The Department of Film Studies runs a highly-regarded series of research seminars every year.
The Department is a leading centre for research on all aspects of cinema, from its earliest days to the present, and branching into related screen-based technologies, including television, online media, and artists’ film and video. Join us at one of our research seminars presented by speakers who specialise in film. Please join us at the usual time and place (Wednesdays at 17:00PM in S-1.04)
Sept 27: Hyojin Yoon (KCL). Chair: Erika Balsom
The Feral Child and Maren Ade’s The Forest for the Trees (Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen, 2003)
As a part of my PhD research on images of a solitary woman in German contemporary cinema, my study of Maren Ade’s fiction feature film, The Forest for the Trees focuses on the social and aesthetic implications of the protagonist, Melanie (Eva Löbau)’s solitude. The film is about secondary school biology teacher, Melanie’s endeavours to adjust to her new work and neighbourhood. Despite her relentless efforts, Melanie fails to build meaningful relationships both at work and in her personal life. Since Melanie struggles to adjust to human society, I compare her to feral children in literature and film. According to anthropologist, Robert M. Zingg, feral man is “the term for extreme cases of human isolation”, such as infants adopted by animals or “older children who have wandered away into the wilds to survive by their own efforts, unaided by human contact”. Through Melanie, The Forest for the Trees examines women’s subjectivity in the present society, focusing on her situation of lack of improvement and affective responses to it. In doing this, the film adopts both neoliberal aesthetics and elements of German Romanticism. The neoliberal aesthetic in The Forest for the Trees renders the protagonist’s situation and subjective feelings visible, while Romantic elements reveal the film’s critical view of society, as well as its sympathy for Melanie. In light of the intersection of these two aesthetics, I argue that the feeling subject in Ade’s film is an alternative to the thinking subject in New German Cinema.
Oct 11: KCL visiting scholars: Karla Bessa, Alexandre Diallo, Zhang Hua, Mika Ko. Chair: Mark Betz
Karla Bessa, Streaming Narratives: Analyzing Gender & Other Violences in Brazilian Contemporary Media
Amidst the ascendancy of conservative forces during the Bolsonarismo era in Brazil, where hate took centre stage in popular engagement, violence surged to prominence across various cultural and entertainment industries, demanding our attention. In this presentation, I embark on both a theoretical and aesthetic journey to examine how two major streaming platforms, Globo Play and Netflix, have invested in audiovisual productions that, in their own unique way, offer counter-narratives. While not radical or revolutionary, these narratives inject a critical sensibility, challenging the normalisation of a violent, racist, and misogynistic socio-cultural imagination.
To illustrate and substantiate my analysis, I turn to two compelling case studies: “Mancha” (2023) and “Sismicas” (2023), both authored by three talented Black women. These works fearlessly explore the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, providing a deeper understanding of the subtle facets of violence. The overarching question guiding this analysis is: How do these narratives shed light on the complex entanglement that blends colonial legacies, social inequalities, and the disdain for otherness, particularly as individuals seek civil and social rights?
Alexandre Diallo, “TV Series in the Era of Globalized Threat: Killing Eve in the Eye of Modern Feminist Discourse”
“TV Series in the Era of Globalized Threat: Killing Eve in the Eye of Modern Feminist Discourse” proposes a reflection on a transnational woman-centered TV series, starring three femmes puissantes (N’Diaye, 2013), trying to show how the complex narratives of its female leading characters interrogate the possibility of a feminist “we.” While many publications have praised the TV series notably for the place it allows to women, and the novelty of the show, the analysis I conducted aimed at showing how this series visually interrogates what unite and can dissolve women.
Zhang Hua, Tony Rayns and Chinese Films’ Internationalisation
As a film critic, curator and activist based in London, Tony Rayns has played a significant role in the process of East Asian (including Chinese) films being internationally accepted over the past 40 years. His function is unquestionably irreplaceable. In reviewing, programming, and adding subtitling as well as his personal commentaries on DVD and Bule ray disks, Tony Rayns has successfully introduced Chinese films to a wider appreciative British audience and the English-speaking world on a whole. Prior to Tony Rayns’s involvement, Chinese films were rarely screened especially on an international level. His work has influenced the internationalised Chinese films of younger generation in the long term, which are considerable different to mainstream films in China.
