The Liverpool Film Seminar 2011 - 2012 - Liverpool Screen School
The Liverpool Film Seminar 2011 - 2012
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The Liverpool Film Seminar is a collaborative research initiative between the Department of Communication and Media, University of Liverpool and the Department of Film Studies, Liverpool John Moores University. It is designed to provide a forum for scholars and postgraduate students in the Merseyside area for the exchange of ideas and for networking opportunities, while promoting high quality research in the field of film studies. Click here for past events.
All seminars will start at 5.30 pm Monday, 30 April 2012 Pamela Church-Gibson (London College of Fashion) 'Cinema in Peril: Stardom, Celebrity Culture and Luxury Brands' This paper – as befits a Film Seminar – will look at the way in which the new power and centrality of celebrity and fashion actually affects not only the content and the casting of contemporary mainstream cinema; arguably, it now dictates what films can be made, and whether or not they achieve widespread distribution. The existing theories around ‘stardom’ need to be reworked. It will focus on Anglo-American cinema and ‘celebrity’ – obviously, Hindi cinema has extraordinarily powerful ‘celebrities’ who can and do dictate style across the Indian sub-continent and within the Hindi diaspora. However, the power of these celebrities is limited to those particular spheres of operation. One of the most disturbing factors of contemporary celebrity culture is its very whiteness, and the fact that it has created yet another form of western imperialism. Monday, 24 October 2011
Professor Robert Burgoyne (University of St Andrews) “Ethics and Politics of the Body in The Hurt Locker and Paradise Now” Of the many cinematic forms that can be described as body genres, the war film is clearly a defining example, drawing its most memorable scenes and its most intensive cultural meanings from the way the body, both as agent and patient, as living and dead, is depicted. Situated in the shadow zone between organic life and national purpose, between sacrificial object and agent of sovereign violence, the body of the soldier conveys in visceral form a vision of history produced from intensive sensual impressions. In the contemporary period, however, the imagery of the body in war – its ethics and its politics -- has been transformed by dramatic shifts in the forms of combat. What Edward Luttwak calls the new “postheroic war” -- continuous war without contours -- has created a particular challenge for film, displacing the theme of the “body at risk” from its position of central importance. In this talk, I explore The Hurt Locker (2008) and Paradise Now (2005) as films that reframe the imagery of embodiment in the new wars and conflicts of the 21st century. Engaging the central questions of present day warfare, both films foreground the ethics and the politics of the body in contemporary conflict settings. Robert Burgoyne is Professor and Chair of the Department of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. His work centers on modes of historical representation in film, with a particular emphasis on themes of embodiment, affect and cultural memory. His recent publications include The Epic Film in World Culture; Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History; and The Hollywood Historical Film. He is currently working on the history of the war film, with a special focus on the “body at risk” as an emblem of generational memory. The Seminar will take place in Room 005, Dean Walters Building, Liverpool John Moores University. Monday, 7 November 2011
Professor Hilary Radner (University of Otago) “Neo-Feminism and the Girly Film: Gender and Genre in Conglomerate Hollywood” Why does Hollywood make so few films for women? Why do the few that are made operate within such a limited band? Films such as Pretty Woman, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Legally Blonde, Maid in Manhattan, The Devil Wears Prada, Sex and the City: The Movie, testify to the rise of a narrative format, which following on from Charlotte Brunsdon, I will call the “girly” film. Borrowing from female friendship, “career girl,” and romantic comedy plots, the genre, if it can be described as such, revolves around the concerns of an unmarried woman, an ambitious “striver,” defining herself as much through consumer culture as romance or work. The needs of Conglomerate Hollywood in terms of pre-established awareness and product tie-ins encouraged this emphasis on consumer culture within the woman’s film. Consequently, a neo-feminist paradigm, which highlights consumer culture as important dimension in feminine identity, has become increasingly the dominant perspective within movies addressing a female audience. Instead of lamenting the loss of second-wave feminism, this presentation will explore why another perspective, neo-feminism, which is more compatible with neo-liberalism, has proven more influential, offering insight into the resulting widespread discontent among feminist-oriented scholars and audiences who are seeking more than “labels and love” in a film experience. Hilary Radner is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago. Her research interests revolve around understanding the representations of gender and identity in contemporary visual culture, particularly in terms of how these evolve over time in relation to second wave feminism. