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*** Latest News ***


Proposed Video Essay Special Interest Group

After roughly a decade of development video essays are now accepted forms for teaching, assessing and research in the wider film and media community. Groups, both ad-hoc and more formalised, now exist in Europe, the UK and North America, and there are regular events, cfp’s, debates and discussions with most recently a Discord channel formed with 250 members. On that same channel at the end of 2022 a brief post lamented the Euro-American bent of video essay discourse. It seems timely then for all of us teaching with, creating or simply interested in video essays in this part of the world to make ourselves seen and heard.

The Video Essay SIG aims to create visibility for the video essay community in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, to provide a space for connections and to develop opportunities for collaboration.

Read more HERE


BOOK LAUNCH

SSAAANZ and SSSN present: A book launch for Horror Film and Otherness (Columbia UP) by Prof Adam Lowenstein (University of Pittsburgh)

March 7th at 6pm at UNSW

What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society’s fear of the “others” that threaten the “normal.” The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film’s depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes.
Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined.
Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art.
Adam Lowenstein is a professor of English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (2005) and Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (2015), both published by Columbia University Press. Lowenstein serves on the board of directors for the George A. Romero Foundation.
Professor Lowenstein will give a presentation about the book, which will be followed by a Q&A. There will be a reception after the Q&A.
The event is co-hosted by the Sydney Screen Studies Network (SSSN) and the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ).

Please register here:

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/book-launch-horror-film-and-otherness-by-prof-adam-lowenstein-tickets-556292745577?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=escb&fbclid=IwAR3rdHjqlZRPJ2Imr_BJgqNUjE5CKSx2ZAemZdIzBE1w2i5u3FkSnAKfpME


Launch Issue – Call for Papers

Media Peripheries – Situated in Aotearoa, Regional in Focus, Global in Scope

CFP Media Peripheries – Launch Issue

Media Peripheries is a new journal of media and communication studies based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Continuing on the legacy of MEDIANZ, Media Peripheries aims to be a forum for academic debates that are regional in focus yet global in scope. For its inaugural issue, Media Peripheries invites contributions that explore some of the issues and themes that are at the core of the journal’s mission. The journal is particularly interested in research that focuses on the peripheries of the global media system both in geographical and cultural terms. The journal conceives the broad notion of periphery as referring to both the specific location of Aotearoa as situated at the margins of the Global North as well as topics and voices that are under researched within media and communication studies.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • The relationship between Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and/or Pacific rim screen industries and cultures
  • The interaction both within regional media industries and between regional and global media systems.
  • Geographies of New Zealand and Pasifika media
  • Indigenous media and communication practices
  • New history of New Zealand and Pasifika media and communication
  • Economic, government and regulatory influences on the Aotearoa New Zealand media industries
  • Gender and sexuality in New Zealand and Pasifika media cultures
  • Critiques of labour circulation and practices in the New Zealand and Pasifika media industries
  • New interpretations of New Zealand and Pasifika media texts, genres, cycles and aesthetics
  • Representations of the antipodean and Pacific imaginaries
  • Reception studies of New Zealand and Pasifika media locally and/or internationally
  • ICT, emerging technologies and platforms in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and/or Pacific rim

Please include in your submission  an abstract of the contribution as well as name, institutional affiliation, full contact details, and a short biographical note. Full articles or video essays will be due by September 30th 2022 and should be maximum 8000 words in length.

Please direct any enquiries or questions about the special issue to medianz.journal@otago.ac.nz or  refer to our website https://mediaperipheries.otago.ac.nz/


CALL FOR PAPERS

Perspectives on Indigenous Language Films in the Global South

(A Book Project)

 

Book Editors

Osakue Stevenson Omoera, Ph.D.

Faculty of Humanities, Federal University Otuoke, Bayelsa State, Nigeria

Email: omoera@yahoo.com ; osakueso@fuotuoke.edu.ng

Scopus ID: 56052398700; ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1086-7874

Web of Science ResearcherID R-7440-2019

 

Francoise Ugochukwu, Ph.D.

Research Fellow, Open University (UK); Senior Research Fellow, IFRA (Ibadan) Website: https://francoiseugochukwu.academia.edu/ Email: fugochukwu@yahoo.com

 ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4317-5826

 

Filmmaking is a contemporary development medium which can be used in preserving and archiving, promoting and projecting indigenous languages, cultures, heritages and mores of the many indigenous peoples tucked away in the ‘peripheries’ of 21st century global cinema. In more senses than one, filmmaking is about human development and human development is a story which is told and retold through visual aesthetics for personal or communal edification, enlightenment and education. Thus, film is a window to indigenous cultures, values and heritages which help to shape the consciousness of millions of people in an age where information and communication technologies (ICTs) reign supreme.

Today, a lot appears to be happening in the film popular culture domain among the indigenous peoples in the Global South that has scarcely received academic attention. It is in this realization that we propose a book project titled “Perspectives on Indigenous Language Films in the Global South.” The intention here is to give a ‘voice’ to the ‘voiceless’, give visibility to the filmmaking activities, filmmakers and their traditions, audiences, among other issues of the so-called cinematic ‘peripheries’, exploring how they stage and perform their indigenousness through their native films. The book shall seek to underscore the existence of a significant corpus of visual literature outside the Hollywood and Bollywood or Western paradigms. It seeks to open a space to discuss alternative sensibilities, sensitivities, aesthetics, meanings, and contexts in filmmaking.

The articles in the book are expected to address the historical, cultural, social, philosophical and linguistic diversities engrained in colonial and postcolonial realities of the Afrikaan, Akan (Twi), Bahasa Indonesia, Bemba, Benin (Edo), Brazilian Portuguese, Chichewa, Cuban Spanish,  Dagaare, Dangbe, Ebira, Esan, Epie, Ewe, Fijian, Fulani,  Ga,Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hindi, Idoma, Igbo,  Ijaw, Itsekiri, Kanuri, Kasem, Kikuyu, Nembe, Nzema, Malay, Pakistani, Papiamentu, Swahili, Tiv, Urhobo, Xhosa, Zulu, among other peoples and languages scattered across the Global South. Essay contributions to the book are expected to be made by film scholars, filmmakers, film critics and theorists, culture administrators and archivists, language and green studies aficionados, from both the northern and southern hemispheres. Essays should be in 12-point Times New Roman, and 7th ed. of APA referencing should be used. Interested contributors should send in their abstracts to the above emails by November 12, 2022, and full papers by March 9, 2023. The book is expected to be published by Adonis and Abbey Publishers, United Kingdom in the last quarter of 2023.


ZOOM TALK

Selfie Aesthetics – Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-representational Art

Nicole Morse, Florida Atlantic University

Challenging the assumption that selfies are best approached through theories of narcissism, this book contends that selfies produce meaning through intersubjective encounters between creators and audiences. Selfie Aesthetics examines how trans feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore transition, selfhood, and relationality through a set of formal strategies that Morse calls “selfie aesthetics”: doubling, improvisation, seriality, and nonlinear temporality. Featuring selfies and self-representational art by Zackary Drucker, Vivek Shraya, Tourmaline, Alok Vaid-Menon, Zinnia Jones, Natalie Wynn, and others, Morse uses close analysis to demonstrate the aesthetic depth and political utility of these ubiquitous digital self-portraits. Contributing to trans feminist political discourse, Selfie Aesthetics shows how digital self-representational art can nuance key insights of queer theory, expand our understanding of self-representation, and construct collective and collaborative modes of being. Selfie Aesthetics argues that paying close attention to the formal strategies that comprise selfie aesthetics can allow viewers to collaborate with creators in order to produce rich theoretical meanings from ephemeral digital media.

