Research Under Construction - Film & TV Studies Seminar Series

Gabrielle Murray (La Trobe)

Images of Torture, Images of Terror: Post 9/11 and the Escalation of Screen Violence

There is enormous unease in western society about the affects on audiences of being exposed to screen violence. An overriding perception exists in the critical discourse that an upsurge in “film violence” in popular western cinema occurred in relation to the social upheaval of “the Sixties” (Alloway 1971; Slocum 2001 & 2004; Schneider 2004; Prince 1998 & 2000). Similarly, current public and critical perception is that there is a strong link—a contagion—between violence in society since 9/11 and the escalation of images of explicit violence on the screen.

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.

Dr Gabrielle Murray is a Lecturer in the Cinema Studies program at La Trobe University in Australia. Her research areas include screen violence, phenomenology, film and philosophy, and aesthetics. She teaches a course on “Violence and the Cinema” and has published in several journals including Metro, Senses of Cinema and Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media. She has contributed chapters to the anthologies The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand (Wallflower Press 2007) and Super/Heroes (New Academic Publishing 2007) and is the author of This Wounded Cinema, This Wounded Life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah (Praeger 2004). Her article “Representations of the Body in Pain and the Cinema Experience in Torture-Porn”, is forthcoming in Jumpcut in Spring 2008.

Claire Perkins (Monash)

Your Friends and Neighbours: Recent Suburban Utopias

Dianne Daley (Monash)

A special Apitchapong Weerasethakul screening

Tropical Malady (Sud Pralad)

A film by internationally acclaimed experimental Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong (Joe) Weerasethakul. Cannes Festival Jury Prize winner (2004), Tropical Malady at first appears to be a relatively straightforward story of the developing, and at times tentative, gay relationship between a soldier and young villager. But the film takes an abrupt, unexpected and emotionally charged change of direction into the jungle. This highly personal, feature-length, experimental narrative, characteristically pushes boundaries and has puzzled critics. From the mundane to the mythical or supernatural and in “the space between”, the film operates on many levels, especially on the senses and heart, and can’t be easily categorised.

Eleanor Kaufman

The Botany of Inertia

This talk is co-sponsored by Communications and Media Studies

A lively discussion of the role and significance of botany in the annals of philosophy from the Ancient Greeks, and Linnaeus in 18th century France, through to Foucault, Sartre and Lacan (who once remarked that it is “infinitely painful to be a plant”) … from botanophilia to botanophobia.

Eleanor Kaufman is associate professor of Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies, and an affiliate in Jewish Studies. She received an A.B. in English and French from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University and has taught at Cornell University and the University of Virginia. Her primary research is on twentieth-century French philosophy, with secondary interests in Medieval Christian philosophy, literature and philosophy of the Jewish diaspora, Maghrebian literature, and modern American literature. She is the co-editor of Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture (Minnesota, 1998) and the author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001) and At Odds with Badiou: Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (forthcoming, Columbia University Press). She is working on three additional book-length projects: “Gilles De leuze and the World without Others”; “The Incorporeal in French Phenomenology” (the subject of the Gauss Seminars that she will be delivering at Princeton in spring 2009); and “The Jewry of the Plain,” on the archives, museums, and cemeteries that commemorate Jewish settlement in remote regions of the American West at the end of the nineteenth century, and simultaneously a meditation on the work of Jacques Derrida. She has published essays in journals such as diacritics, parallax, SAQ, Postmodern Culture, The Oxford Literary Review, Criticism, Polygraph and Angelaki.