Film & Television Studies Podcast
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May 18th, 2009
Subjectivity and Emotion in Documentary Film
In the past documentary has been popularly perceived in ways that align it with education, science, history and other ‘discourses of sobriety’. This frame has never been adequate for conceptualising the stylistic and thematic breadth of documentary culture. In part, documentary is compelling because it frames subjectivity in distinct ways. This paper proposes a refocusing of debates and a renewed methodology to deal with documentary. This methodology will account for how emotionality marries with the social project of documentary in ways that make the non-fiction genre a compelling site for perceiving how fantasies of self and other circulate through specific textual practices in the public sphere. This is an investigation into how individuals are positioned by documentary representation as subjects that are entrenched in the emotions, whether it is pleasure, hope, pain, empathy or disgust. I will draw on a number of salient examples but will pay particular attention to the Brazilian documentary, Bus 174 (2002).
Dr Belinda Smaill works in the Film and Television Studies section of Monash University. Her book on issues of subjectivity and emotion in documentary film will appear by the end of the year.
2008
Film and TV Seminar Series: Sian Mitchell
September 11th 2008
A Historiography of Psychoanalytic Film in Hollywood, 1920-1960
This seminar looks at some of the films influenced by the introduction of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice to the United States in the early 1900s. This was a period where psychoanalysis grew in popularity and support within mass culture before undergoing a crisis within academic and professional circles. Films that will be discussed in this seminar include Carefree (Mark Sandrich, 1938), Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, 1944), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and Freud (John Huston, 1962). Elements such as the image of the analyst and the neurotic patient within these films form an exaggerated and sometimes melodramatic (mis)representation of psychoanalytic practice, however, such insistence on therapy as a narrative device has assisted in its popularisation and ongoing love/hate relationship psychoanalysis has with American cinema.
Under Construction: Tessa Dwyer
August 14, 2008
Slashing and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship and Translation
Based on research undertaken in collaboration with Romanian national Ioana Uricaru, this paper focuses on media piracy in pre-1989 communist Romania involving the translation of banned foreign-language films and television programs. Noting how translation can function both in the service and subversion of censorship, and how both roles are complicated by contradictory notions of quality and authenticity, I begin by pitting Romania’s government-sanctioned translation methods against the unofficial, amateur practices that typify piracy operations. I then proceed to unpack and expand notions of media piracy to include niche, expert and online modes of engagement. It is my contention that the audiovisual translation techniques that accompany both censorship and piracy processes provide a largely unexamined angle from which to interrogate the politics of film exhibition, distribution and reception.
Under Construction: James Curnow
31 July 2008
The Third Wave of Disaster: Science Fiction Cinema and the New Era of Anxiety
Photo: Restroom Signage by Marcin Wichary
The science fiction disaster film has had sporadic success over the last 60 years, the peaks of which can be seen in three distinct waves – those of the 1950s, the 1990s and the 21st century. The wave of the 1950s has largely been seen as a kind of response to the social anxiety brought about by the nuclear threat exemplified by the cold war. The wave of the 1990s can be seen as the result of a rapid increase in special effects technologies and a decade of mild paranoia brought about by millennialism, as well as being a kind of nostalgic reinvention of the SF disaster films of the 1950s, appropriating the imagery whilst detaching it from any real social anxiety.
This paper focuses on a third wave of science fiction (SF) disaster films that has come about in the 21st century as a response to present social anxiety.
Provisional Insight: Film and Television Colloquium
At the start of the 21st Century this colloquium drew together scholars from a diverse range of fields to provide a forum in which the actuality of Siegfried Kracauer’s writings were analysed, debated and explored. Through a detailed engagement with his writings on topics as diverse as film, photography, architecture, popular culture and history, the colloquium illuminates the many continuities and shifts in Kracauer’s thinking that span his early Weimar writings, his work in the immediate post-war period, and the books that he wrote while living in exile in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s.
Recordings of papers may be downloaded here
Speakers include:
- Graeme Gilloch (Lancaster University)
- Lesley Stern (University of California, San Diego)
- Adrian Martin (Monash University)
- Helen Grace (Chinese University Hong Kong)
- Andrew Benjamin (Monash University)
Under Construction: Robert Stam
5 June 2008
From Revolution to Resistance: Alternative Aesthetics in Brazilian Film/Media/Music VideoStam’s talk consists of a taxonomy of aesthetic strategies in Brazilian media aimed at critiquing social/racial exclusion. He presents a series of brief clips (about 15 or so) drawn from fiction films/documentaries/and music videos. The talk is followed by audience discussion.
