Monash University Film & Television Studies Podcast

Under Construction: James Curnow

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:00:00 +1000

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.

Under Construction: Robert Stam

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:00:00 +1000

5 June 2008

From Revolution to Resistance: Alternative Aesthetics in Brazilian Film/Media/Music Video

Stam’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

Mon, 19 May 2008 17:34:14 +1000

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

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:00:00 +1000

April 3rd 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

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:29:19 +1100

20th 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

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 01:01:00 +1100

21st 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.