Date: Tuesday, 17 May

Time: 10-11 am

Venue: Burns4 &  Zoom ID 92363374067 (Password: MFCO)

University of Otago


PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT

Radical Equalities and Global Feminist Filmmaking: An Anthology, edited by Bernadette Wegenstein and Lauren Benjamin Mushro (The Johns Hopkins University).

Radical Equalities and Global Feminist Filmmaking – An Anthology’s main objective is to exhibit and unveil the fruit of the growing movement of feminist filmmakers around the world through interviews with current filmmakers themselves and through critical analysis of the works of these filmmakers. Every filmmaker we examine tells their own story about radical equality from a place that they have lived, are drawing from, or have imagined. The common theme in all of the films of our selected filmmakers is the obligation they feel towards the oppressed and the resulting ethics of interdependence their films exhibit. Some films give voice to those who are suffering in the shadows, or have been silenced and murdered because of their political orientation and work; some films showcase vulnerable identities (especially gender identities) because the characters are inter-sex, transgender, of a marginalised class and skin color, are being forced into a split identity because of a colonial history, or because they are living in a part of the world from which they cannot escape. Other films highlight the feminist experience of lesbian love and its constraints or revolutions, the experience of motherhood, and the question of origin in all of its complexities.

The authors have, to date, conducted 16 interviews with filmmakers from around the world who, in very different ways – at times with comic relief , at times by pointing the cameras back at themselves, at times by inviting the viewer to grieve with them – question radical equality and vulnerability. We have selected these films on the basis of their unique stories and story-telling style, and their diverse points of view referencing different socio-political historical realities around the world. Each of them has one, if not several, female, intersex or non binary characters as their leads; each of them engage us with the question of feminism in a political way that highlights our obligation toward the character and her lived experience. Each of them focuses on “interdependence” as an aesthetic and cinematic principle. But what is most important is the fact that each filmmaker will be able to describe how they found their access and inspiration for their story, and how the film reflects on their own lived experience that is socio-economically and historically determined.

“This is an impressive and important collection of voices, positions and statements on the art and practice of feminist filmmaking. Its strengths are multiple. First of all, the book is extremely timely, in that it identifies the field and practice of feminist filmmaking in the first place, and that it goes to great lengths to ensure that the field is well represented in its vibrant diversity and the multiplicity of its voices and viewpoints from across the globe. The editorial introduction grounds the project in specific events and encounters between filmmakers, curators, producers and writers while explaining the book’s methodology, approach and political commitment. I really value the mix of live dialogue and critical commentary the book offers. A great deal of labour, attention, and care has clearly gone into staging all the dialogic encounters and ensuring that the collection works together as a whole. This will be an important volume for a variety of audiences. It will serve as an inspiration to junior filmmakers who are still seeking their own voice as well as ways of negotiating with society’s institutions and constraints, including those concerning gender. It will encourage critical reflection on (and hopefully practical change with regard to) the genres of film that women, gender-fluid and queer filmmakers are encouraged – and discouraged – to pursue. But ‘Radical Equalities and Global Feminist Filmmaking’ will also be an important text for the interdisciplinary field of film studies and media studies more broadly, providing it with a live map of the most exciting and important developments and ideas around feminist filmmaking across the globe. There is nothing like it out there yet!”
– Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London
More information available here:

PODCAST ANNOUNCEMENT: SEEING GREEN
SEEING GREEN reviews Australian film classics through the lens of contemporary environmental concerns, evoking new interpretations that recast Australian national cinema for present day audiences. Each episode features a dialogue between a film expert and a professional in ecology or sustainability.
Episodes so far have looked at WAKE IN FRIGHT, the MAD MAX series, and STORM BOY, with a new episode being released every week for the first season.
This podcast is a collaboration between Swinburne University of Technology and Monash University, with funding from the Australian Research Council. Host: Dylan Bird. Producer: Britta Jorgensen. Executive Producers: Belinda Smaill and Therese Davis.

Teaching Scholar, Film and TV and Animation

  • Based at our Burwood Campus
  • Full-time (36.75 hours per week) and Continuing
  • Level A $ 79,210 + 17% Superannuation

Founded in 1974, Deakin is a public university in Victoria with 61,000 students across five campuses: Melbourne Burwood, Geelong Waurn Ponds, Geelong Waterfront, Warrnambool, and the online Cloud Campus. We are a progressive and open-minded university, with the highest student satisfaction in Victoria and consistently ranked in the top 1% of the world’s universities.

The Teaching Scholar (Film/TV/Animation) is actively involved in teaching and scholarship and carries out activities to maintain and develop their professional activities relevant to the discipline areas of Film, Television and Animation. The role is involved in academic and professional service/engagement, industry partnerships and professional activities. The Teaching Scholar brings a variety of creative, technical, and industry expertise and skills in one or more of the following areas – Broadcast Media (including TV production and outside broadcast technical production), Post Production (including sound production/design, film and sound editing, software workflows, data management, colour grading), and/or Cinematography (including lighting, cameras, lenses, workflows, camera data management).

Your key responsibilities will include:

  • Maintain appropriate discipline knowledge across one or more areas of Film, Television and Animation
  • Develop effective learning materials and activities as part of a design team or with guidance from Unit Chair
  • Demonstrate awareness of ongoing innovation in curriculum design and pedagogy
  • Deliver effective and innovative teaching practices
  • Integrate industry and/or research practice to teaching
  • Provide clear assessment criteria and timely feedback to learners to demonstrate learning outcomes to FTVA students
  • Assist in applying industry and/or research practice into student learning experiences and resources
  • Facilitate collaborative learning opportunities at the unit level
  • Support and assist with teaching scholarship and pedagogical research activity

To be successful, you’ll have:

  • Bachelor degree or higher in a relevant discipline and/or other relevant qualifications and experience
  • Employment experience in an Australian university, independent FTVA production environment, or Industry context
  • Demonstrated technical expertise and established creative practice across one or more of the following areas: Cinematography (lighting, colour, cameras, lenses, workflows, camera data management), Post-Production (film and sound editing, virtual production, industry standard software, data management, colour grading, sound production and design), TV and Web Direction (including TV studio, multi-cam, live streaming and outside broadcast technical production knowledge)
  •  Capacity to contribute to teaching, teaching philosophy and administration in Film, Television and Animation
  • Excellent interpersonal skills and a proven ability to establish good working relationships with colleagues
  • Ability to make a contribution to community engagement

For a copy of the position description, please see below:

Download File Teaching Scholar FTVA.pdf

Applications for this position close on 26 March 2022.

Apply now:


Open Access Ukraine

As a university press, one of the roles of Amsterdam University Press is to distribute knowledge, ensuring that scholarly work on the world’s most urgent events reaches a worldwide audience.

Academic publishers play a vital part in ensuring that the public has access to peer-reviewed information. The Humanities, historical study, in particular, provides us with solid source-based analyses that critically inform at times of disinformation.

