FRIDAY 5th SEPTEMBER
Conference Registration: 2.00-3.00pm – myra mcculloch foyer
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welcome: 3.00-3.15pm– bob kayley studio
Welcome to the conference by Alison Butler, the Head of the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading
Introduction to the conference by organisers John Gibbs & Lisa Purse
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Screening: 3.15-4.40pm
Prinzessin (Birgit Grosskopf, 2006) 82 minutes – BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
Starring Irina Potapenko, Henriette Müller, Desirée Jaeger, and Amina Schichterich
A searing portrait of four disenfranchised young women living in the public housing slums of a dismal West German suburb. Focusing on the camaraderie and tensions of this feisty group, the film is a subtle exploration of alienation, aggression, and friendship. Spare, beautiful cinematography, a witty script and committed performances produce a harrowing but fascinating film that surprises and discomfits from its first moments.
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Coffee: 4.40-5.00pm– Myra mcculloch foyer
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Keynote: 5.00-6.30pm – bob kayley studio
Chaired by John Gibbs
Douglas Pye, Visiting Fellow in Film, University of Reading – At the border: the limits of knowledge in No Country for Old Men (Ethan & Joel Coen, 2007) and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005)
These films have a good deal in common, not least the presence of Tommy Lee Jones playing veteran men of the West – iconically, a cowboy and a sheriff - in stories set in West Texas and concerned with the porous border between the USA and Mexico. I want to focus on one aspect of point of view – the access to knowledge about the films’ worlds – as it affects the Tommy Lee Jones characters (very much the moral centre of each film) and our position as spectators. In different ways the films significantly limit the characters’ knowledge and understanding while refusing the spectator broader perspectives - with parallel effects on the values and ways of seeing tacitly endorsed.
Biography: Douglas Pye is recently retired but he remains closely involved with Department of Film, Theatre & Television, of which he was Head for many years. A member of the Movie editorialboard from 1976, he has written a range of important essays on film and film analysis, including ‘Seeing by Glimpses: Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia’ (1988), ‘Film Noir and Suppressive Narrative: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt’ (1992), ‘In and Around The Paradine Case: Control, Confession and the Claims of Marriage’ (2004), and ‘Movies and Point of View’ (2000). His books include: The Movie Book of the Western (1996, co-edited with Ian Cameron), Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (2005, co-edited with John Gibbs). He is series co-editor (with John Gibbs) of Close-Up, an annual series devoted to the close analysis of film and television, in which his own study ‘Movies and Tone’ was published in 2007. He was co-organiser of the Style & Meaning conference which took place at Reading in the year 2000.
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DINNER: 6.30-8.30pm – BULMERSHE DINING HALL
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SCREENINGS: 8.30-10.30pm – VARIOUS ROOMS
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BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1981) 125 mins
Starring Barbara Hershey, Ron Silver, David Labiosa and Margaret Blye
The story of a Californian woman who is repeatedly and brutally assaulted by an unseen presence. Terrified of what's happening to her, she initially turns to therapy for treatment. Yet as the attacks become more extreme and her trust in the doctors falters, she seeks help from parapsychologists.
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B147
Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton, 2007) 116 mins
Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jamie Campbell Bower and Laura Michelle Kelly
The film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's award-winning 1979 stage musical. It re-tells the Victorian melodramatic tale of Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp), a fictitious English barber who, driven insane by the loss of his wife and daughter, murders his customers with a cut-throat razor, and with the help of his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), turns their remains into meat pies.
The film won a number of awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, and the Academy Award for Best Art Direction.
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BG78
The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006) 151 mins
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga, Ray Winstone and Alec Baldwin.
Scorsese’s remake of Hong Kong Thriller Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau & Alan Mak, 2002) takes place in Boston, Massachusetts, where notorious Irish Mob boss Francis "Frank" Costello (Jack Nicholson) plants his protégé Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) as an informant within the Massachusetts State Police. Simultaneously, the police assign undercover cop William Costigan Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) to infiltrate Costello's crew.
The film won four Academy Awards in 2007, including the Best Picture, and Best Director.
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SATURDAY 6th SEPTEMBER
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION: 8.30-9.00am – Myra mcculloch foyer
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Panel Session A: 9.00 – 10.30am – Various ROOMS
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Impact of digital practices - BOB KAYLEY
Chaired by Iris Luppa
Sheena Scott - Hidden images, hidden histories: the consequences of the digital on the cinema through an analysis of Michael Haneke’s Caché
Abstract: This paper is a close analysis of Michael Haneke’s Caché and will explore how contemporary cinema’s filmic space and form have changed. Generally in films, the colour or definition of the images change to delimit different temporalities or places within the narrative, for example the film will turn black and white to denote that the narrative is jumping into the past. Jean-Luc Godard’s Eloge de l’amour, for example does the exact opposite, the first part, the present time, was shot in black and white with a 16mm camera, whereas the second part, showing the past, was shot in colour with a DV camera. Caché, however, does no such thing. The shots from the anonymous tapes and those that show the past memory/dreams of the protagonist, George, look the same as the shots of the film itself. They were all filmed with a High Definition digital camera. Thus confusing the cinematic image with television, surveillance video and digital home camcorders. I will therefore first discuss how cinema has changed due to the emergence of digital cameras and video, and then secondly how this might have affected the way the spectator watches a film.
