*** University of Southampton CIFR Research Seminar Series, Semester 2, 2016-17 ***
Dear Colleagues, Students and Friends,
Sorry for cross-posting.
You are cordially invited to the forthcoming talks of the CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL FILM RESEARCH (CIFR)’s Research Seminar Series at the University of Southampton in Semester 2. All welcome!
SPEAKER: Professor Christine Geraghty (University of Glasgow)
DATE: 7 February 2017, Tuesday
TIME: 4pm - 5:45pm
VENUE: Lecture Theatre B, Building 65, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton
PAPER TITLE:
Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949): A Test Case for New Disciplines
ABSTRACT:
The many adaptations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary have provided fertile grounds for teaching and analysis. In this paper I want to explore how Vincente Minnelli’s 1949 adaptation for MGM has provided a test case for critics from different disciplinary backgrounds. In particular, I want to set the analyses of two seminal critics in adaptation studies (George Bluestone and Robert Stam) against the early work of two film studies scholars (Lesley Stern and Robin Wood). I will use this analysis to provide a brief account of the different approaches to classic Hollywood in both disciplines and to suggest that the new methods which formed the basis of Film Studies as a discipline in the 1970s and 1980s offered a more complex account of a film which can be best understood as ‘a film in which the internal contradictions turn its apparent ideological function against itself’. (‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’, J. Comolli and P. Narboni). But I would suggest this exchange (or lack of it) illustrates how Film Studies at that point was predicated on a lack of interest in adaptations as adaptations while Adaptation Studies’ pre-occupation with the movement from book to film hampered even its most radical theorists. In conclusion, I will reflect briefly on current interest in the study of adaptations and would welcome comments on that in the discussion.
SPEAKER’S BIO:
Professor Christine Geraghty is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She began her career by studying and then teaching part-time with British Film Institute and University of London in the 1970s and 1980s and took up her first fulltime academic post at Goldsmiths College in 1993. She has published extensively on film and television with a particular interest in fiction and form. Her books include Women and Soap Opera (Polity, 1991); British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (Routledge, 2000), Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) and Bleak House (Palgrave/BFI, 2012). Her most recent work includes essays on Atonement (2007), The Knack . . . (1965) and The Iron Lady (2011). She is on the editorial board of the Journal of British Cinema and Television and on the advisory boards of a number of journals, including Adaptation, CST and Screen. She was for 10 years chair of the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association.
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SPEAKER: Dr William Brown (University of Roehampton)
DATE: 14 February 2017, Tuesday
TIME: 4pm - 5:45pm
VENUE: Lecture Theatre B, Building 65, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton
PAPER TITLE:
Drone Film Theory: The Immanentisation of Kinocentrism
ABSTRACT:
As philosopher Grégoire Chamayou (2015) suggests, the drone in some senses is the perfection of war: a flying camera with weapons, it sees all and can strike anywhere, at any time, and with no danger of the loss of human life – for the side operating the machine if not for their opponents. With Paul Virilio (1989) in mind, then, war has become cinema (with some gaming components thrown in for good measure). Or rather, the drone crystalises the cinematic logic – or the kinocentrism – of the contemporary world: total surveillance, the reduction of the other to an image, killing become fun. What is more, through its eradication of the possibility of death (for the side operating it), the drone signals war without risk, perhaps even war without war.
Meanwhile, the use of drones has become increasingly commonplace in cinema, perhaps especially in documentaries. With its connotations of power through surveillance and the verticality of the ‘drone shot’, we might theorise a democratization of cinema – in that ‘anyone’ now can put together a film featuring drone imagery. However, in other senses the drone shot signals an aspiration towards a cinema without risk, created at a distance and with a reduced possibility of loss, or change, for the film’s makers, and by extension its viewers. In this way, the near-omnipresent drone shot signals not cinema at war with itself – what in the spirit of Jacques Rancière (2006) we might characterise as an aesthetic struggle over politics and a political struggle over aesthetics – but a near-total capitulation to the logic of cinema, or the immanentisation of kinocentrism.
REFERENCES:
Chamayou, Grégoire (2015) Drone Theory (trans. Janet Lloyd), London: Penguin.
Rancière, Jacques (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics (trans. Gabriel Rockhill), London: Continuum.
Virilio, Paul (1989) War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (trans. Patrick Camiller), London: Verso.
SPEAKER’S BIO:
Dr William Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Berghahn, 2013), and Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (with Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, St Andrews Film Studies, 2010). He is also the co-editor of Deleuze and Film (with David Martin-Jones, Edinburgh University Press, 2012). He has published numerous essays in journals and edited collections, and has directed various films, including En Attendant Godard (2009), Circle/Line (2016), Letters to Ariadne (2016) and The Benefit of Doubt (2017).
***
Run by the Film department at the University of Southampton, the Centre for International Film Research (CIFR) is a research centre that provides an interdisciplinary forum for research into film. The CIFR showcases the university’s research excellence while engaging wider communities through public events, visiting speakers and research initiatives.
For more information about CIFR’s research seminar series:
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/film/news/seminars/latest.page
For more information about CIFR members’ research:
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/film/research/index.page
Best,
Ruby
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Dr Ruby Cheung
Lecturer in Film Studies
University of Southampton
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
UK
Latest Publication: New Hong Kong Cinema: Transitions to Becoming Chinese in 21st-Century East Asia<http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=CheungNew>
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