In the context of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, AUP has flipped two books on the history of Ukraine to Open Access so that they are available to download for free.

Click here to access the collection:


International Women’s Day 2022
Open Access Highlights
Amsterdam University Press is committed to publishing high-quality scholarship that (re)examines women’s lives in the past and today.

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2022, we have put together an Open Access collection highlighting ground-breaking scholarship by our authors investigating women, gender and sexuality.

Click here to access the collection: 


Horror and Gothic Media Cultures Series – First Discussion Group for 2022, Monday 28th of February

 

The first Horror and Gothic Media Cultures discussion group for 2022 will take place via Zoom on Monday the 28th of February –6pm Melbourne / Australian Eastern Daylight Time and 8am Amsterdam / Central European Time.

 

This monthly podcast and discussion series is linked with the new Horror and Gothic Media Cultures book series with Amsterdam University Press, and is open to researchers (including PhD/Masters researchers) and creative practitioners with an interest in horror and Gothic genres. In the discussion this month, we will respond to the provocation “How has the rise of streaming influenced the horror genre?” This short video introduces this provocation to spark some ideas that you can bring to the discussion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ6f5VyBRs0

The discussion will be hosted by Series Editors Dr Jessica Balanzategui and Professor Angela Ndalianis and will take place on Zoom. Researchers (including PhD/Masters researchers) and creative practitioners with an interest in horror and Gothic media cultures are welcome to join. Click the below link to register and join the meeting:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtd-Coqz0pH91LH3Oq7gIx9DI7dc2K3-q0

You can join from wherever you are in the world. Contact jbalanzategui@swin.edu.au with any questions.


SSAAANZ Members and Friends Survey; responses requested by Friday 4 March

We have put together a short survey to understand the needs of SSAAANZ members and friends regarding our association and the 2022 conference, including whether you are interested in us establishing Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

We’d appreciate it if you could respond to the survey by Friday 4 March:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Z9P7D7D

Your views will help inform SSAAANZ’s strategic vision, website development, and the forthcoming biennial conference (29 Nov – 2 Dec 2022).


Call for Papers – Edited Collection

Working Title: Sixteen at One Hundred

Sixteen Millimeter emerged as a new film gauge and suite of equipment in 1923. Building on longstanding demand for a more flexible, multi-functional apparatus that was clear from cinema’s earliest days, the new gauge rode the tide of technological innovation that helped the American film industry become what we now simply call “Hollywood.” Designed not to compete with the products of American studios or to displace the professional standard 35mm gauge, 16mm was sold and developed as an amateur’s delight, a mighty military tool, a miraculous business solution, a prime pedagogical resource, and a community organizing device. By the end of World War II, 16mm projection devices handily out-numbered theatrical screens in the United States. Its growth thereafter was rapid and vast, fueling a boom in film technology manufacture, sales, and use. As access to these cameras and projectors proliferated and spread internationally, 16mm’s effect on cinema was revolutionary and far-reaching. It transformed realms large and small, public and private, rural and urban, local and global. It launched countless audio-visual forms, enabled new users, and created everyday interfaces that reshaped and expanded how and where and what people would see and hear.

16mm was a particular kind of apparatus: affordable, programmable, adaptable, portable, repairable, and often hybrid, linked to other small media: phonographs, slide projectors, radios, magnetic tape, television, games, and toys. The uses of 16mm were vast. It was a tool for delivering public service messages and public relations campaigns, boosting church attendance, preaching good “social hygiene,” promoting political candidates, spreading propaganda, and encouraging community dialogue. It facilitated new forms of hobby and play. Artists and activists relied on 16mm cameras and projectors as modes of experimentation, organization, upheaval, and advocacy. From the local to well beyond, small gauge filmmaking and showing also became integral to colonialist, imperialist, nationalist, and multi-nationalist institutions and efforts.  For almost 100 years, this uniquely important film format upended and shaped a vast realm of creative, political, governmental, juridical, sexual, educational, recreational, informational, televisual, industrial, promotional, and experimental practices and activities.

This book invites papers that assess the phenomena that fall under the rubric of 16mm film, broadly understood as a complex technological, aesthetic, institutional transformation of moving image and sound practices. Papers may include theoretical or historical (or historiographical) approaches. Above all, this book seeks essays that identify key terms, concepts, resources, and modes of analysis that address the particularities of 16mm — its various iterations, and the broader shifts in which it played a key role.

Please send a 300-word abstract, three key words for your essay, and a short biography to us by July 22, 2021.

Send to:

 

Greg Waller (gwaller@indiana.edu)

Provost Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, Indiana University

 

Haidee Wasson (haidee.wasson@concordia.ca)

Professor, Film and Media Studies, Concordia University, Montreal

 

*Please note that we aspire to have this collection in print during the calendar year 2023 in order that it help shape ongoing discussions about the 100th year of 16mm. Precise deadlines will be shared as the project evolves.


PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT: Australian Genre Film

Edited by Kelly McWilliam and Mark David Ryan

Australian Genre Film interrogates key genres at the core of Australia’s so-called new golden age of genre cinema, establishing the foundation on which more sustained research on film genre in Australian cinema can develop.

The book examines what characterises Australian cinema and its output in this new golden age, as contributors ask to what extent Australian genre film draws on widely understood (and largely Hollywood-based) conventions, as compared to culturally specific conventions of genre storytelling. As such, this book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Australian genre film, undertaken through original analyses of 13 significant Australian genres: action, biopics, comedy, crime, horror, musical, road movie, romance, science fiction, teen, thriller, war, and the Western.

This book will be a cornerstone work for the burgeoning field of Australian film genre studies and a must-read for academics; researchers; undergraduate students; postgraduate students; and general readers interested in film studies, media studies, cultural studies, Australian studies, and sociology.


JOB POSTING: Vice-President and Executive Dean College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University

Flinders University has significantly grown its research and teaching strengths in recent years. Underpinned by a strong financial base, it is poised to achieve its goals to be a world leader in research and an innovator in contemporary education.

The opportunity is to join Flinders to lead the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and contribute to organisational positioning and direction. The Vice-President & Executive Dean reports directly to the Vice-Chancellor and is a member of the University’s senior executive team.

The University is ambitious for the College and its contribution the institution’s future. The role will further build upon research and teaching in the College and to drive growth of both domestic and international student enrolments and profile. A strength of the College has been its creative and performing arts, consistently ranking highly in The Rookies Top Creative Media and Entertainment Schools in the world.

The successful candidate will have standing for a full professorial appointment, and demonstrate a capacity for strategic academic leadership at scale.

To obtain full details and for a confidential discussion, prospective candidates should contact Rosalind De Sailly at VPEDCHASS@desailly.com.au.

Full applications addressing the selection criteria must be submitted to the email address above by Monday 30 November 2020.


FOR EARLY RISERS: Screen Serialities – Film Reboots Launch

Please join us for the launch of the new Edinburgh University Press book series SCREEN SERIALITIES and its first book FILM REBOOTS.

SCREEN SERIALITIES will be launched by Professor Julie Grossman (Le Moyne College) and Film Reboots will be launched by Professor Jason Mittell (Middlebury College).

DATE/TIME

Melbourne/Sydney: Thu Dec 3, 6.00am.

