Speakers

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Ian Aitken
Associate Professor of Film Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University

What is Cinematic Realism?

This paper will explore the development of the realist tradition from its origins in the 19th Century through its appropriation by Luk á cs, to the ideas of the 'classical' realist film theorists. It will be argued that this realist tradition is best understood as a form of reflexive practice which arose in order to resist an aestheticisation of art and an intensifying specialisation of the aesthetic sphere within capitalist modernity. It will also be argued that this tradition was based in an intuitionist model of knowledge, and was characterised by a rejection of the provenance of rule-governed systems and the a priori formulaic. The paper will discuss the ideas of Georg Lukács, and argue that current understandings of Lukácsian-based models of cinematic realism are fundamentally incorrect, in that, whilst Lukács' writings on literary realism conform to the Balzacian model of the 19th Century novel, his writings on film endorse a quite different model: one based on naturalist and symbolist premises. Following this the paper will relate the ideas of Grierson, Kracauer and Bazin to a paradigm of 'intuitionist cinematic realism'; and the idea of intuitionist realist cinema will be discussed with reference to the films of Antonioni, Pialat and Angelopolous. The paper will then relate this realist tradition to the broader spectrum of contemporary film theory, and, in particular, to a 'pragmatist' school which emerged during the 1990s, and which encompasses forms of neo-formalist and cognitivist film theory. It will be argued that the realist tradition is superior to this school, because of its fruitful synthesis of idealist aesthetics, phenomenology and Marxism, and ability to engage with abstract theoretical models. This argument will then be developed by applying Kracaurian and Bazinian ideas, and particularly Bazin's notion of the 'dialectic of the concrete and the abstract', to an analysis of Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d' Arc . The paper will conclude by attempting to map out a future programme of research for the study of cinematic realism, one which encompasses study of the major theorists of cinematic realism, the translation of key texts, the idea of intuitionist realism and its relation to philosophical realism, the ideas of Bergson, Husserl, Kant and Hegel, and the relationship between film, realism and disciplines such as the philosophy of science, the philosophy and psychology of perception, and artificial intelligence theory. 

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Ian Christie
Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History,
Birkbeck University of London

'Why did moving pictures catch on? Looking for answers in early London film history'

Film history has long been focussed on the text, and on surviving texts alone. Yet for early cinema, it is clear that we need a more holistic archaeological approach, using a wide variety of sources, to reconstruct a business and a social world that has largely disappeared. Birkbeck's London Project is engaged in trying to marshall all the available data on London as one of the three major pioneer centres of world cinema (with New York and Paris), and developing a more comprehensive understanding of how the new phenomenon survived its novelty phase to become a prototypical new industry. This paper will report on interpretation of findings to date, especially in relation to the development of a moving picture business community, the emergence of specialist venues and programme genres, and the growth of a dedicated movie audience. Recent research data can be viewed at; http://londonfilm.bbk.ac.uk [opens new window].

Professor Ian Christie is RMIT Visiting International Fellow. His visit is made possible with assistance from the Ian Potter Foundation.

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Pam Cook,
Emeritus Professor in Film,
Southampton University, UK

