Sydney Screen Studies 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, where they chat about the effect of new technologies (iPhones, 3D, streaming services) on the viewing experience, and the death of cinema.

Seminar: 0.00 - 31min

Q & A: 31min - 1hr 14min

Produced by the Sydney Screen Studies Network

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Where is transnational cinema going? Dr Timothy Laurie 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.

Seminar: 0.00 - 53min

Q & A: 53min - 1hr 32min

Produced by the Sydney Screen Studies Network Visit our website: sydneyscreenstudies.wordpress.com Email us: [email protected]

Since Liverpool local Amy Jackson’s debut in 2010, where she played a young British woman in the Tamil period-drama Madrasapattinam, Jackson has played exclusively Tamil/Indian characters in all of her films. Despite her Caucasian background, Jackson is nativised for these roles, her skin spray-tanned, her hair dyed, and her blue eyes hidden behind dark-brown contact lenses.

Grad student Meena Saverimuttu explores Jackson and a recurring reference to Jackson’s characters as “the white chick” in two of her more recent Tamil films Thangamagan (2015) and Gethu (2016). These films position two vastly different Amy Jacksons: the on-screen Indian and the off-screen westerner. Meena takes into account how audiences make meaning of the character through their knowledge of the actress herself. Dr Michelle Langford joins Meena for a Q&A with the audience after her talk, where they talk about gender, whiteness, film distribution.

Seminar: 0.00 - 28min

Q & A: 28min - 1hr 05min

Produced by the Sydney Screen Studies Network

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Video games present an interesting challenge to other visual media: they are neither wholly narrative, nor wholly interactive. Ben Eldridge (USyd) explores mainstream interactive media with a brief case study of two texts splattered with violence and security content – Crytek’s video game Crysis 2 (2010) and Peter Watts’ subsequent novelization of the game, Crysis: Legion (2011). Crysis 2 is an interchangeable example of the so-called First Person Shooter (FPS); formulaic, uninspiring, and ideologically suspect. Ben contrasts the visual grammar of the game with the textual grammar of the novel. Dr Ari Mattes offers a response to Ben’s paper and they explore the video game as spectacle, gaming as a military recruitment strategy and more.

Seminar: 0.00 - 45min

Q & A: 45min - 1hr 10min

Produced by the Sydney Screen Studies Network

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Recent developments in cinematic VR open up vital questions around how much this new mode can draw on established cinematic paradigms, such as linear narrative progression, techniques of montage, and emotional engagement via identification with diegetic characters. In this talk, PhD candidate Adam Daniel examines VR’s potential as a medium of ethical experience. He expands ethical experience beyond an intellectual consideration of moral or ethical dilemmas, to examine how images can affect us in a multimodal sense: cognitively, but also emotionally, corporeally, and sensorially. Dr Robert Sinnerbrink presents a response to Adam’s talk, and the two sit down for a Q&A with the audience.

Adam's talk: 0.00 - 24min

Robert's response: 24min - 45min

Q & A: 45min - 1hr 13min

Produced by the Sydney Screen Studies Network

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In the 1990s, Australian experimental and avant-garde film traditions were displaced – at the level of theory, policy and practice. The 1994 ‘Creative Nation’ policy announced the Keating Government’s enthusiasm for innovation and digital media. Australian artists and organisations scrambled to claim ground, funds and relevance in an era marked by insistent declarations of the end of the avant-garde, the end of cinema and the inevitability of a digital future. Two decades on the innovation rhetoric is louder than ever, but there is a near vacuum of funding for experimental film practice through film funding agencies. Dr Maura Edmond presents a historical take on the question of where-to-now for film (and film studies) in an era of convergent screen media, by looking at a period in which those questions were considered at length by filmmakers, institutions, critics and policymakers. Maura is joined by Phoebe Macrossan for a Q&A where they discuss some of these issues with the audience.

Seminar: 0.00 - 46min

Q & A: 46min - 1hr 20min

Produced by the Sydney Screen Studies Network

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Complex transnational and local factors have made way for alternative channels of film circulation to emerge all around the globe. What is significant about these channels is not just that they are illegal, but the ways they transform the films, culturally and politically. PhD candidate Mahsa Salamati explores this transformation through Jafar Panahi’s This is not a Film (In Yek Film Nist, 2011) and his ongoing ban from filmmaking. Mahsa is joined by Melanie Robson for a Q&A with the audience, where they discuss the general state of Iranian film censorship, Panahi’s political standing, and his apparent ‘re-invention’ of cinema.

Seminar: 0.00 - 23min

Q & A: 23min - 57min

Produced by the Sydney Screen Studies Network

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Between 1937 and 2016, Walt Disney Animation Studios released 56 animated theatrical films for children. Since 2000, the teenage and young adult female protagonists from 12 of these films have been retroactively grouped into a media franchise called the Disney Princesses. Although most research around the Disney Princesses relates to the franchise’s appropriateness for children, they are not the only demographic with an investment in this franchise. Adults online produce fan works, listicles, discussion, campaigns and humour featuring adoring, critical and satirical interpretations of the Disney Princesses. UNSW PhD candidate Emily Chandler argues that adult fandom around this franchise can be attributed to a combination of their appeal to nostalgia, their use within identity politics, and their transgressive potential through satire. Emily’s paper is followed by a Q&A session facilitated by Meg Russell and involving the audience present on the day.

Seminar: 0.00 - 41min

Q & A: 41min - 1hr 26min

Produced by the Sydney Screen Studies Network

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In this talk, Dr Karina Aveyard examines the embodied elements of the film viewing experience across the range of public and private environments. The proliferation of internet-based technologies has given rise to renewed scholarly interest in the phenomenological aspects of media. It is frequently argued that cinema gives rise to intense and focused mode of viewing. Non-theatrical viewing, in contrast, is regularly assumed to be more distracted and sporadic. This talk refocuses this debate through the lens of phenomenology as a more critical approach for exploring the different bodily experiences of film viewing. As a format with perhaps the widest register of screens (from the cinema through to the smart phone), film is uniquely placed to expand the field of phenomenology. It invites us to think about not just how bodies interact with screens, but also how they interact with objects and screening spaces. Adam Daniel conducts a Q&A session at the end of Karina’s talk.

Seminar: 0.00 - 36min

Q & A: 36min - 1hr 04min

Produced by the Sydney Screen Studies Network

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Film critic and PhD candidate Lauren Carroll Harris uses a case study of US comedy HITS (David Cross 2015) and the BitTorrent Now website to explore how filmmakers are using file-sharing networks to monetise film distribution and reach their own fanbases. This seminar presents an argument for how file-sharing can be a valid, legal form of reintermediation that supports independent film culture, and

reinserts filmmakers into the film value chain with a minimum of interference from gatekeepers. Lauren is joined by Jessica Ford who conducts a Q&A with the audience present on the day.

Seminar: 0.00 - 22min

Q & A: 22min - 51min

Produced by the Sydney Screen Studies Network Visit our website: sydneyscreenstudies.wordpress.com

Email us: [email protected]