ZOOM

Meeting ID: 816 4165 5948

Password: 018309

DESCRIPTION

Edited by Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, SCREEN SERIALITIES provides a forum for introducing, analysing and theorising a broad spectrum of serial screen formats – including franchises, series, serials, sequels and remakes – from various perspectives: historical and contemporary, national and transnational, across old and new media platforms.

Bringing together the latest developments in the study of serial formatting practices – remakes, sequels, series – FILM REBOOTS, edited by Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis, is the first collection to specifically focus on the new millennial phenomenon of rebooting as a practice that is at once respectful and revisionary. In a vibrant set of case studies including Batman, Ghostbusters and Star Trek, among others, the collection features contributions by Daniel Herbert, Erin Hanna, Eileen R. Meehan, Constantine Verevis, Jennifer Forrest, Matt Hills, Nicholas Benson and Jonathan Gray, Derek Johnson, Chuck Tryon, Claire Perkins, Kathleen Loock, James Fleury, Paul Grainge and William Proctor.


SSAAANZ 2020 Colloquium

Coming Up Next!: Thinking Film, TV and Screen Media Beyond 2020

Tuesday 1st and Wednesday 2nd December

 

Preceded by the ECR Webinar: 

Getting On and Getting Out: Navigating Screen Careers Beyond 2020

Monday 30 November 2020

 

Call for papers, panels & roundtables

The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly altered the way audiences access and consume film and television. The production and content acquisition strategies of screen practitioners and businesses may never return to what they were. Screen studies scholars and educators have also had to adjust to these changing conditions, adjustments that may have deep and permanent impacts on our teaching and research practices. 

At this juncture of extreme disruption, the Coming Up Next Colloquium aims to examine how the screen ecology is transforming, and to consider the possible ramifications of these shifts beyond 2020. The Colloquium will bring together SSAAANZ members to discuss new pathways forward, and to examine how screen content, distribution logics, and production settlements operate in the age of COVID-19. It will also be an opportunity to reflect on and return to earlier periods of film-making and film theorising that offer intellectual and ethical resources for our ‘unprecedented’ present.    

The Colloquium will bring together the SSAAANZ community through short video papers, chaired discussion sessions building upon these pre-prepared video papers, and a number of networking events aimed to foster collaboration and disciplinary solidarity at this moment of uncertainty. We invite both scholars and practitioners to engage with the Colloquium theme in the form of their own choosing, be it more traditional scholarship or creative visual works.

 

Format

7-10 min video papers published prior to the colloquium

Morning sessions: chaired discussion sessions, including panels and roundtables

Afternoon sessions: informal networking and discussion 

 

How to participate

Video papers and panels

Work-in-progress (screen practitioners)

Roundtables

Audience participant

 

Please submit abstracts of 250 words and bios of 50 words to ssaaanz2020.conference@sydney.edu.au by 19 October

 

More info here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j9E94iV8UEa-JP6zX90re9mXMAVvH7bC-S0E8_v0heA/edit#heading=h.3sllmqpb6zls


Call for Papers: Architecture/Urbanism/Memory in Romania

Proposals: 15st of November 2020
Papers due: 1st of March 2021
Romanian cinema is at the forefront of addressing the challenges that the country faces
today, often linking troublesome memories to urban spaces. Recent films such as Radu
Jude’s I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History as Barbarians and Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada
address collective processes of remembering by linking them to physical places – public as
well as private -, thereby exemplifying the way in which memory is dependent on and
projected onto the locus of the city. Media artists, such as Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor,
have also explored the topographies of memory. At the crossroads of the country’s past and
future, architecture is a powerful force for cinematic storytelling, displaying a feeling of
“restorative nostalgia” (Svetlana Boym) as well as a desire for change.
As part of its Romanian focus 2021, the East European Film Bulletin is preparing a special
issue on the topic of architecture and memory in Romanian cinema, television, video art and
experimental film. We are looking for contributions that examine and analyse the diverse
relationships between cinema, architecture and memory and their links with Romania’s
complex memory, both remote and recent.
We are particularly interested in essays concerning the following topics:
1) Ruins as places of memory
2) Spaces of religious revival (folk, new age, neo-Orthodox)
3) Mall films and/or suburbia
4) Topographies of memories in alternative cinema and video art
5) Urban planning, democratic transition and its possible criticism
6) Romania’s Belle Epoque
7) Memory places: spaces which commemorate historical catastrophes (Romania’s
participation in the destruction of European Jews; slavery; child gulags)
Proposals of 250 words should be sent to editors@eefb.org by November 15th 2020.


New Report into the Gold Coast Independent Screen Industry

Working with the Council of the City of Gold Coast, Associate Professor Dr Mark Ryan, Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham, and Dr Phoebe Macrossan have published a new report into independent Gold Coast screen production activity at QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre

The Gold Coast has long been associated with the filming of Hollywood blockbusters, and the city’s screen industry has consequently been viewed as a service industry for film and television productions created by companies from elsewhere. However, this research, into Gold Coast-originated screen production occurring independent of the Village Roadshow Studios reveals the city is now a growing hub for local feature film and online screen content production.

A/Prof Ryan and Dr Macrossan interviewed local producers, writers, directors, and online content creators creating film, television, documentary, and digital/online content production. Since the early 2000s, a small group of content creators based on the Gold Coast have produced local content, largely feature films and documentaries both in and outside the region. Yet until 2009, the number of Gold Coast-based writers, directors and producers creating intellectual property and developing projects was small, production was infrequent, and talent-drain was common.

A key finding of the study is that there has been strong growth in Gold Coast-originated screen production over the last decade, from the killer-shark movie Bait (2010) and the alien invasion film Occupation (2018), to the documentary Nothing on Earth (2013) and the web series Stage Mums (2018). It’s now a productive hub for locally produced low-budget indie feature films, online content and commercial corporate production. Scripted web series and online content activity is also growing and feeds the ever-hungry platforms of YouTube, other social media channels, subscription video on demand, and web-series, as well as short form commercialised content.

The Report and its findings will be detailed and discussed at an industry event that will be held on Monday 21st September at HOTA on the Gold Coast.  To register to attend the industry event, please contact the Gold Coast Film Festival team on mail@gcfilmfestival.com. The full report can be viewed at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/203607/.


Publication Announcement: Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955): Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country by Catherine Kevin

Anthem Press is delighted to announce the publication of Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955): Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country by Catherine Kevin.

This book brilliantly evokes two intersecting histories – the making of Jedda, a remarkable film set in Australia’s north, and the nature of race relations in faraway Ngunnawal country, where those who financed Jedda made their fortunes. In its intimate exploration of the legacies and paradoxes of settler colonialism, it illuminates not only the times it portrays but also our own.
— Ann Curthoys, professor emerita, Australian National University

A remarkable and unexpected story. In Catherine Kevin’s telling, Jedda becomes much more than a landmark in Australian film history. The book also brings together the history of her own settler family, who were members of the pastoral elite that financed Jedda, and the larger history of what Whites did to Indigenous people in taking possession of the continent. Jedda is a tragic tale of the spectacular remote outback, but it is also entangled in surprising ways with the dispossession and marginalisation of Aboriginal people in a country much closer to the places most white Australians call home.
— Frank Bongiorno, professor of history, Australian National University

This engaging book offers a new approach to an iconic Australian film. It narrates the untold histories of both the Yass Valley graziers who financed the film and the Ngunnawal people whose lives uncannily paralleled the colonial and assimilationist themes Jedda explored. Intimate and searching in the questions that it asks, this thoughtful study reveals the complexities of family memory which can both illuminate and suppress uncomfortable histories.
— Shino Konishi, senior lecturer, Centre for Western Australian History, University of Western Australia

‘Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)’ brings together a history of race relations, pastoral boom and film-making. It is a personal account of coming to terms with a history of dispossession and colonial power relations in a place that has offered the author a strong sense of belonging and settler-colonial family heritage.

