Film and Television Studies ‘Under Construction’ Seminar Series
2012 Seminar Series
Convened by Associate Professor Adrian Martin
Download recordings of papers from the links below. For more recordings, see our podcasting page. A series of seminars beginning in August will lead up to, and prepare for the World Cinema Now conference in September.
| 14 March | Threads of Horror: Ero Guro, J-Horror and Japanese ModernityMichael Honig Since the Meiji restoration period, pre-modern culture has been identified with an unadulterated Japanese nation. Two particular threads of Japanese horror can be seen throughout the 20th century: the pre-modern ghost story and the Ero guro genre. In both of these threads, the body is used both as a symbol of transformation and as a metaphor for the state of the Nation. Since the early short stories of Edogawa Rampo, seminal figure of the Ero guro genre, focused on the changing, modernising landscape of Japan and the deformation of the body. In Post-War Japan the tensions of nationalism again appeared in relation to the body. The ebbs and flows of debates concerning nationalism can be seen throughout the Japanese New Wave, the avant-garde dance movement Ankoku-Butoh and Pink film with its increasing violence. Though the area that the paper is mostly concerned with is the extremely violent V-cinema (Japanese straight to video) splatter horror of the 1980s: a period noted for the Japanese economic ascendency and J-Horror of the late 1990s and early 2000s made during a crisis of modernity. Michael Honig is writing his PhD on the J-horror genre at Monash University (FTV/RUFCT). |
| 18 April | Paris in the CinemaProfessor Keith Reader Professor Reader works on various aspects of (primarily but not solely) twentieth-century French culture. In the area of film he has published a monograph on Robert Bresson (Manchester University Press, 2000) and one on Jean Renoir's La Regle du jeu. He has recently finished an article on Resnais's L'Annee derniere a Marienbad as sado-masochistic text - an approach that incorporates his interest in critical theory (in this case the work of Deleuze) and in gender studies. The latter approach largely underpins his monograph, coauthored with Rachel Edwards, on The Papin Sisters (Oxford University Press, 2001 ), and even more markedly his study of male (self-)abjection The Abject Object (Rodopi, 2006), which examines avatars of the abject phallus across a variety of texts - theoretical (Lacan, Kristeva ...), literary (Bataille, Doubrovsky, Houellebecq ...) and cinematic (Godard, Eustache ...). His most recent project builds on a developing interest in the area of cultural topography, by way of a cultural history of the Bastille/Faubourg Saint-Antoine area of Paris. The range of texts here extends from canonical literature (Hugo's Les Miserables) and theory (Benjamin's Paris: capitale du XIXe siecle), through the detective novel (Leo Malet), film (Klapisch's Chacun cherche son chat, Pialat's Police) and less-explored areas still such as chanson and bande dessinee. |
| 16 May | The Figure of La Parisienne in French and US CinemaFelicity Chaplin Roland Barthes defines myth as a signifier of the second order, a type of social usage added to pure matter and adapted to a certain type of consumption. In Louis Malle’s 1965 film Viva Maria!, two mythologies productively intersect: the mythology of la Parisienne and the mythology of striptease. The film stars Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau – the two grandes demoiselles of French cinema of the day – as Maria and Maria, who accidentally found the art of striptease. The aura surrounding Bardot and Moreau, cultivated by their star personae, adds a further layer of significance and consecrates the mythological history of the origins of striptease. This paper will also consider Marc Allégret’s En Effeuillant la Marguerite (1956), Rouben Mamoulian’s Silk Stockings (1957) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Une Femme est une Femme (1961). Felicity Chaplin is a PhD candidate at Monash University, across Film and Television Studies; and Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. Her thesis is titled ‘La Parisienne in Cinema’. |
Past and Present Conferences and Seminars
Visit our archives of conferences and seminars - recordings of many papers are available for download: