Under Construction Semester 2
Film and Television Studies presents a program of seminars and screenings on work in progress in film and TV research and production. Fortnightly Thursdays @ 4pm, March to July 2008. Contact: Therese.Davis@arts.monash.edu.au
Recordings of some of the presentations in this series are available from the Film & Television Studies Podcast or by clicking the individual links below.
- July 31
-
James Curnow
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. This anxiety is fuelled by a multiplicity of events, including but not limited to those of September 11; the Iraq war and the subsequent shift in the standing of the United States; as well as the theory of global warming. This wave, like that of the 1990s, appropriates and references the films of the 1950s. However, unlike the films of the 1990s, these films self-consciously declare their own status as representations of contemporary social anxiety, drawing comparison between the first wave’s preoccupation with the nuclear and the contemporary wave’s preoccupation with present concerns. These films also differ from predecessors in their aesthetic of realism and a shifting of focus from images of destruction themselves, to a focus on the way in which characters react to these disastrous environments – the imagery of destruction being too close for comfort in the 21st century.
James Curnow is now into the eighth month of his Masters thesis, currently entitled Imagining the Next Disaster. The focus of this thesis is on the science fiction disaster film and the way in which it seems to obtain popularity under specific social and cultural conditions. A prior honours thesis on the contemporary Hollywood biopic and the representation of history has fostered this interest in the relationship between films and their broader social context. James has recently written a review of Christine Cornea’s Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy & Reality, which will appear in the upcoming issue of Screening the Past.
- August 14
-
Tessa Dwyer
Slashing and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship and Translation
Based on research undertaken in collaboration with Romanian national Ioana Uricaru, this paper focuses on media piracy in pre-1989 communist Romania involving the translation of banned foreign-language films and television programs. Noting how translation can function both in the service and subversion of censorship, and how both roles are complicated by contradictory notions of quality and authenticity, I begin by pitting Romania’s government-sanctioned translation methods against the unofficial, amateur practices that typify piracy operations. I then proceed to unpack and expand notions of media piracy to include niche, expert and online modes of engagement. It is my contention that the audiovisual translation techniques that accompany both censorship and piracy processes provide a largely unexamined angle from which to interrogate the politics of film exhibition, distribution and reception.
Tessa Dwyer is a doctoral candidate in the School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne, researching issues surrounding film and translation. Her film articles have been published in journals such as The South Atlantic Quarterly, Polygraph and Linguistica Antverpiensia, and in the anthology A Deleuzian Century? (1995). Currently co-editing a special issue of the online journal Refractory on the subject of the split screen, she is the former Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography and a member of the World Picture e-journal advisory board. Her article ‘Slashings and Subtitles’ on which this talk is based, is forthcoming in The Velvet Light Trap.
- August 28
-
John Conmos
Mutant Media: Cinema, Video Art and New Media
John Conomos is a media artist, critic, and theorist who extensively exhibits both locally and internationally. His art practice cuts across a variety of art forms - video, new media, installation, performance and radiophonic art - and deals with autobiography, identity, memory, post-colonialism, and the “in-between” links between cinema, literature and the visual arts. He is a prolific contributor to local and overseas art, film and media journals and a frequent participant in conferences, forums and seminars. In 2000 he was awarded a New Media Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts. His recent book Mutant Media (Artspace/Power Publications, Sydney) collects his essays from over a 20-year period.
In his presentation, John will discuss issues arising from Mutant Media, illustrated with clips.
- September 11
-
Sian Mitchell
A Historiography of Psychoanalytic Film in Hollywood, 1920-1960
This seminar looks at some of the films influenced by the introduction of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice to the United States in the early 1900s. This was a period where psychoanalysis grew in popularity and support within mass culture before undergoing a crisis within academic and professional circles. Films that will be discussed in this seminar include Carefree (Mark Sandrich, 1938), Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, 1944), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and Freud (John Huston, 1962). Elements such as the image of the analyst and the neurotic patient within these films form an exaggerated and sometimes melodramatic (mis)representation of psychoanalytic practice, however, such insistence on therapy as a narrative device has assisted in its popularisation and ongoing love/hate relationship psychoanalysis has with American cinema.
Sian Mitchell is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at Monash University, researching parody, psychoanalysis, and therapy culture in the films of Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze.
- September 25
-
Dr Melissa Gregg
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of QueenslandWork on TV
Moving beyond the established benchmarks of crime, law and medicine, the past ten years has seen an expansion in the number of workplaces depicted as prime time television entertainment. Not only have these shows created new opportunities for empathy with employees at the front line of the service industry (airlines, beauty, and border security, for example) they have positioned the viewer as a knowing insider to an ever greater range of jobs beyond their own training and expertise – an extension of what John Hartley calls television’s ‘cross-demographic’ function.
From the White House to the underworld, the kitchen to the office park, work on TV has been one of the most successful of recent television genres, reaching its zenith in a suite of programs that have dramatised the art of TV production itself. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, 30 Rock, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Extras all base their appeal on familiarity with the routines of the cultural industries and the vicissitudes of portfolio careers, providing fresh possibilities for TV content in the process. Coming at a time of increased union activity with the 2007 writers’ strike and its associated publicity, these programs deliberately confused insider/outsider status: viewers were invited to identify not only with the fate of creative talent but also the challenges they posed to management.
This paper suggests that on the surface these shows can be read as evidence of a new style of labour politics befitting the creative economy, where narcissistic self-representations are used to articulate and justify a devalued work ethic. Yet in a post-broadcast era, they might also be regarded as a last-ditch attempt on behalf of a vulnerable industry to gain the support of an audience with little compulsion to remain loyal to its offerings.
