Sydney Screen Studies Network Talks

UNSW postgraduate Charu Maithani explores the new kinds of interactions enabled between viewer/spectator and screen in the postmedia age. She examines changing aspect ratios, interactivity, and film production technology through the past 50 years, and questions: Can screens be studied as a new way to reconfigure postmedia? How do these technologies change the way we interact with screens? She is joined afterwards by Melanie Robson for a Q&A with the audience.

Dr Timothy Laurie discusses masculinity in transnational action cinema. He looks at the numerous high budget action films emerging in the US, China, and India in the past decade that employ both international casting and transnational narratives. He argues these films create new kinds of masculine heroes as well as signalling deep cultural differences. Prof. Meaghan Morris joins Tim after his talk to further discuss masculinity, K-Pop stars, and underrated action films.

Meena Saverimuttu, a postgraduate at Macquarie University, examines whiteness in Tamil cinema by taking as her case study British actress Amy Jackson's role in two recent Tamil films. She explores the positioning of two different Amy Jacksons: the on-screen Indian and the off-screen Westerner. Meena's paper is followed by a Q&A session moderated by Dr Michelle Langford.

Presented by Ben Eldridge, a postgraduate at The University of Sydney. Ben provides a rumination on mainstream interactive media, grounded in a brief case study of two texts spattered with violence and security content – Crytek’s first-person shooter video game Crysis 2 (2010) and Peter Watts’ subsequent novelization of the game, Crysis: Legion (2011). He contrasts the visual grammar of the game with the textual grammar of the novel, and is particularly concerned with their construction of temporality, subjectivity and person. Ben’s paper is followed by a Q&A session with the audience and a response by Dr Ari Mattes.

Postgraduate Adam Daniel explores the potential of virtual reality as a medium of ethical experience. He questions how images can affect us in a multimodal sense: cognitively, but also emotionally, corporeally, and sensorially. Adam's paper is followed by a detailed and thought-provoking response from academic Dr Robert Sinnerbrink, who then opens up the discussion to the audience.

Melbourne-based academic Dr Maura Edmond presents her research on Australian experimental film culture in the 1990s. She looks at the legacy of the Keating government's 1994 "Creative Nation" policy and considers whether, two decades on, it has had its intended affect on the media and film landscape of Australia in supporting innovative, experimental film work. Maura's paper is followed by a Q&A session facilitated by Phoebe Macrossan.

PhD candidate Mahsa Salamati discusses informal film circulation in contemporary Iranian cinema. She uses a case study of Jafar Panahi’s This is not a Film (2011) and his other works since he was banned from filmmaking in 2008. She explores how different channels of circulation add different layers of politics and meaning to the films. Mahsa's talk is followed by a Q&A with Melanie Robson and the audience present on the day.

Postgraduate researcher Emily Chandler explores the current trend in adults' participation in fandom for films aimed at children. She focusses on the Disney princess franchise, and attributes adults' ongoing engagement with it to a combination of its appeal to nostalgia, its use within identity politics, and its transgressive potential through satire. Emily is interviewed after her talk by Meg Russell.

Sydney University researcher Dr Karina Aveyard discusses the embodied elements of the film viewing experience across a range of public and private environments. She challenges the assumption that the theatrical cinema is a superior film-viewing environment, and refocusses this debate through the lens of phenomenology. The Q&A session at the end of Karina's paper is facilitated by Adam Daniel.

Postgraduate and film critic Lauren Carroll Harris argues for the legitimacy of peer-to-peer file-sharing as a legal method of film distribution. She draws on numerous examples of this distribution model playing out, including David Cross's 2014 film Hits. Lauren's paper is followed by a Q&A session with Jessica Ford and the audience present on the day.