Transnational Utopias: Centre and Periphery in Baz Luhrmann’s Red Curtain Films

In recent years, globalization, international co-production and diverse funding practices have given rise to new ways of thinking about cinema and the boundaries of nation-states. International cinemas have produced bodies of work highlighting questions of transnationalism, place, space and cultural hybridity. This work explores and dissolves spatial boundaries, challenging hierarchical relationships between centres of power and locations traditionally defined as peripheral (remote, minor or isolated). The centre is no longer perceived as subsuming its margins, nor are margins necessarily seen as seeking the centre. The locations of centre and periphery have shifted, and are often reversed as new, imaginary spaces for artistic and cultural innovation are visualized. My paper will look at the relationship between national and transnational, centre and periphery in Baz Luhrmann’s Red Curtain films. So far, Luhrmann’s film-making career has followed a familiar trajectory. After Strictly Ballroom’s success at international film festivals attracted the interest of Hollywood, a deal was struck with News Corporation’s 20th Century Fox that inaugurated a relationship with the studio that continues today. Luhrmann’s work moved from the local/national level into the global arena, as he produced two bigger-budget films (William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) that consciously discarded national specificity in favour of liminal spaces conceived as both somewhere and elsewhere. At the same time, Luhrmann has always asserted his commitment to living and working in Australia, and his next project is an Australian-themed historical epic that will be produced there. My analysis will draw on empirical research conducted in Australia, including interviews with Luhrmann and his chief collaborator Catherine Martin at their production base in Sydney, to investigate Luhrmann’s complex relationships with Hollywood and the Australian context. By addressing issues such as national style and identity, aesthetics, production methods, working practices, branding strategies, authorship, promotion and reception, I hope to illuminate the power dynamic between Luhrmann as an independent, non-Hollywood film-maker and the global American film industry.

Pam Cook's attendance has been assisted by the Macgeorge Bequest, University of Melbourne

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Richard Maltby
Professor of Screen Studies and Head of the School of Humanities
Flinders University

Where We Came In: Audiences and the History of Consumption

This paper takes an overview of recent developments in the historiography of audiences and cinema-going, derived in part from my experience of having co-edited five collections of essays in the field during the last seven years, and in part from the possibilities for new research methodologies and tools provided by digital technology. The paper will explore the proposition that cinema history - the history of cinema as a social, economic and cultural institution - constitutes a separate field of enquiry from film history, which may be best understood as a variant form of art historical practice. In particular, the paper will argue that the histories of cinema audiences and of cinema distribution, concerned with the place and social function of cinema and the formation of a mass public, are most appropriately contextualised within the history of consumption.

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Dr Adrian Martin
Senior Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies
Monash University, Melbourne

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off: Uses and Abuses of the 'New Cinephilia'

There has been, in recent years, an enormous amount of discussion (books, essays, conference panels, reams on the Internet) devoted to cinephilia - the love of cinema - and its practice, whether in acts of writing, curating/programming, teaching or filmmaking. But certain excesses and contradictions in the current discourse are disconcerting, to say the least - especially to anybody who, in any fashion, chooses to define themselves as a cinephile. There is now practically a master narrative, a myth or legend concerning the rise, fall and comeback of cinephilia - from the gloriously innocent '50s, through the 'rise and ideology' in the '60s and '70s, and finally to the triumphant current 'return of the cinephile'. In this supposed age of the 'new cinephilia', where bits of films are yoked to powerfully fashionable theories of memory and modernity, it's worth trying to intuit what ongoing cultural battles are hidden behind what Paul Willemen once called the "smokescreen" of the cinephile passion, and what lessons are to be found in the writing of its history.

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Janet Staiger
College of Communication, Department of Radio-Television-Film
University of Texas

Thinking "Identity" and "Agency" for Feminist Historiography         

Contemporary scholarship in feminist, queer, and cultural studies has recently focused on understanding identity and agency in order to understand the past and to affect the future.  I will briefly review some of the work that uses Foucault, Bakhtin, and Vgotsky in which the argument is that individuals "self-fashion" their identities which are (1) improvised, (2) in tension between the past and possible futures that are attractive to them, and (3)  imaginations of the self in "worlds of action."   The implications of this theorizing for historiography include thinking about what and where to look for, and how to analyze, those textual traces of identity and agency.   How actors in the history of cinema tell stories, remember events, and forecast their lives at particular moments provide significant evidence for feminist historians.