Biography: I am currently doing a PhD at University College London writing a thesis on the relation of the sense of touch with the cinema, focusing on post-war French cinema. I took a Masters in Film Studies at UCL, which I completed with Distinction. I graduated with first-class honours in a BA in French.
Jenna Ng - Here’s looking at you: the point (of view) of handheld aesthetics in The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield
Abstract: This paper critically interprets the point of view in the aesthetics of the handheld camera, whereby the entire film consists of “footage” shot by its characters in the style of a home video. This motion sickness-inducing aesthetic choice—what Roger Ebert terms “QueasyCam”—has been effectively used in horror thrillers such as TheBlair Witch Project (1999) and, more recently, Cloverfield (2007). The incessant filming which facilitates the handheld aesthetic is only made possible by the technologies of an omnipresent camera—lightweight, cheap and typically digital. Through close analyses of Witch and Cloverfield, I argue that the POV of this (omni)camera emphatically amplifies the effect of the handheld style, primarily in presenting all the horror and havoc of its diegetic world as a superordinated form of suture—not via editing but, rather, by pulling over a Strange Days-esque SQUID.1 Like a Vertovian nightmare, our vision is circumscribed by the camera’s lens which is utterly machinic, robotic and dispassionate. In its unforgiving totality and impassiveness, I ultimately argue that the camera itself becomes an object of horror: here’s looking at you, and all the witches in the trees, and all the carnage around you, and there is absolutely nothing you can do.
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1 In Kathryn Bigelow’s film, Strange Days, SQUID stands for “superconducting quantum interference device”, a virtual reality machine which plugs directly into the brain so that someone’s past experience can be viewed, sensed and played back to a client as if he/she was experiencing it so directly through the mind and body of that person.
Biography: Jenna Ng is a final-year doctoral candidate in Film Studies at University College London (UCL), where she is currently writing a thesis on time and the image. She has previously published in online journals and edited collections on memory, cinephilia, digital technologies and cinema and the city as well as various film reviews.
Michael Pigott - The analogue-digital feedback loop: video game aesthetics in Children of Men.
Abstract: This paper will argue that Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006) is clearly influenced by the visual style and strategies of involvement discernible in video games with first-person viewpoints. This will be demonstrated by identifying a series of distinct points of similarity between the film and the recent WWII set first-person-shooter Call of Duty (Infinity Ward/Activision, 2003). The adoption of these stylistic modalities is made possible by innovations in digital technology and a growing awareness of the conventions, pleasures and possibilities of video gaming.
Through an analysis of some of the most spectacular sequences in Children of Men I will examine the ways in which the influence of video games manifests itself within the formal and structural fabric of the film, and try to determine exactly what it is these effects are doing to the relationship between the viewer, the camera, and the world of the film. From here, I will argue that these characteristics achieve much more than simply injecting some of the thrill and immediacy of video games into feature film – they also work within and contribute to the thematic and narrative scheme of the film as a whole.
Biography: Michael Pigott is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick (UK). His area of specialization is film aesthetics, focusing on the ontological and stylistic relationship between time and film. Michael has work forthcoming on the representation of memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and on the treatment of time in Ozu Yasujiro’s Late Spring.
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FRAGMENTED TEXTS – Studio 2
Chaired by Kathrina Glitre
James Walters - Fragmentation and coherence in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill vol. 1 & 2
Abstract: Recently described as “largely lessons in how to borrow styles gracefully” (Booker 2007: 93), Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films provide a sometimes frenetic collage of aesthetic tones and strategies that might be seen to compromise notions of coherence, credibility and unity in relation to the films’ fictional world. Taking such issues into account, this paper seeks to determine the extent to which patterns and significant relationships are established and pursued within the films, and how sequences combine to form a discernible reality in which the characters exist. Within the confines of this debate, and through close analysis of key moments from both films, I am interested in how the words, actions, attitudes and sensibilities of particular characters relate meaningfully to the world they inhabit, reflecting its tone and nature as well as its opportunities, restrictions, codes of conduct and social hierarchies. In the course of this discussion, I propose that the fragmented style of the Kill Bill films provides occasion for detailed consideration of its fictional world as a coherent reality experienced by its characters, rather than restricting claims for significance only to matters of pastiche, parody and self-conscious cultural borrowings.
References:
Booker, M. Keith (2007) Postmodern Hollywood: what’s new in film and why it makes us feel so strange, Westport: Praeger.
Biography: James Walters is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema (Intellect, 2008) and is currently writing a second book, Fantasy Cinema (Berg, forthcoming). He has chapters appearing in the collections Film and Television After DVD (Routledge, 2008) and Violating Time: History, Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Lucy Fife -The death of performance? Questions of post-studio style and meaning in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Abstract: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is now over thirty years old, nonetheless it still offers a considerable and unmet critical challenge to any detailed approach. Its visual style represents a significant formal rupture to continuity between classical and contemporary, even more so than current horror texts. Through close analysis this paper will explore the film’s stylistically intricate form, examining the means by which it complicates the way we receive information and thus deliberately raises questions about interpretation.