 

Catherine Kevin is a senior lecturer in history at Flinders University, Australia. She has published on the histories of domestic violence, pregnancy and miscarriage, feminism and maternity, post–World War II migration to Australia and the making of the film ‘Jedda’ (1955). Kevin’s work has appeared in a range of Australian and international journals and edited collections.

 

Further information about Catherine Kevin and her work, including  Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955): Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country, is available here.


Inhuman Screens Conference

The Sydney Underground Film Festival in collaboration with Sydney College of the Arts is pleased to announce the third annual conference Inhuman Screens. The conference will explore issues of the human and nonhuman in relation to crisis. Fittingly, the conference will be held online.

The conference features keynotes from ANGELA NDALIANIS and LISA E. BLOOM. Bloom explores ecological devastation inrelation to issues of representation and memory and Ndalianis explores uncanny technological representations and theirontological challenge to the human.

We will also be talking—via exclusive keynote interviews—with Barbara Creed and Jodi Dean. Dean’s interview will cover topics such as “Communicative Capitalism” in relation to whether capitalism is the new feudalism and whether there may be a socialist/communist future. Creed’s interview will examine the human andthe animal in relation to film, and especially horror film; with creed’s focus being species studies and the way in which horror cinema undermines anthropocentrism, breaking the distinction between man and animal.

Plus there will be a panel discussions with Bruce Isaacs and Salote Tawale as confirmed contributors.

The link for the Inhuman Screens conference is here: https://suff.com.au/inhuman-screens.html


Returning to the Gothic Ocean: Maritime, Marine and Aquatic Uncanny in Southern Waters

 

Call For Papers: An Interdisciplinary Virtual Symposium on Maritime, Marine and Aquatic Gothic Culture and Research to be held Friday 12 February 2021, 0930 – 1930 (AEST)

 

Deadline for abstracts: 5pm, Friday 2 October 2020

 

Returning to the Gothic Ocean is a one day interdisciplinary virtual symposium dedicated to an exploration of the haunted waters stretching across Australia to the Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans as well as the Timor, Tasman, Arafura and Coral Seas. Australian Gothic fictions are steeped in terrestrial lore of the land and landscape and the architectural forms built upon it. It descends from the “weird melancholy” of the bush in colonial literature (Clarke 2013/1893), surges in contemporary reflections on colonial trauma (Gildersleeve 2020), and represents a range of national regional identities – Northern Gothic (Carleton 2012), Tropical Gothic (Craven 2008), Tasmanian Gothic (Stadler 2012), Hinterland Gothic (Doolan 2019), Desert Gothic (Stadler 2019), and Coastal Gothic (Hawryluk 2020). Yet, unlike the land, the watery sources and reaches of Gothic’s haunting fascination are less explored. Elspeth Probyn’s (2018) ominous description of the otherness and toxic “return” of the “mercurial” ocean inspires the symposium title and its fluid regional geographies of ‘Australia’ that stream into the realms of Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, the Asia-Pacific, and Indo-Pacific.

 

This symposium will probe the uncanny, eerie, wondrous and dreaded dimensions of seas, oceans and all variety of aquatic forms and waterways – creeks, lagoons, streams, billabongs, estuaries, rivers, swimming pools, floods and tsunamis – to examine the gothic aesthetics and hauntings that emanate from them. The Gothic includes the lifeless ports and tourist resorts in the iconic global images of the pandemic. It looms in the waste-ridden oceans and waterways that materially intensify human connectivity through the eco-toxicological horror of plastics and pollutants circulating globally in ocean currents.

 

The Gothic sense of dread and anxiety has manifested in Indigenous knowledge and mythologies of the Yidinji people, describing the creator, Bhiral’s creation of The Great Barrier Reef by throwing lava from the sky; the Djunkgao, sisters associated with floods and currents; the bunyip of the Wemba-Wemba peoples that captured the colonial folkloric imagination; and the Muldjewangk, a monster Ngarrindjeri child were warned lived in the waters of the Murray river.

 

Maritime Gothic extends around and beyond the Australian coastline in numerous novels and short stories, and in films of marine adventures and thrillers such as In the Wake of the Bounty (Chauvel 1933), White Death (Bowen 1936), Dead Calm (Phillip Noyce 1989), The Bounty (Roger Donaldson 1984), Sanctum (Grierson 2011), Uninhabited (Bennett 2010), The Reef (Trauki 2011), and Bait (Rendall 2012), The Shallows (Collet-Sera 2016) and in the underwater cinema of Valerie and John Taylor, Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough.

 

While Gothic is most associated with the dread, horror and uncertainty of human existence (Turcotte 1998), it is sometimes ambivalent, or even celebratory and “happy” (Spooner 2017). “Nautical and Maritime writing” can “transform the scope of the Gothic and its materiality” (Alder 2017).

 

Papers can explore how the uncanny “landward” or terrestrial tropes enter maritime, marine or aquatic spaces; or, as Punter and Packham (2017) suggest the “Gothic dimension to critical frameworks” of Hester Blum’s paradigm of “oceanic studies” (see Blum 2013; 2015). If the “submerged and hidden condition” of the “deep” ocean is “encountered foremost through its power to haunt” (Packham and Punter 2017), it can also be discovered in the haunted shallows and sunlit ripples; the uncanny plunges and splashes in rivers and pools; the dives on reefs and wrecks; and the snorkels among buoyant flotsam and drowned jetsam. Delve into the ways in which maritime, marine and aquatic uncanny emerge and submerge, and what spectres and monsters breast the landed fringes – the shores and islands, sandbanks, seabeds, coral reefs, or haunt the forms of maritime architecture and vessels – ports, bridges, piers, rigs, ships, liners, dinghies and ferries.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers from across the Humanities, Blue Humanities, and Marine and Environmental sciences which consider the Gothic nature of the oceans, seas and waterways of the southern hemisphere, extending around and beyond Australian shores. The media of Gothic is unrestricted: literature, cinema, theatre, television, games, visual and video art and digital media, experiments, surveys, field research or other forms are welcome. Chapters arising from the symposium will be invited for publication in an edited collection.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Sea monsters and ghosts

Marine or aquatic undead

Haunted voyages

Shipwrecks and ghost ships

Indigenous creation stories and song lines

Bio-cultural knowledge of waters and sea country

Gothic oceans, seas and waterways in canonical literature

Charting gothic maritime geographies and marine ecologies

Haunted research, uncanny experiments in field and Reef studies

Scuba gothic and horror

Underwater museums and antiquities

Naval gothic and horror

Haunted submariners

Video games about watery gothic horror

The role of the gothic in the contested histories of the Southern seas and oceans

Intersections of the Gothic and the Anthropocene in the Southern oceans, seas and waterways

Folk horror in marine and aquatic settings

Eerie eco-critical approaches to the Southern seas, oceans and waterways

The horror of waste and plastics in Southern waters

Mechanised, virtual, digital or animated oceanic or watery Gothic

Submechnaphobia

Polar extremities

Maritime archaeology

Ancient mega-fauna of Southern waters in scientific research, mythology and the imagination

Gender and gothic oceans, seas and waterways

Symbiotic organisms or the uncanny or inexplicable marine ecologies of Southern waters

Children’s literature and media featuring gothic oceans, seas or waterways

Sporting, yachting, boating horror and gothic

Creative writing around ports, rigs and shipwrecks, or any of the above

Documentary, or creative non-fiction writing on any of the above

Please send an abstract of 300 words and a 50 word author bio to RTOsymposium@gmail.com by 5pm, Friday 02 October 2020.