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Stephen Teo
Research Fellow, Asia Research Institute,
National University of Singapore

History, Nation, Trans-Nation, and the Wuxia Film

This paper discusses the wuxia film (martial chivalry) genre as a historicist, nationalist and trans-nationalist project in different periods of development in the Chinese-language cinemas (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China), using as case studies the following films: A Touch of Zen (1970-71), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (2002) and The Promise (2005). The discussion will centre on the manner in which the films engage with history (or historicism), nation (or nationalism), and the concept of transnationalism. It will explore how the genre evolves, or even mutates, in terms of spectatorship and market trends as well as postmodern concepts of globalism and localism. Though the focus is on the films mentioned, which have international exposure and recognition, the author will attempt to place these films in the broad context of the wuxia genre as it has developed in the Chinese cinemas and its close associations with the history of China, both ancient and contemporary.

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Keyan G Tomaselli
Professor, Research Director and Outreach Coordinator in Culture
Communication and Media Studies (CCMS)
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

Indigenous Film Making: From Amateurism to Advocacy

The John Marshal's five part magnus opus called A Kalahari Family (2002) is the subject of this keynote address. I will discuss Marshall's film making techniques, his shift from amateur/adventurer through conventional (PBS) documentary to reflexivity, advocacy, guerilla and beyond. John was part of the Ricky Leacock, Robert Gardener, Timothy Asch and Maysles brothers' generation in the USA and fundamentally contributed to the development this documentary film movement. A Kalahari Family is John's sustained response to his many anthropological critics. John's first film amongst the Ju/'hoansi in the Kalahari was made in 1950 and his last was the revisionist corpus in A Kalahari Family (2002) culled from over a million feet of 16mm footage and outtakes, not including his more recent video documentation. Finding a way of making sense of this extraodinary archival footage shot over a 50 yar period on the same Ju/'hoan clan was a task of its own, which shall form part of the address (cf. Tomaselli 1999). John's corpus of released titles and outtakes is truly Film in History and Film Through History, History on Film, and a chronology of new techniques, new technologies and new theories, some
of which he himself wrote and innovated. Despite his significant aesthetic and reflective theoretical contributions to documentary, John was always more concerned with those `in front of the camera' than he was with those who studied film texts: ethical considerations were paramount. John Marshall died last year. I will discuss how John came to making A Kalahari Family in relation to his developmental and advocacy work in the Kalahari.

Further reading: Tomaselli, K.G. (ed.) 'Encounters in the Kalahari.' Visual Anthropology, 12(2-3), 1999. Theme issue.

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Janet Walker
Professor, Department of Film Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara,

Testimony in the Umbra of Trauma: Film and Video Portraits of Survival

This presentation seeks to identify an awkward disconnect between the psychology of memory and the historiography of testimony, and how that disconnect gets electrified in certain experimental
documentary films about the Holocaust. Whereas contemporary memory researchers are amassing incontrovertible evidence that forgetting and memory errors are part of the normal processes through which we "remember" the past, curators and conservators of testimonial archives prefer to head off doubters and dangerous revisionists by focusing on the practical aspects of data collection. Certainly, we
have an ethical and political obligation to remember, acknowledge constantly, and act on the traumatic aftermath of shattering occurrences. But it is crucial that we do so with the knowledge that traumatic events, especially, are reconstructed as they are experienced, reimagined, reported, and recorded, and that this process is affected by an interplay of psychological and socio/cultural/political forces. Feminist critical trauma studies and experimental documentary film and video practice offer two complementary approaches to the mutability of historical and personal memory, live and on tape, and to memory's necessary but tenuous relationship to our troubled past. Walker will discuss various testimonial works including Video Portraits of Survival, of which she is the project director. In this program of short,
expressive portraits of Holocaust survivors and refugees, forgetting and indirection join factual accuracy as interconnected modalities of historical knowing.

Janet Walker is Professor and former chair of the Department of Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Women's Studies Program. She is the author or editor of Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry (Minnesota University Press, 1993), Feminism and Documentary (co-edited with Diane Waldman; Minnesota University Press, 1999), Westerns: Films through History (Routledge, 2001), and a new book, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2005), concerning the nonfiction filmic representation of catastrophic past events.