Dr. Melissa Gregg is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is author of Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006) and co-editor, with Gerard Goggin, of the ‘Wireless Cultures and Technologies’ issue of Media International Australia (November, 2007). Her current projects include The Affect Reader (co-edited with Greg Seigworth, forthcoming), Broadcast Yourself: Presence, Intimacy and Community Online (with Catherine Driscoll) and Working From Home, a three year study of new media technologies’ impact on work and home life.
- October 16
-
Craig Frost
Re-gendering the Final Girl: Eli Roth's Hostel Films
Image: Clean Cut by Ora Pera
Described by Carol J. Clover as “abject terror personified”, the traditional Final Girl has long been a staple figure of the slasher sub-genre of the horror film. Providing audiences with both a narrative anchor and a point of identification, the virtuous Final Girl has been presented as the binary opposite of her murderous antagonist. In Hostel, writer/director Eli Roth inverts the gender of his ultimate survivor and through his Final Boy re-configures gender constructs and audience identification within the contemporary slasher-horror film.
In this paper I will address how Roth’s film reinvents genre conventions and forces audiences to shift not only their pre-existing knowledge of the genre, but also how they relate, react and judge the images presented on screen.
Craig Frost is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. He is currently researching the horror sub-genre of “Torture Porn” and its relation to notions of gender, the body, and images of torture in a post-911 cinematic landscape.
- November 13
-
Special Bonus Session: Gotot Prakosa
Preview Screening of Paroska's New Film Kantata Takwa
The Indonesian experimental filmmaker, animator and painter, Gotot Prakosa, who is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Film and Television at the Jakarta Institute of the Arts, will visit Monash next Thursday, 13 November, and present a preview screening of his latest film, Kantata Takwa, at the Film and Television Studies ‘Under Construction’ seminar. Gotot is in Australia for the Asia-Pacific Film Awards in Brisbane, where Kantata Takwa is in competition for the Documentary Award. His visit to Monash is sponsored by the Monash Asia Institute.
This Bonus ‘Under Construction’ Seminar will take place in Theatrette S704, 7th Floor, South Wing, Menzies Building, at 4.00 pm, Thursday 13 November.
Gotot will provide a brief introduction and answer questions at the end of the session. Two earlier short films by Gotot will also be screened:
-
Non KB (Family Planning, 2 min.) (Animation, originally shot on 16mm, colour, 1979) “The letters KB refer to the official term ‘Keluarga Berencana’, i.e. ‘Family Planning’. This is a “Non KB” film. A spontaneous vision on the introduction of family planning.”
-
Meta Ekologi (14 mins) (Originally shot on 16mm film at the Jakarta Institute of the Arts, B.& W., 1979). Directed by Gotot Prakosa and based on a performance event developed by Sardono W. Kusuma. “This film is a response to an attempt to enter into dialogue with the ecology of earth and water. Humanity expresses its feelings through its body by striving to become one with the universe. It is like farming peasants who work on the land, covered with mud. A process of poeticisation.” One of the most remarkable films ever made in Indonesia.
-
Kantata Takwa (68 mins) (Directed by Gotot Prakosa and Erros Djarot, Colour, English Subtitles, 1990 - 2008) Kantata Takwa is an experimental political music documentary, initially filmed in 1990, during the Suharto period, but for political and (related) financial reasons, only completed and released in 2008. This ‘fiction-documentary’ film focuses on the public lives and ideas of Indonesias most important contemporary pop singer of the time, Iwan Fals, and his Swami group, who in June 1990, held a huge pop concert, entitled Kantata Takwa, at the large Senayun sports stadium in central Jakarta. At this concert they sang many of their famous protest songs, together with a set of new Islamic songs, written specifically for the cantata, at the same time inviting Indonesias leading poet and playwright, W. S. Rendra, to recite his powerful protest poetry as part of the concert.
This concert has been described as a mega-show, the ultimate gedongan Islamic chic, gedongan meaning here, in effect, the property of the wealthy classes. But in fact the Kantata Takwa concert was a clever way of focusing and bringing together the suppressed anti-Suharto feelings of the population, both in the circle of Indonesian artists and amongst the ordinary people. The pop songs of protest could not be banned, for the group was now so popular that such a move by the government would have been counter-productive, and the film, and also private videos made at the time, show popular enthusiasm for the sentiments expressed in the songs, the unruly crowd vigorously participating in the singing (Apparently we must take to the streets in order to get rid of this Satan who stands over us), while police and army stand by, for the time being relatively helpless. After a second concert, this time in Surabaya, further performances of the concert were not permitted.
The film had reached rough-cut stage by December 1991, but further work on it was abandoned, for the time being, due to the knowledge that it would not be allowed to be released. The film contains powerful footage of the concert, but also includes scenes of philosophical speculation by the singers, and dramatises both the songs and Rendras poetry in a range of other contexts, including scenes reminiscent of traditional peasant rebellions against exploitative village heads, ultimately, by implication, seeing the youth of Indonesia as being those who would eventually throw out the oppressors. But the film ends on a decidedly gloomy note, in allegorical scenes showing members of the Swami group being hunted down by unidentifiable masked representatives of the state, in one scene Iwan Fals himself is being held down and having his teeth removed by masked figures. The society in the film is represented as, in some regards at least, as almost worse than the colonial period, for it is as though one cannot identify ones enemy.
The European premiere of this film is an invited screening at the Rotterdam International Film Festival next January.
A subtitle translation for this film was prepared by David Hanan from Film and Television Studies, Monash University and Basoeki Koesasi from the Indonesian Studies Program at Monash University.
-
How to Get There
The venue is room S704, on the South wing of the 7th floor of the Menzies Building on Monash University's Clayton campus.
Navigate using the interactive map below, or download Clayton campus map in PDF format.