The other day we interviewed a couple of PhD scholarship candidates. Good applicants, with interesting and unusual research proposals. However, I was saddened when one of them started talking about ‘impact’. So, she’d found out about the institutional regime of evaluation that now governs research and learned the lingo, but is this the game that applicants ought to be playing? Read more
We convened in Brussels, for a colloquium on transnationalism in Hispanic cinema, on the eve of the latest European summit. The juxtaposition was ironic and not irrelevant. On one side of town, the leaders of European transnationalism grappling with the crisis of the day. On the other, a small gathering of scholars from several European countries and the Americas, north and south, interrogating the transnationalism of Spanish-speaking cinema. Different takes on the same process of globalisation that shapes the modern world twenty years after the end of the Cold War
In 2002 the Cuban filmmaker Fernando Pérez made a compelling documentary called Suite Habana which portrayed the melancholic mood of the Cuban capital at the start of the 21st century. Ten years later the mood is rather different, as I discovered on my first visit to Cuba for three years, for a Seminar on Cuban Cinema in the department of history at the University of Havana. Reforms introduced over recent months which allow people to open small businesses, buy and sell their homes (instead of swapping them) and various other measures, have begun to alleviate the sense of hopelessness of the past two decades, at any rate among the students I met, who nevertheless remain critical of a regime they all consider thoroughly paternalistic. Read more
Maastricht provided a suitably quiet setting for an international workshop on ‘Soundscapes of the urban past’, which covered the behaviour of audition across different forms — radio, film, theatre, plus new audio phenomena like car stereos and audio museum guides — from a range of perspectives, including social history, history of technology, sociology, music, media and cultural studies, etc. The idea, with Karin Bijsterveld at the helm, was to bring together a group of about a dozen people to discuss the drafts for a volume of essays to be published next year. Read more
Events since the near-death experience of finance capital in 2008 have succoured renewed attention not to Marxism as a political creed but to Marx as the urtext of the proper analysis of the capitalist system. On the one hand, old established Marxist scholars like Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and David Harvey have all published new books, while on the other, numerous articles alluding to Marx’s relevance have appeared in both the capitalist press and independent weeklies, sometimes even on the radio (though never television). On the web, you can find a growing number of videos about capitalism, its discontents and dysfunctions, strongly informed by Marxist ideas, jostling for attention with an explosion of more anarchistic street level video activism. Read more
The Thesis Whisperer 22/02/2012
Interesting discussion going on recently over on Film-Philosophy about that old bugbear, the relation of theory to practice in our teaching and study of film. This debate has a history which, in the UK at least, goes back to the 1970s, when the art colleges taught experimental film making, and the then polytechnics and a few new universities began to include film-making in their undergraduate film courses. Film theory as such was still taking shape, and video was in its earliest stages. In an atmosphere charged with radical intellectual fervour, the theoretical input led to much experimentation in colleges of creative practice—the watchword of the time was deconstruction. The paradigm for the infusion of theory into practice could be found in the work, for example, of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, who established themselves on screen and on page, together and separately, as leading denizens of both. Some of the people emerging from this habitus made the break and went on to successful careers in the mainstream, but independent film-making informed by theoretical critique remained in the margins. Read more
After my rather long silence, an uncharacteristically short post.
We gathered, on an unusually warm day for January, at the London College of Communication in Elephant & Castle for the third seminar convened by the Artists’ Moving Image Research Network, with Pratap Rughani and Catherine Elwes as our hosts, to talk about the relations and tensions between documentary, ethnographic film, and artists’ film and video. We ranged across a whole range of topics from the ethics of representation—Pratap spoke about the film-maker’s relation to the subject—to the teasing out of meanings from the archives: Catherine Russell spoke about Los Angeles Plays Itself and The Exiles, and Laura Mulvey talked about Madame Dao. Hito Steyerl showed her video In Free Fall. Rachel Moore talked about Jean Epstein’s concept and practice of photogénie. Stan Frankland provided a trenchant and funny critique of Jean Rouch and a number of other targets, and Sean Cubitt summed up beautifully. What we’ve really been talking about, he suggested, was the problem of what can’t be seen as such, like culture, and the non-identity of the image, which I take to mean the import or sense in any image of what is not directly portrayed within it. Or to put it another way, what Wittgenstein would call the aspect of the image which can shift this way or that, especially according to the way the image is combined with others—and montage, of course, is the privileged mode of the film medium. (This ought to apply to sound as well, which unfortunately on this occasion remained a neglected topic.) Read more
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33123752[/vimeo]
The world represented by the mainstream media is still governed by a division into centre and periphery which has been thrown into doubt by recent events—not only the global effects of economic crisis, but the popular protest movements which have sprung up in Europe, the Middle East, and now the USA. It is nowadays the general rule that news from the old periphery, as well as the margins and the interstices of society, arrives in the social media before reaching the mainstream media. It was three or four weeks before Occupy Wall Street was picked up by the mainstream, and predictably it only broke through when cameras on the streets caught the first acts of gratuitous police violence and posted them on the web.