As a method of exploring the extent of this challenge I will explore the potential of performance analysis to open up ways of engaging with the post-studio horror film. The way the performers’ bodies are used and placed within the space of the film suggests that there is an attempt to alter engagement with the characters, yet in the case of such an excessive fragmentation of a performer’s body, does severe lack of characterisation mean there is no performance to discuss? I aim to examine whether the film’s apparent rejection of attention to performance is genuine, and if this is the case does it mean that in the post-studio period, performance can be so different, so unconcerned with character, as to become an impossible consideration?
Biography: Lucy Fife is a third year PhD student in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, researching performance in the post-studio horror film, with particular focus on the materiality of performance and its relationship to elements of film style. She received her Research MA in Film from the University of Reading and her BA in Film and English Literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury.
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Visibilities of Style – BG78
Chaired by Mark Broughton
Jacob Leigh - Eric Rohmer’s Visible Camera
Abstract: Despite arguing, in 1965, that ‘a cinema where the camera is invisible can be a modern cinema’, Rohmer has sometimes created moments where the camera’s work claims our attention. This paper will focus on three examples of Rohmer’s ‘visible camera’. William Rothman has noted that one similarity between Rohmer’s work and Hitchcock’s work is that neither the Hitchcock thriller nor the Rohmer comedy can be defined without characterising ‘the role the figure of the author plays within its world’. Le Rayon vert and Conte d’hiver manifest the controlling responsibility of the director through a form of internal doubling: both refer to their germinating source material (Verne and Shakespeare). In doing so, both films invite us to recognise the framework supporting their stories. Unlike these two examples, Rohmer’s three ensemble comedies (Pauline à la plage, L’Ami de mon amie and Conte d’automne) use the insistency of a camera movement to highlight the structure of the films’ narratives. The ‘visibility’ of the camera movements focuses our attention on the interlocking trajectories of the multiple characters. Each of these moments features a movement by the camera that highlights its independence from the characters and draws our attention to Rohmer’s control.
Biography: Jacob Leigh BA, MA, PhD (Lecturer, Media Arts, Royal Holloway)
My publications include The Cinema of Ken Loach and Reading Rohmer, published in Close-Up 02. I am currently writing The Cinema of Eric Rohmer for Wallflower Press. I have also published an article on Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line in CineAction and an article on Rohmer’s Conte d’automne in the FIPRESCI online journal Undercurrent. At Royal Holloway, I teach courses on Film Aesthetics, Documentary, Hitchcock, Hollywood Star Performances, Critical Theory and Textual Analysis.
Elif Akçali - Discontinuities in contemporary cinema: a new continuity and a new convention
Abstract: Discontinuity, fragmentation and absence are often keywords in descriptions of a new style in contemporary narrative cinema of the past decade. Conventional techniques of storytelling have been transformed: non-linearity in the editing of a film, use of shorter shots and faster cuts or lack of continuity and causality in terms of time and space are common practices. Style in many contemporary films is a part of the narrative; instead of disrupting our engagement with the stories, it adds to their meaning and coherence. Discontinuities, fragmentations and absences now form a new continuity; once viewed as unconventional and as resisting the established forms of filmmaking, they have become conventional choices.
Referring to Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) and L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962), I will trace how absences, discontinuities and fragmentations were once used in cinema. I will then contrast this usage with a discussion of how their functions have reformed in time by using examples from contemporary cinema such as Dogville and Manderlay (Lars von Trier, 2003 and 2005), Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004).
Biography: Elif Akçalı is a second year PhD student at the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests include film style and narrative in contemporary cinema, digital filmmaking, film history and criticism.
Belén Vidal - The mannerist aesthetic: fragments and figures in the contemporary heritage film
Abstract: In this paper I would like to explore the notion of a mannerist style concerned with the period aesthetics in the heritage film. Whereas notions of ‘realism’ and ‘authenticity’ have proved an uneasy fit to describe these contemporary reconstructions of the past, the term mannerism can be used to refer to the increasing importance of the fragment and the figure to evoke historical intertexts. Following Adrian Martin’s suggestion that mannerism defines film-making practices in which ‘style performs out on its own trajectories, no longer working unobtrusively at the behest of the fiction and its demands of meaningfulness’, I contend that the pleasures of the heritage film, often reduced to pastiche and nostalgia by its critics, can be situated in the play with repetition and variation of visual figures in the period mise-en-scène.1The simultaneous readability and self-consciousness that imbue figures such as ‘the house’ or ‘the letter’ often arises as the stylistic raison d’être in period fictions and new adaptations of classic texts. Thus, the consideration of a ‘mannerist mode’ in period aesthetics allows for an interrogation of motifs as visual fragments obeying to their own (intertextual) logic. By looking at one recurrent figure - ‘the house’ – this paper examines the affective variations proposed by the heritage film in relation to the return of national iconographies at a moment of weakening of the national, i.e. of dislocation of national cinemas in the global circuits of production and reception.