With apologies for cross-posting.
Details of the next in our Screen Seminars at Glasgow series.
All welcome!
Breathing Bodies: Sounding Subjectivity in the War Film
Dr Philippa Lovatt (University of Stirling).
5.30pm, Tuesday 21 February
Room 408, Gilmorehill Halls
University of Glasgow
Abstract
War films celebrated for their use of sound such as Saving Private Ryan and The Hurt Locker have tended to focus on the subjective and phenomenological experience of war from the perspective of soldiers, whose agency and placement within the very centre of the action drives the film's narrative. By contrast, the two Iranian films I discuss, Bahram Beizai's Bashu, The Little Stranger (1990) and Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly (2004) record the experience of war from the perspectives of those whose lives have been radically and violently disrupted by it, but who have had no active role in shaping its outcome. In both films, characters rarely speak about their trauma. Instead, embodied sounds and vocalisations are heard on the soundtrack at key points in the narrative to align the spectator with their perspective while at the same time emphasising the characters' vulnerability at the centre of the larger, global 'sensate regimes of war' (Butler 2012, 110). Through close analysis of the sound design in these films, I argue that sound can play a crucial restorative role by articulating a sense of characters' agency and subjectivity often denied to civilian victims of war both in official records and in their cinematic representation. As such I claim that the films offer a radical alternative to dominant conceptualisations of war as depicted in Hollywood cinema, challenging and broadening our understanding of the genre, as well as potentially deepening our understanding of the impact of war on the lives of civilians and refugees.
Bio
Philippa Lovatt is a Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Stirling. Philippa is Primary Investigator of the AHRC funded Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network - 'Promoting Dialogue Across Critical and Creative Practice' and an Associate Editor of The New Soundtrack journal (Edinburgh University Press). She gained her PhD ('Cinema's Spectral Sounds: History, Memory, Politics') from the University of Glasgow in 2011 after which she taught Sound Theory on the MSc Sound Design for the Moving Image programme at Glasgow School of Art. She is currently writing her first monograph on Sound Design and the Ethics of Listening in Global Cinema.
Best,
David
Dr David Archibald
Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies
Direct Line: +44 (0)141 330 3807
Fax: +44 (0)141 330 4142
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https://glasgow.academia.edu/DavidArchibald?c_p=t
Film and Television Studies
School of Culture and Creative Arts
University of Glasgow
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Glasgow, UK, G12 8QQ
www.gla.ac.uk/tfts
The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401
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