Robert Stam’s books include: Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2006); Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation (Rutgers, 2006); Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005); Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005); Companion to Literature and Film (Blackwell, 2004); Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000); Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke, 1997); Reflexivity in Film and Literature (UMI Press, 1985); Brazilian Cinema (Associated University Presses, 1982), as well as many co-authored and co-edited books. His works are translated into and published in: French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Farsi, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Under Construction: Adrian Martin
15 May 2008
Social Mise-en-scène: A New Idea in Film Analysis
Adrian Martin (Monash)
The idea of mise en scène has become a classic - meaning historic and traditional – tool in film analysis. Conceived as the ‘creative gesture’ par excellence, the director’s mise en scène (the positioning and moving of actors and camera in relation to an environment) has long been imlicitly or explicitly seen as a way for cinema to give ‘form to the formlessness’ of space, time, body and place. But, more recently, particularly in various parts of Europe, a new idea has emerged: the idea that the ‘pro-filmic’ reality with which cinema frequently works is itself already (as sociology has long investigated) a complex matter of cultural or social mise en scène: a series of customs, rituals and manners that set bodies in circumscribed places and behaviours. Cinema, then, would be the interleaving or collision of two kinds or levels of mise en scène: social mise en scène and artistic mise en scène. My presentation will offer examples, from fiction films by John Ford to Roy Andersson, also taking in comedy and documentary, to demonstrate this fertile new idea in cinema analysis.
Since 1979, Dr. Adrian Martin has combined work as a professional writer and film critic with a university career. He was film reviewer for The Age between 1995 and 2006. For his numerous books, essays and public lectures he has won the Byron Kennedy Award (Australian Film Institute) and the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, and his PhD on film style won the Mollie Holman Award. He is the author of four books and hundreds of essays on film, art, television, literature, music, popular and avant-garde culture.
Under Construction: Claire Perkins
3 April 2008
Your Friends and Neighbours: Recent Suburban Utopias
Claire Perkins (Monash)In February 1998, UK film journal Sight and Sound reached the letter “U” in an “A-Z of Cinema” series and set out a catalogue of various cinematic utopias and dystopias. Unsurprisingly, it was overwhelmingly science fiction works that were cited here as examples of films that animate utopian dialectics: Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927); Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982); Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997). Outside of this paradigm, though, another type of cinema that can be approached in this way is the “suburban nightmare” film that has been exemplified variously in The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1992). Throughout the 1990s, the suburban nightmare became a particularly popular myth for both popular and independent American filmmaking and, of course, popular television (Six Feet Under, Desperate Housewives, Weeds). In much of this work, suburbia appears as a typically inverted utopia: a depersonalised world that, extrapolated from consumer capital, is dominated by attitudes of despair, anxiety and violence. This paper will discuss the articulation of this myth in the more nebulous tendency of the American ‘smart’ film. Drawing on examples including Your Friends and Neighbours (Neil LaBute, 1998), The Safety of Objects (Rose Troche, 2001), Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) and The Chumscrubber (Arie Posin, 2005), the paper will argue for the existence of the ‘suburban smart film’ as a specific anti-utopian type concerned with the exposition of social fact. With particular attention to the example of Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) - a suburban smart science-fiction film - the paper will conclude by considering how some of these films mobilise discourses on becoming to animate a properly utopian dialectic, and advance a new cinematic utopianism.
Under Construction: Gabrielle Murray
20 March 2008
Images of Torture, Images of Terror: Post 9/11 and the Escalation of Screen Violence
Gabrielle Murray (La Trobe)
David Edelstein, the New York Magazine film critic, commenting on the surge in extreme, prolonged graphic torture, abduction, rape and dismemberment in films such as The Devil’s Rejects, Saw, Wolf Creek and Hostel, dubbed the phenomenon “torture porn” (2006). The current box-office success of films like the Saw and Hostel series stunned many critics; most seemed bewildered by young audiences’ thirst for such graphic fare. Edelstein’s uneasy review suggests that the media release of documentary images of US and UK military personal torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib helped feed the escalation of uninhibited images of torture, degradation and mutilation in fiction film. This claim is echoed in most reviews and commentaries on the phenomenon (Barber 2007; Douthat 2006; Rimanelli and Liden 2006; Newman 2006). Furthermore, the critical literature argues increasingly graphic scenes are appearing in a broader range of mainstream and art-house releases.
However, while much of the critical literature agrees that public attitudes toward violent imagery are generally historically determined, most discussion of the nature of the linkages between social and cinematic violence remain circumstantial and speculative (Slocum 2004). This paper poses questions regarding the public and critical perception post 9/11 that there is a direct link between increased visual knowledge of violence and torture in the “real” world acquired from images on television and the internet, with an escalation of representations of explicit violence in the commercial and cultural medium of popular western cinema.
Abel Ferrara: Adrian Martin
21 March 2008
'Abel Ferrara' Book Launch
On the 21st of March Edward Colless launched Adrian Martin's translation of Nicole Brenez's Abel Ferrara (illinois University Press 2007). A crowd of friends and staff of Film and Television Studies at Monash were witness to Edward's extraordinary appraisals of both Nicole's authorship and Adrian's translation and Nicole Brenez herself e-mailed her appreciation to Adrian which was read out by Deane Williams. The launch was followed by a rare screening of Ferrara's Mary (2005) accompanied by wine and food. The launch was very successful with all available copies of Abel Ferrara selling. More copies have been ordered by the Monash Bookshop.
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