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on cinema, visual culture and gender: these range from film melodrama, make-up, fashion photography, and women's magazines to, more recently, the woman’s film, New Zealand fashion, Hollywood film genres, New Zealand cinema, World Cinema and French cinema. Her books include two monographs on feminine culture and subjectivity: Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure (Routledge, 1995) and Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture (Routledge, 2010). She is also a co-editor of six volumes: Film Theory Goes to the Movies (Routledge, 1993); Constructing the New Consumer Society (St. Martin's Press, 1997); Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity (Wayne State University Press, 2009); New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past (Intellect, 2011); Feminism at the Movies (Routledge, 2011). Current projects include The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary French Cinema (with Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Alistair Fox), a monograph on romantic melodrama in Hollywood cinema, as well as a long-term project on the woman's film in national cinema. The Seminar will take place at the Rendall Building, Lecture Theatre 9, University of Liverpool. Monday, 12 December 2011
The Seminar will take place at the Rendall Building, Lecture Theatre 9, University of Liverpool. Monday, 23 January 2012
Professor Ginette Vincendeau (King’s College, London) This illustrated presentation examines a relatively unknown, yet crucial aspect of Brigitte Bardot’s career. While Bardot is known for her sexually transgressive roles in melodramatic films such as Et Dieu ... créa la femme/And God Created Woman (1956), La Vérité (1960) and Le Mépris/Contempt (1963), half of the 43 films in which she appeared were comedies, including some of her most popular at the French box-office. The talk explores the different ‘ages’ of Bardot as comic star, from impish gamine to ‘dumb blonde’, and reflects on both the problematic interaction of sexuality and comedy, and the potentially liberating value of comedy for highly eroticized stars such as Bardot.
Monday, 13 February 2012
Professor Bill Osgerby (London Metropolitan University) '"Your Town Could Be Their Killing Ground ...": Exploitation, “Otherness” and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie’ Released in 1966 and billed as ‘the most terrifying film of our time’, The Wild Angels laid the way for a slew of low budget, lurid and gratuitously violent movies based around the exploits of marauding motorcycle gangs. This paper explores the nature and significance of this seldom discussed film genre. In their pageant of transgressive machismo, it is argued, the 1960s biker movies conjured with themes of an uncontrolled ‘Otherness’ whose unrestrained lusts and sneering disaffection set it beyond the pale of mainstream culture. Informed by the ‘carnivalesque’ traditions of exploitation cinema, however, the biker genre’s treatment of these themes was avowedly ambivalent. On one level the bestial depravity of outlaw bikers was presented as chilling evidence of a societal order in a state of collapse. But, in other respects, the biker movies revelled in their anti-heroes’ flouting of mainstream tastes and conventions. Ribald and bawdy, the 1960s biker film delighted in tweaking the tail of conformist sensibilities. Rather than reading the biker movie as an ‘oppositional’ film genre, however, the paper argues that it was a site of conflict and contradiction. While many mainstream cultural norms were certainly flouted in biker movies, they also affirmed many of core values of American popular conservatism. In particular, the biker genre configured the outlaw motorcyclist as a pioneering frontiersman – a ‘last American hero’ who embodied the distinctly masculine and conservative themes of rugged, autonomous individualism. Monday, 19 March 2012Dr Frank Krutnik (University of Sussex) Frank Krutnik is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex and is the author of In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991), Inventing Jerry Lewis (2000) and, with Steve Neale, Popular Film and Television Comedy (1990), as well as numerous articles in critical anthologies and leading screen studies journals. He is editor of Hollywood Comedian Comedy: the Film Reader (2004) and co-editor of Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (2007). He is currently working on a monograph on radio noir. The Seminar will take place at the Rendall Building, Lecture Theatre 9, University of Liverpool. |