Allison Craven is an Associate Professor in Screen Studies and English at James Cook University, Australia. She is currently Colin and Margaret Roderick Scholar in Comparative Literature with a project entitled ‘The Properties of the Gothic: Haunts and Hauntings in Australian Film and Literature’. She is the author of Fairy Tale Interrupted: Feminism, Masculinities and Wonder Cinema (2017) and Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema: Poetics and Screen Geographies (2016).

Diana Sandars is a Lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she teaches courses in Screen, Gender, Digital Cultures, Social Justice and Cultural Studies. Diana has a research focus on the child in, and subject of, screen media. Diana is the author of What A Feeling: The Hollywood Musical After MTV (Intellect, forthcoming).

 

 

References

 

Alder, Emily. 2017. Through oceans darkly: Sea literature and the Nautical Gothic.” Gothic Studies 19(2), pp. 1-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/GS.0025

Blum, Hester. 2013. Introduction: oceanic studies. Atlantic Studies 10(2), pp. 151-155.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2013.785186

___. 2015. Terraqueous planet: The case for oceanic studies. In The planetary turn: Relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century, edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru. (pp. 25-36). Northwestern University Press.

Clarke, Marcus. 2013/1893. Preface. In The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon. 1893 edition. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/258/258-h/258-h.htm#link2H_PREF

Craven, Allison. 2008. Tropical gothic: Radiance revisited. eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics 7. http://www.jcu.edu.au/etropic/ET7/CravenRadiance.htm

Carleton, Stephen. 2012. Australian gothic theatre and the northern turn. Australian Literary Studies 27(2), pp. 51-67.

Doolan, Emma. 2019. Hinterland gothic: Subtropical excess in the literature of South East Queensland. eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics 18(1) https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.18.1.2019.3679

Gildersleeve, Jessica. 2020. Contemporary Australian trauma. In The Palgrave handbook of contemporary gothic. Palgrave. Pp. 91-104.

Hawryluk, Linda. 2020. Exploring Australian Coastal Gothic: Poetry and Place. In Writing the Australian Beach, edited by Elizabeth Ellison and Donna Lee Brien. (pp. 91-107). Cham: Switz: Palgrave MacMillan.

Packham, Jimmy and David Punter. 2017. Oceanic studies and the gothic deep. Gothic Studies 19(2), pp 16-29. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/GS.0026

Probyn, Elspeth. 2018. The ocean returns: Mapping a mercurial Anthropocean. Social Science Information 57(3), pp. 386-402.

Spooner, Catherine. 2017. Post-millennial gothic: Comedy, romance and the rise of happy gothic. Bloomsbury.

Stadler, Jane. 2019. Atopian landscapes: Gothic tropes in Australian cinema. In A companion to Australian cinema, edited by Felicity Collins, Jane Landman and Susan Bye. (pp. 336-354). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

___. 2012. Seeing with green eyes: Cinema and the ecological gaze. Senses of Cinema 65. http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/tasmanian-and-the-cinema/seeing-with-green-eyes-tasmanian-landsacpe-cinema-and-the-ecological-gaze/

Turcotte, Gerry. 1998. Australian gothic. In The handbook to gothic literature, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts (pp. 10—19). NY: New York UP.


FRN Power and Precarity Roundtable

 

ZOOM – Tuesday 25th AUGUST 4:00pm – 5:30pm

 

This virtual roundtable event has been conceived as a response to the uncertain employment conditions in higher education, exacerbated by the impacts of COVID-19. With government funding changes and various structural changes within the university, this virtual roundtable seeks to explore what those within the university sector can do to support prospective and precariously employed academic staff. The event will be split between a panel conversation and audience Q&A/discussion. The panel includes higher degree research students, early career researchers and  ongoing academic staff. We welcome academic students and staff from all levels of higher education, particularly those with an interest in how the precarious workplace affects higher education and academic research in Australia.

 

TO ATTEND:

 

Please register your interest through the link below: https://frnpowerandprecarity.eventbrite.com.au

Zoom details will be sent to registered attendees closer to the date.

 

For more information please contact Amy Boyle at amyboyle@uow.edu.au


PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT  

Anthem Press is delighted to announce the upcoming book Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955): Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country by Catherine Kevin.

 

‘Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)’ brings together a history of race relations, pastoral boom and film-making. It is a personal account of coming to terms with a history of dispossession and colonial power relations in a place that has offered the author a strong sense of belonging and settler-colonial family heritage.

 

Catherine Kevin is a senior lecturer in history at Flinders University, Australia. She has published on the histories of domestic violence, pregnancy and miscarriage, feminism and maternity, post–World War II migration to Australia and the making of the film ‘Jedda’ (1955). Kevin’s work has appeared in a range of Australian and international journals and edited collections.

 

Further information about Catherine Kevin and her work, including  Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955): Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country, is available here.


Call for Papers: Soviet Underground and Parallel Cinema

Proposals: 1 August 2020
Papers due: 15 October 2020

In the early 1980s, two moments of underground film — the so-called Parallel Cinema — emerge in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and Moscow. For the first time radical young filmmakers, painters and artists produce amateur films, mainly in 16mm, outside of Goskino’s state monopoly. While the Moscow school’s approach to film is shaped by the influence of conceptualist art, the Leningrad school, associated with “Necrorealism,”
explores an expressionist and absurd cinema, circling around death, decay and horror.

As part of its Russia focus 2020, the East European Film Bulletin is preparing a special issue on Soviet Parallel Cinema (parallelnoe kino), an experimental film movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. We are looking for contributions on underground films and video art by, among others, Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, Evgeny Iufit, Evgeny Kondratiev (Debil), Boris Yukhananov, Andrej Myortvy, Konstantin Mitenev, Igor Bezrukov, Alexander Doulerain, Vladimir Zakharov, Oleg Kotelnikov etc.

We are particularly interested in essays that examine films and video art in relation to politics, art, early avant-garde film, literature, philosophy, punk culture and transnational relations.

Proposals of 250 words should be sent to editors@eefb.org by Saturday, August 1, 2020.

