GEOGRAPHY, FILM, AND VISUAL CULTURE

A one-day symposium hosted by the King's Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre (KISS-DTC)
Supported by the Department of Film Studies, King's College London

0930-1650, Wednesday, 30th April 2014
Nash Lecture Theatre, K2.31, King's Building
Strand Campus, King's College London

In the past twenty years, there has been a surge in scholarly interest in the relationship between geography, film, and visual culture as part of a broader reconfiguration of the relationship between the humanities and social sciences. This has entailed an increasing tendency among historians and theorists of film and other visual media to think geographically, use geographical methods, and draw on the work of particular geographers; and it has entailed an increasing interest among geographers in the forms and practices of visual media as objects of study, and in issues of representation. Studies of the city, landscape, place, and globalization have been especially enriched by this trend.

This one-day symposium is intended to provide an opportunity to reflect on these developments and speculate on their future, to hear a range of papers from various disciplinary backgrounds, and to discuss some key questions around which they revolve: What is the value of thinking about film and visual culture geographically? What insights and methods can those based in the arts and humanities gain from geography? What can geographers learn from a consideration of film and visual culture that they cannot learn from other sources? What insights from the arts and humanities can geographers put into action in their own work?

Attendance at the symposium is free of charge, though prior registration is strongly advised as places are limited. No prior study of the geography/film/visual culture intersection is required – the event is designed to be of interest to specialists and non-specialists alike. All are welcome.


0930-1000      Dr Mark Shiel (Film Studies and KISS-DTC, KCL), Welcome and Opening remarks

1000-1100      Keynote 1, Professor Stanley Corkin (Comparative Literature, Cincinnati), "The Spaces of cinema and the places of films: Hollywood and (mostly) urban geography"

1100-1120      Tea and coffee (provided)

1120-1250      Panel 1
Dr Martha Shearer (Film Studies, KCL), "Place, genre and studio production: New York and the Hollywood musical"
Viktoria Vona, (Geography, KCL), "Artivist documentaries: Resisting gentrification in New York and London"
Searle Kochberg (Creative Technologies, Portsmouth), "Finding place in [sub]urban space: Gay Jewish Male life stories filmed on the streets of London"

1250-1350      Lunch (buffet provided)

1350-1450      Keynote 2, Professor Matthew Gandy (Geography, UCL), "Cinematic Landscapes"

1450-1510      Tea and coffee (provided)

1510-1610      Panel 2
Dr Johan Andersson (Geography, KCL), "Dispossession and the picturesque: the ruinous cinematic landscape of New York City 1980-1985"
Dr Jinhee Choi (Film Studies, KCL), "Korean gangsters in urban spaces: Seoul, Busan or somewhere near"

1610-1650      Roundtable discussion


**To register, or for any enquiries, please contact:**
Dr Mark Shiel, Department of Film Studies, King's College London, The Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
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Department of Film Studies, King's College London
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/filmstudies/index.aspx

King's Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre (KISS-DTC)
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/pg/school/dtc/welcome.aspx


Biographies of speakers

Johan Andersson is Lecturer in Urban and Cultural Geography at King's College London. He has a BA in literature and art history from Stockholm University and a PhD from the Bartlett, UCL Faculty of the Built Environment, on contemporary queer nightlife in London. He is the co-author of Planning on the Edge: The Context for Planning at the Rural-Urban Fringe (Routledge, 2006) and has published essays in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Antipode, and Urban Studies. Recently, he has turned to cinema in an attempt to merge Marxist methodological approaches from urban geography with work on spectatorship in Film Studies. The first output from this research is an article on Michael Haneke's Code Unknown in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (vol. 31, 2013).

Jinhee Choi is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London. With a BA and MA in Aesthetics from Seoul National University she also has two PhDs — one in Philosophy and the other in Film Studies — from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her books include the monograph The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs (Wesleyan UP, 2010) and two co-edited volumes, Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, with Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (Hong Kong UP, 2009) and Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions in Film Theory, Practice and Spectatorship, with Matthias Frey (Routledge, 2013). Recently, she has also published the book chapters "Exiled in Macau: Hong Kong Neo-Noir and Paradoxical Lyricism", in E. Yau & T. Williams (eds.), Hong Kong Neo-Noir (Hong Kong UP, 2013) and "Multinational Casts and Epistemic Risk: The Case of Pan-Asian Cinema", in M. Hjort (ed.), Film and Risk (Wayne State UP, 2012).

Stanley Corkin is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati and one of the most important historians of film and media whose work examines the interaction of cinema, media and cities. He is the author of Starring New York: Filming the Grime and the Glamour of the Long 1970s (Oxford UP, 2011), Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History (Temple UP, 2004) and Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States: Cinema, Literature, and Culture (Georgia UP, 1996). His fourth monograph The Wire: Space, Race, and the Wonders of Post-Industrial Baltimore is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2014.

Matthew Gandy is a Professor in the Department of Geography at University College London. He is the author of Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (MIT Press, 2002) and the editor of The Return of the White Plague: Global Poverty and the 'New' Tuberculosis (with Alimuddin Zumla; Verso, 2003), Hydropolis: Wasser und die Stadt der Modene (with Susanne Frank; Frankfurt: Campus, 2006), Urban Constellations (Berlin: Jovis, 2011), and The Acoustic City (with B. J. Nilsen, Berlin: Jovis, 2014). He has contributed essays on film to Screening the City (Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds, Verso, 2003), Landscape and Film (Lefebvre, Routledge, 2006), Geography and the Humanities (Richardson et al, eds, Routledge, 2010), and The Blackwell Companion to Werner Herzog (Praeger, ed., Blackwell, 2012). His next monograph, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination, is forthcoming with MIT Press.

Searle Kochberg is a maker of and writer on cinema and other performing arts. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Portsmouth in Auto-ethnographic Film and Jewish London. He teaches film studies, directing and script (fiction and nonfiction) at the same institution. His short films have included Leaving the Table (2007) and L'Esprit de l'Escalier (2010) both of which enjoyed exposure at several international film festivals. He has edited the textbook Introduction to Documentary Production (2002) and contributed to Introduction to Film Studies (2012) and Promotion in the Age of Convergence (2012). His only play, Isle of Joy was presented as a workshop performance at the Tristan Bates Theatre, London, 2007.

Martha Shearer completed her PhD in Film Studies at King's College London in 2013. Her doctoral research concerned the relationship between New York City's postwar transformation and its representation in the Hollywood musical. She teaches film and media studies at King's and the LSE and has also taught at Kingston University and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Mark Shiel is Reader in Film Studies and Urbanism in the Department of Film Studies at King's College London. He is the author of two monographs - Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles (Reaktion Books, 2012) and Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 2006) - and the editor of Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Blackwell, 2001) and Screening the City (Verso, 2003), both with Tony Fitzmaurice. He is currently editing and contributing to a collection of new essays entitled Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968 (Temple UP, forthcoming 2015). At King's, he is also the convener of Theme 8 of the King's Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre (KISS-DTC) which deals with "Urbanization, Globalization, and Social Change".

Viktoria Vona is currently pursuing a PhD in Geography at King's College London where she is also a member of the Cities Group. Having spent the first decade of her life in communist Hungary, she experienced rapid social change first hand, developing interests in democracy and social and economic equality which she pursued in art by completing a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art. The topic of her PhD is 'The Role of Artists in Resisting Gentrification in London and New York City'.



Dr Mark Shiel
Reader in Film Studies and Urbanism
Department of Film Studies
King's College London
The Strand, London WC2R 2LS
United Kingdom
Tel.: +44-20-78482024
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/filmstudies/index.aspx
http://www.markshiel.com/