Mika Ko, Suffragettes and Early British Cinema
This presentation unveils preliminary findings from my ongoing research on the intriguing interplay between suffragettes and the early British cinema. While the quest for women’s suffrage commenced in the United Kingdom during the 19th century, it gained renewed impetus around the turn of the 20th century. This resurgence coincided with the advent of cinema and the emergence of film industry and culture. Naturally then, suffrage campaigns and activists, particularly those of militant ones, known as ‘suffragettes,’ became a popular subject in both newsreels and fiction (predominantly, comedy) films. Focusing primarily on fiction films, this presentation begins by offering a brief overview of suffragette-themed films released in Britain between 1900 and 1918, shedding light on prevailing representations of suffragettes. The focus then shifts to the 1911 film entitled True Womanhood, a unique project initiated by suffragettes themselves. This section scrutinizes suffragettes’ endeavors not only to challenge their prevalent caricatured negative stereotypes but also to redefine the notion of ‘true womanhood’ in the filmic text. The presentation then probes into suffragettes’ concerted effort to promote and integrate the film as a vital component of their activism. It will be argued that True Womanhood may be seen as a pioneering attempt in which women’s movement harnessed the potential of film for a political end, thus, marking a pivotal moment in the convergence of cinema and feminist activism.
Nov 8 – Valeria Villegas Lindvall (Gothenburg). Chair: Iain Robert Smith
Let’s torch it all:Contemporary Mexican horror as anticolonial subversion
This research seminar ponders the possibilities of contestation in contemporary Mexican genre film, focusing on its subversion of notions related to gender and sexuality through the aesthetic excess of Tenemos la carne (We Are The Flesh, 2016) and La región salvaje (The Untamed, 2016) and punk folk horror of Huesera (The Bone Woman 2022), among other pieces. It considers the timely contribution of decolonial (and ultimately, anticolonial) thinkers hailing from Latin America as a valuable methodological framework to discuss horror audiovisual culture from and about the region while vindicating otherwise jettisoned epistemologies.
Nov 15 – Ritika Kaushik (Goethe Universität Frankfurt). Chair: Tom Brown
No Director’s Cut: Rethinking Authorship in State Sponsored Indian Documentary
This talk examines the interplay of governmental control and creative agency available to independent filmmakers working on commission from Films Division of India (FD), India’s primary state institution of documentary film. FD made films for educational, informational,
and publicity purposes and, in addition to their own in-house productions, regularly
commissioned films from independent filmmakers. I draw attention to the lesser-known sponsored films made by Mani Kaul, who is otherwise known internationally for his experimental work and formed a key part of the Indian new wave. Like Kaul, other new wave filmmakers like Kumar Shahani, G Aravindan, Goutam Ghose, would often work for FD. By focusing on two Kaul’s films made for FD: The Nomad Puppeteers (1974) and the Indian Woman: A Historical Assessment (1975), I trace the films’ political and aesthetic interventions and will show how artistic filmmakers, while bringing their own aesthetic commitments, navigated the complex bureaucratic systems of film production within FD and approval for exhibition by the Film Advisory Board (FAB).
Specially commissioned as a film on Rajasthani puppeteers, The Nomad Puppeteers is an analytical film report that meditates on their struggles and efforts to keep themselves relevant and employed in an increasingly mediatized world. The Indian Woman was commissioned for “international women’s year” and is a cinematic treatise on making visible women’s labor that is generally characterized as “unproductive.” While The Nomad Puppeteer was passed with only minor changes after a reedit demanded by the FAB, in the case of The Indian Woman, the changes suggested by the FAB were unacceptable to Kaul and led to the disavowal of his directorial credit for a forcefully reedited film. Foregrounding the bureaucratic processes of control filmmaking alongside a close analysis of these two films and their original scripts, I inquire into the stakes of reconfiguring documentary film authorship as a contested site—a contentious co-production between the filmmakers and the complex institutional frameworks and forces at play—as it emerges in the layering of the audio-visual and paper records.
Dec 6 – Nikolaus Perneczky (Queen Mary). Chair: Erica Carter
Restitution and the Moving Image
As calls for the return of looted artefacts from Western museums and ethnological collections intensify, what about similarly displaced Global Majority film heritage? In this talk, I present some preliminary findings from an ongoing research project which considers colonial legacies of uneven development and unequal exchange in global audiovisual archiving through the lens of restitution. The project has two interrelated aims: firstly, to make visible the colonial legacies shaping the archival logics and logistics of global film heritage with the aim of developing concrete strategies of redress; secondly and concurrently, to explore in a more speculative register both the challenges and possibilities arising from the conjunction of “restitution”—a paradigm elaborated in relation to irreproducible artefacts and human remains—with the technical object of film after the digital turn. My argument, in short, is that by refracting the restitution debate through the medium-specific affordances and operations of the moving image, we are compelled to move beyond the single question of return, towards a more comprehensive horizon of reparative worldmaking, whose field of action encompasses everything from the uneven development of archival capacity to epistemic violence encoded in archival infrastructures, and on to the legal and economic forms that frame image property and authorship.