Under Construction
Film and TV Studies @ Monash presents a program of seminars and screenings on work in progress in film and TV research and production. Thursdays @ 4pm in S704 (Menzies Bldg, Clayton) 26 July-18 October 2007. Contact: Therese.Davis@arts.monash.edu.au
- 26 July
Adrian Martin (Monash)
En construcción
(“Work in Progress”) José Luis Guerín Spain-France, 2001, 125 min.Over three years, José Luis Guerín recorded with obsessive rigor the demolition of an entire section of the Barrio Chino, a crumbling working-class neighborhood in Barcelona, and the construction of a modern residential complex for the new Catalan middle-class. But as the construction of the city of the future proceeds, the past reasserts itself over and over again: as much in the eerie discovery of an ancient Roman cemetery below the foundations of the new building as in the rich cultural lore revealed in a casual conversation between two old neighbors.
A miracle of observational documentary, Guerín’s incredibly intimate and ubiquitous camera shows how the life of this section of town will be changed, how the old inhabitants will be displaced, along with their customs and words that seem to represent a culture also on the brink of extinction. The immigrants and laborers that the construction brings in each contribute in their turn to the process of transformation of one city into another.
For more information on this film, see José Luis Guerín’s 2004 piece in Rouge
- 2 August
Deane Williams (Monash)
‘“The Evidence is There”: Michael Winterbottom and the New Waves’
On one hand, Winterbottom has featured in top ten lists in Britain and his name has become a moniker of distinction in the promotion of his own films. He has used a consistent creative team and a stable of actors. On the other hand, his name has become synonymous with an oeuvre that skips across genres and styles, often proving connections with a host of filmic influences. In this paper I will reconcile these disparate positions by, first, articulating the ideas which have led to the name “Michael Winterbottom” being associated with a particular oeuvre and, second, turn to those factors which tend to dissipate the idea of Winterbottom as a cohesive single source of a world view and style, and to relocate his films within a constellation of directors, films and, principally European, national cinemas.
- 9 August
John Gillies (College Of Fine Art, UNSW)
Early Video Art in Australia
The recent Centre Pompidou Video Art 1965-2005 at ACMI traced the trends and historical milestones of the genre, from the first appearance of video art in the 1960s to the present day. Those of you who saw the exhibition would have noticed, however, how very little Australian work was included in this international exhibition. In this presentation, John Gillies’ addresses this oversight, presenting rare, key early Australian video works that have impacted on this genre here and elsewhere.
“John Gillies is a mainstay of and inspiration to the Sydney experimental arts scene as video-maker, sound artist, musician and teacher (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) with a long association with Performance Space where a retrospective of his video works is about to be held (April 16-May 13 2004). His new work, the deeply engaging and politically suggestive Divide will premiere later this year. Youth theatre in Queensland, says Gillies, kindled his interest in performance. At Darling Downs College of Advanced Education from 1978 to 1980 he studied film and video with David Perry of UBU fame …” Realtime April-May, 2004.
- 16 August
Alexia Kanas (Monash)
The Fifth Chord (Giornata near per l’ariete) Luigi Bazzoni, Italy, 1971
A particularly stylish example of the Italian giallo genre directed by Luigi Bazzoni, The Fifth Cord stars Franco Nero as a troubled newspaper reporter who becomes involved with a string of brutal murders. This film showcases Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s (The Conformist (1970), Apocalypse Now (1979)) great talent and is accompanied by a hip Ennio Morricone score. Silhouetted live sex shows, creepy modernist locales and a whole lot of stairs – this is giallo cinema at its best!
- 23 August
Therese Davis (Monash)
Cross-Cultural Collaboration and Exchange in Australian Film
Therese Davis presents a paper on the why and how of her current ARC funded research on the cultural history of collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers in Australia from the 1960s to the present.
- 30 August
Sian Mitchell (Monash)
Am I Malkovich? The Search for Masculinity in Being John Malkovich
A seminar exploring the breakdown of traditional psychoanalytic notions of masculinity in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999).
- 6 September
Belinda Smaill (Monash)
Civic Love, the Labour of Authorship and Contemporary Dissent Documentary
Political documentary has enjoyed a remarkable level of popular success in recent years. Much of this wave of documentary draws on reflexive techniques of form and narrative that as Nichols notes “attempt to emphasise epistemological doubt.” This desire to induce doubt is central to what marks these documentaries as an effect of authorial labour. In this mode of documentary in particular the relation between filmmaker and viewer is foregrounded. This paper examines how civic “love” and passion in the form of Socratic questioning coalesce discursively around the documentary filmmaker and the way that this has significant ramifications for apprehending the subjective quality of civic and political activity. If civic love discursively accompanies the labour of this authorship in the public sphere, the profound ambivalence, or the psychic interconnections between love and hate must also be accounted for. Through drawing on filmmakers such as Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11) and Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott (The Corporation) this paper explores this aspect of the performance of authorship and its relationship to the efficacy of dissent in documentary.
- 13 September
Charles Tutton (Monash)
On histories of new media
In the field of new media studies, there is a popular trend to identify new ways to argue that new media isn’t new, through a systematic and categorical description of new media and its essential principles, followed by a process of identifying these principles in art and media which are outside the techno-historical sphere of new media, often dating back to the pre-cinematic era.
- 20 September
Guy Harris (Monash)
D-DAY
An analysis of documentary film culture in the digital age. Presentation, discussion and screening of an independent film entitled ‘Grey Skies Blue’ which is to be digitally launched & released in the Spring of 2007.
- 4 October
Jodi Brooks (UNSW)
The Lure of Disappearance: spectatorship, time, and the unseen.
Jodi Brooks is internationally known for her work on spectatorship and Benjaminian film studies. In this new work she sets out to examine the role of representations and sensations of time in spectatorship, bringing recent debates around film time (Mulvey, Doane) into dialogue with theories of spectatorship.
- 11 October
Anna Poletti (Monash)
DIY culture and autobiographical filmmaking
Anna is a new appointment at Monash Gippsland in writing and communication studies. She is known for her innovative work on Australian zine culture and autobiography. This interdisciplinary paper is her first venture into DIY film culture, looking at Tarnation (2003) and other films.
NB: seminar starts @ 4.30 pm today.
- 18 October
Constantine Verevis (Monash)
Take 2: critical approaches to the sequel
Take 2 (SUNY, forthcoming 2009) – a book of essays on film sequels that I am presently co-editing, with Carolyn Jess-Cooke (U of Sunderland) – is itself a sequel, to my book Film Remakes (2006). In this seminar I talk about my contribution to the anthology – a chapter entitled “Re-defining the Sequel: The Case of the (Living) Dead” – and also the various approaches to the sequel adopted by other contributors. This presentation seeks to provide a critical account of sequelization (and remaking), interrogating the film sequel as a function of a network of commercial interests, textual strategies, critical vocabularies and historical contexts.
END-OF-SEMESTER DRINKS: This seminar will be followed by drinks and eats @ 6pm.