

Talks take place on Tuesdays, 5:15, at 99 North St, St Andrews.

First talk: October 14, by our Visiting Professor, Prof. Robert Burgoyne
(Wayne State University).

All Welcome!

For further information, please contact me (01334 467 472) the Department of
Film Studies Secretary, Mrs Karen Drysdale, at 01334 467 473. 



Best wishes,

Saer Maty Ba









Centre for Film Studies - St Andrews University

October 14, 2008, 5:15 pm, Board Room, 99 North Street

Prof. Robert Burgoyne, Wayne State University, USA

Haunting in the War Film: Flags of our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006) and
Letters From Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood, 2006)

Despite its long-standing reputation for realism and authenticity, the war
film frequently departs from the conventions of verisimilitude to convey the
nightmarish effects of the historical past.  Although realism and
verisimilitude has provided a touchstone for the genre’s development, films
such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Apocalypse Now, and recently Letters
From Iwo Jima and Flags of our Fathers are defined as much by their ghostly,
spectral encounters as by their faithful reproduction of war time
experience.  Sonic and visual realism has been celebrated as the war film’s
particular contribution to the history of the cinema, but the cultural
trauma of war goes beyond the frame of even the grimmest forms of
verisimilitude.  Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers and Letters From Iwo
Jima are both centered on the haunting of the present by the past, with
artefacts such as photographs and letters becoming a kind of medium of
spectral possession.

Prof. Robert Burgoyne is one of the most distinguished scholars in the area
of Film in the USA and internationally. We are welcoming him as a special
guest to the Centre. For the duration of his three week-long visit to St.
Andrews he will be engaged with teaching on our MLitt programme and in
meetings with the PhD students. Professor of English at Wayne State
University, his areas of specialisation include narrative theory of film,
issues of historical representation and film, national identity and film,
war film, epic cinema. His studied at the Universities of Minnesota (B.A.)
and New York University (PhD). Besides publishing numerous articles and book
chapters, he is the author of Bertolucci's 1900: A Narrative and Historical
Analysis (Wayne State University Press, 1991) and New Vocabularies in Film
Semiotics, co-authored with Robert Stam and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis
(Routledge, 1992). His acclaimed books on film and history -- Film Nation:
Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and
The Hollywood Historical Film (Blackwell Publishing, 2008) – are widely used
not only in film studies but also in the context of the teaching history and
its representations in cinema. Currently he is editing an anthology on the
International Epic Film. 

Centre for Film Studies
28 October 2008, 5:15 pm, Board Room, 99 North Street

Prof. Janina Falkowska, University of Western Ontario, Canada

Michael Haneke: Mourning and Melancholia in European Cinema

The presentation will discuss the work of this renowned European filmmaker
not only in the framework of melancholia and mourning as theorized by
Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein but also in the context of new social and
political developments.  Haneke's films must be seen against the background
of the dissolution of the communist system, German unification, mass
migratory movements in Europe, and increasing homophobia and terrorist
paranoia, as well as general globalization and unification trends within the
new global economy and the Western world. Michael Haneke expresses
melancholia in his early films, and masters its expression in his later
accomplishments. There is a consistent authorial thread in all his films,
whether those only written by him, those written and directed, or those
directed and produced. In all the films, similar preoccupations are present:
melancholia and mourning lie behind the films' plots, deeply pervading every
layer of the film. Thus the goal of this presentation is twofold: first, to
show how melancholia is cinematically communicated by Haneke; and second, to
argue that the lost object in these deeply melancholic films is a family
unit that uncannily and synecdochally epitomizes the disappearing or defunct
nation-state. Among the films discussed are Haneke’s early films, Drei Wege
zum See (1976); Wer war Edgar Allan? (1984); Schmutz (1985)  and Fraulein
(1986) , and some later films with particular attention paid to The Seventh
Continent (1989), 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Time (1994), Funny Games
(1997) Code Inconnu (2000), The Time of the Wolf (2003) and Caché (2005).
Professor Janina Falkowska teaches East-Central European and Western
European cinemas at the Department of Film Studies, the University of
Western Ontario, Canada. In her analysis of film, she combines theoretical
perspectives on reception theory and theories of national cinemas with
historical and textual analysis of European cinemas. Her book The Political
Films of Andrzej Wajda: Dialogism in Man of Marble, Man of Iron and Danton
(Berghahn Books, 1996) incorporates theories of Mikhail Bakhtin in the
analysis of political cinema. She edited a special issue of  Canadian
Slavonic Papers on ‘National Cinemas in Post War Easy Central Europe’ (Vol.
XLII, Nos. 1-2, March-June 2000) and The New Polish Cinema with  Marek
Haltof  (Flicks Books, 2003). Her newest book, Andrzej Wajda: History,
Politics and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), is
a full film biography of the director. Her current projects deal with issues
of globalization and European unification (especially Austria and Germany),
the cinema of migration and the interpretations of European cinemas in the
context of Bakhtin’s notions of carnivalesque.

Centre for Film Studies
18 November 2008, 5:15 pm, Board Room, 99 North Street

Lars Kristensen, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

Bicycle Cinema: Bikes, Racing and Master Narratives

Moving images of bicycles and its riders are multiple: from the ‘first’
(Leaving the Lumière Factory, 1895), to modern classics like Bicycle Thieves
(1948) and its post-communist remake Beijing Bicycle (2001). Moreover, many
well-known directors have started their filmmaking careers with films that
offer bicycles in pivotal roles, for example, Ridley Scott’s Boy and Bicycle
(1965), Roman Polanski’s lost first film The Bicycle (1955), or Colin
McKenzie in Forgotten Silver (Botes and Jackson, 1995). The topic of this
talk will be cinema’s affinities with the bicycle; as the above-mentioned
films illustrate, the
bicycle and cinema share an intricate relationship.Scanning film theories
for a framing set up, I will be ‘studying sideways’ revealing master
narratives that make possible cross-genre and transnational generic readings
of bicycle cinema. There will be an emphasis on the films that concentrate
on the bike race and, in particular, the documentary films of Danish Jørgen
Leth, The Stars and the Water Carriers (1974) and A Sunday in Hell (1976),
and the autobiographical film, The Flying Scotsman (2006).

Lars Kristensen is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of St.
Andrews. His forthcoming thesis addresses issues of the representations of
transnational cinematic representations and narratives of migrating Russians
from the post-communist period.

Centre for Film Studies
December 2, 2008, 5:15 pm, Board Room, 99 North Street

Bernard Bentley, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

Facing 110 years of Spanish Cinema

Organising and structuring a hundred years of Spanish Cinema presented many
problems and discoveries, some of these will be shared with all those
interested in Cinema History or in Spanish Cinema.

Bernard Bentley is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of 
St Andrews, Head of the Spanish department, and the person behind the
University’s excellent collection of Spanish-language films. He has been
teaching Spanish Cinema since 1976, at first to enhance language acquisiton,
and in the early eighty argued for the inclusion of film studies in the
Faculty. He has supported Film Studies since the Degree and discipline was
first considered important to the Univeristy's programme of studies. He is
also a vital source of information on the intricacies of in-house
regulation, and a member of the Management Group of the Centre for Film
Studies. His new book, A Companion to Spanish Cinema (2008), will be
presented as part of the talk.