Stylistic guidelines for essays published in our journal can be found here:
https://eefb.org/contribute/

East European Film Bulletin | 22 rue des Envierges, 75020 Paris | Facebook | eefb.org

-Isabel Jacobs ( isabeljacobs23@gmail.com )


Call for Papers

Music in Russian Cinema
Proposals: 1st of June 2020
Papers due: 1st of October 2020

As part of its Russian focus in 2020, the East European Film Bulletin is preparing a special music issue.

Music holds a special place in Russian cinema. In place of a “soundtrack”, implicating different songs, music is an intricate component of Russian film, weaved into its very core. This rich history could be considered in a multitude of ways. While the film scores of great Russian composers like Dimitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev have often been written about, the scoring of many Russian films has been overlooked.

We are particularly interested in:
– The manipulation of music and sound in Soviet/Russian cinema under directors such as Kira Muratova and Alexander Sokurov
– The national and transnational politics of the soundtrack: how has music been used to emphasize traditional values or encourage dissent?
– Russian, and especially Soviet musicals
– Documentary-making with a special focus on music and sound effects, such as that of Vladimir Kobrin
– Histories of film composers such as Eduard Artemiev as well as films about musicians or musical movements

Proposals of 250 words should be sent to editors@eefb.org by the 1st of June 2020.
English translations for Russian scholars are possible.

Stylistic guidelines for essays published in our journal can be found here: https://eefb.org/contribute/.


POSTPONED: Third Biennial Conference of the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ)

Please note that this year’s SSAAANZ conference has been postponed until further notice due to COVID-19. We will advise SSAAANZ members of further plans once they are in place.


SCREEN FUTURES: Media, Concepts, Worlds—Third Biennial Conference of the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ)

Hosted by the University of Sydney Film Studies Program, Department of Art History, School of Literature, Art and Media, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Keynote speakers confirmed

Professor Francesco Casetti (Yale University)
Professor Jackie Stacey (University of Manchester)
Associate Professor Jo Smith (Victoria University of Wellington)

Call for papers

“We must do what we can to open our imaginations up to a radically different set of future possibilities.”
—Crow Chief Plenty Coups’s reasoning, according to Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation

Our screens are filled with images of the future, some uncannily familiar to us, some strange and unsettling. As climate and ecological emergencies are declared or denied, democratic states collapse, and authoritarianism intensifies, it seems necessary to break with the business-as-usual call for papers to consider the future of screen-based media, and those disciplines organised around and oriented to them. If the intellectual project of screen studies in its broadest sense is to consider how screen arts and media shape our selves and our worlds, what does the present moment require of us? The biennial conference of the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ) provides an opportunity to focus on future research, practice-based and teaching agendas, both individual and collective, from diverse standpoints and critical orientations. Can we consider the state of the field in terms of how it might reflect, mediate, negotiate and anticipate the state of the world? What can screen arts and media, and screen studies, contribute to transformations in cultures that might guarantee viable or, even better, flourishing futures?

SSAAANZ invites proposals from researchers, archivists, educators, policymakers, and practitioners that address this broad theme and its possible topics, including but not limited to:

  • Activist screen media in the attention economy
  • Archives for future historians
  • Cinema experience in the twenty-first century
  • Cyber-feminist methodologies for screen media
  • Decolonising screen media
  • Documentary’s anticipatory ethics
  • Dystopian and utopian screen media
  • The ecological politics of screen media
  • The future of film and television in the absence of the state
  • The (negative) futures of queer screen media
  • Hypertopic screen media
  • Histories and philosophies of screen media time and time-consciousness
  • Indigenous screen media
  • Mediating migration
  • Memory and screen media
  • New keywords for screen studies
  • Petromodernity, hydrocarbon imaginaries and histories of screen media
  • Post-cinema’s extinction imaginary
  • Post-war film movements and/as regenerative film culture
  • Screen media and scientific research
  • Time-based versus time-critical screen media
  • Trauma, affect and screen media.

Submission format guidelines

Individual paper: standard scholarly paper; 20 minutes.

Pre-formed panels: three or four papers focused on a single project or a shared research theme or topic; option (1) four speakers; or option (2) three speakers with a respondent; 80 minutes total excluding Q&A.

Show-and-tell: a short presentation of a screen art/media case study, followed by audience discussion; 20 minutes. The time available should be split evenly between screening plus commentary (10 minutes), and audience discussion (10 minutes). The category of screen media is open and may include short creative work or excerpts from longer work, work-in-progress, video essays, fragments or orphans, or archival screen media.

Please send an abstract of 200-250 words and a short bio of 50 words to ssaaanz2020.conference@sydney.edu.au no later than 1 May, 23:59pm AEST. Please state clearly the proposed format of your presentation. Pre-formed panel proposals should include an additional abstract on the project or research theme, and nominate option (1) or (2).

For general conference inquiries, please email the Chair of the Conference Steering Committee, Dr Susan Potter.

Conference Steering Committee: Bruce Isaacs, Susan Potter (Chair), Richard Smith (Film Studies Program, The University of Sydney); Anna Broinowski, Stefan Popescu (Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney). Early Career Researcher Event Subcommittee: Max Bledstein (University of New South Wales), Ivan Čerečina (University of Sydney), Janice Loreck (Curtin University), Missy Molloy (Victoria University of Wellington), Kirsten Stevens (University of Melbourne).

Note that the conference will run from the afternoon of Tuesday 24 November through to the afternoon of Friday 27 November. All confirmed presenters will be required to be financial members of SSAAANZ in order to register for the conference.

The Film Studies Program acknowledges and pays respect to the traditional owners of the lands on which the University of Sydney Camperdown Campus is built, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within Aboriginal Custodianship of Country, and acknowledge that the lands of the Gadigal people were never ceded.

We are committed to organising a conference with a minimal carbon footprint.


Bertha Foundation Fellowships

At Bertha we know that many activists and investigative journalists are already doing groundbreaking work to investigate, amplify their work and connect with each other. The Bertha Challenge aims to support this work by providing time to work exclusively on a focused project, the spaces in which to connect with a diverse global cohort of Bertha Fellows and partners, and the resources to develop tangible products speaking directly to the Challenge question.

Our fellowships offer:

Income for each Bertha Fellow for one year, not exceeding USD $60,000 and commensurate with the applicant’s current or equivalent salary at the host organization – ideally a media outlet for an investigative journalist and an NGO, community organization or social movement for an activist.

Project funding of up to USD $10,000 for each Bertha Fellow to produce a culminating product that responds to the question posed by the Bertha Challenge. Directed toward a specified target audience, this could be a series of articles, videos, podcasts, games or drama productions, for example. Bertha Fellows working together will have the option to pool their project funding to produce on a larger scale.

A connect fund specifically designed to encourage collaboration between fellows.

Training through regular webinars, with topics on a range of issues from current debates around the climate crisis and ecological collapse to methods of investigation, methods of communicating findings through news media, storytelling, popular education and more.

Peer and mentor support in the form of regular virtual check-ins with Bertha staff and a cohort of Bertha Fellows. Like many fellowships, the Bertha Challenge aims to provide space for personal development. However, we also believe that work is most impactful when it is done in collaboration with peers conducting similar work on a sustained basis.

Network development through the global cohort of Bertha Fellows and exposure to relevant partners within and beyond the Bertha network, including our legal partners in the Bertha Justice Network, many of whom are at the forefront of creating legal strategies to address the climate crisis. Bertha can also support in strengthening local networks.

Global convenings of Bertha Fellows and selected guests at the start (July 2020) and end (June 2021) of the Bertha Challenge.

All fellowship applications must include a local host organization willing to act as a financial and oversight host. This could be an organization within which potential applicants already work or another appropriate organization willing to host applicants for the year. Bertha Fellows and host organizations must share a commitment to Bertha Challenge objectives and conditions.

The Bertha Challenge will provide space for leaders in their fields to develop professionally.  A further aim is to fuel productive debates and solidify networks that will last beyond the one-year project cycle.

 

Applying

Pairing Activists and Investigative Journalists
We will give priority consideration to investigative journalists and activists that apply to the Challenge jointly. Joint Applicants must fill in individual applications, but make reference to their partner applicant, including where their work will overlap and how they will support one another’s projects.

Applicants unable to find a partner and who want to apply independently are still encouraged to do so.

Deliverables
This is a full-time fellowship. Bertha fellows will spend the majority of their time working in their home countries and be required to:

  • Attend in-person global convenings that take place at the beginning and end of the Challenge
  • Develop and deliver a culminating product that responds to the Bertha Challenge
  • Participate in monthly virtual check-ins
  • Participate in monthly webinars
  • Develop local and global network relationships

Bertha Challenge Culminating Product
It is important to find creative and scalable ways to expose and build wider awareness and critical thinking. The centerpiece of this fellowship program is the work fellows will produce to communicate their Bertha Challenge findings to a specified audience.

These products should first and foremost serve an identified target audience. For activists this might be supporters within their network, for investigative journalists it might be readers of their newspaper. We encourage applicants, apart from identifying the work they intend doing, to be specific about the audience they intend on reaching, and how they intend on doing so.

We want fellows to learn from each other’s work. In addition to delivering the final product to the target audience throughout the fellowship year, all final products must be presented at the Bertha Challenge closing convening. Products presented must be open source and in English. If translation is needed, this cost must be included in fellow’s project budgets.

Guidelines on how project budgets can be spent are included in the MoU. Click here to view.

Application Requirements
All applicants must submit:

  • Completed online application form
  • A brief resume/CV of no more than three pages
  • A list of 2-4 referees including name, relationship to applicant and contact details
  • A signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) from your prospective host organization – including commensurate salary and any benefits provided.

Host Organizations
Fellowship applicants are required to secure a host organization in their home country to receive and administer the fellowship award and project funds. Host organizations must be legally structured to receive grant funding and be able to process payroll. Host organizations must share a commitment to Bertha Challenge objectives and conditions.

For an investigative journalist the host organization should be a media outlet. For an activist the host organization should be an NGO, community organization or social movement.

The Bertha Fellow’s salary must not exceed USD $60,000 and must be commensurate with the current or equivalent salary of the applicant at the host organization. This is to avoid creating disparity at the host organization. The host organization will be expected to make arrangements regarding tax, healthcare and other benefits, the cost of which will be allocated from within the fellowship award. Bertha will make a contribution of 15% of the fellowship award to the host organization to cover administrative costs. A table is provided within the MoU to assist applicants in calculating the fellowship award.

Bertha Foundation will not interfere with the editorial autonomy of the host organization during the course of the Bertha Challenge.

Time Commitment
While we understand that applicants will have some existing obligations to the movements and organizations with which they work, this fellowship will require a full-time commitment. Both the applicant and host organization must commit to this in writing.

Important Considerations
All strategies must be non-violent. Funding may not be used for political lobbying activities. The program does not fund enrolment for degree or non-degree study at academic institutions, including dissertation research. This must be your only fellowship or source of income for the duration of the term.

Selection Criteria
Bertha endeavours to select an inclusive and representative cohort of Bertha Fellows that celebrates diversity.

Bertha Fellows will be selected on individual merit but also on their complementary skills to the cohort, their existing and/or proposed networks and prospects for long-term impact of their work.

Applicants may come from and work in any country, but to ensure that this cohort of Bertha Fellows is able to be fully participatory, we require all applicants to be proficient in spoken and written English.

 

For more information: http://berthafoundation.org/shorthand_story/the-bertha-challenge/?sfns=mo


Call for Papers

Edited Collection – Ryan Murphy: Genre, Gender and Authorship

Editors: Dr. Melanie Robson (UNSW Sydney), Dr. Jessica Ford (University of Newcastle, Australia) and Dr. Phoebe Macrossan (Queensland University of Technology)

In his 20 years in the US television industry Ryan Murphy has amassed a large and diverse body of television work. Murphy exemplifies the modern TV mogul, operating as an executive producer, creator, showrunner, writer and director on a wide range of series. Murphy is well-known for creating or co-creating Nip/Tuck (FX 2003-2010), Glee (FOX 2009-2015), American Horror Story (FX 2011-), Scream Queens (FOX 2015-2016), American Crime Story (FX 2016-), Feud (FX 2017), Pose (FX 2018-), 9-1-1 (FOX 2018-) and The Politician (Netflix 2019-), among others. 

In 2018, Murphy signed an unprecedented $300 million deal with streaming giant Netflix to create content for the platform for the next five years. Murphy’s television series and made-for-TV movies have been distributed across broadcast, cable and streaming, and they have a distinct recognizable style and aesthetic. Murphy has re-popularised the television anthology format and is known for his camp aesthetics and experiments with genre, form and style. Murphy’s television series often champion underdogs and non-traditional lead characters, such as people of colour, minoritized women, trans* and non-binary characters and people who are diverse in their sexuality, gender, and/or sex characteristics. While these characters may be marginalized in other television series, in Murphy’s series they are rendered in complex and dynamic ways, challenging and subverting gender and genre expectations. 

This edited collection seeks to investigate the key concerns, forms, and central abiding questions of Murphy’s television oeuvre, paying particular attention to the question of how and why his particular creative and business decisions have made him so powerful in the current television and streamed content environment. 

We are particularly interested in papers that address how Murphy and his work sits at the intersection of many contemporary debates in television studies around genre, gender and authorship, including but not limited to:

  • Genre studies of Murphy’s work
  • Genre hybridity and fluidity 
  • Questions of television aesthetics and style 
  • “Quality” television, “cinematic” television and “peak” TV
  • Movie stars on television and television celebrity
  • Expansion of television distribution networks 
  • Shifting genre boundaries and expectations 
  • Diversity of voices and perspectives on television 
  • Non-traditional television protagonists, including queer characters, older women, trans* characters and people of colour
  • Questions of gender and sexuality in visual culture
  • Changing models of television authorship
  • Questions of television authorship, paratexts and branding 
  • And more 

Please send 400-word abstracts and a short bio to Melanie Robson (m.robson@unsw.edu.au) by April 1, 2020. 

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Jessica Ford jessica.ford@newcastle.edu.au or Phoebe Macrossan on phoebe.macrossan@qut.edu.au. 

Notification of acceptance: May 1, 2020. 

Full papers due: 16 September, 2020. 

All papers will be double-blind peer reviewed. 


Thomas Elsaesser 1943-2019
The Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand joins the international screen studies community in expressing our deepest condolences to the Elsaesser family and to Sylvie on the passing of Thomas on the 4th of December. Thomas was a titan of screen studies theory and history whose immeasurable presence in all aspects of so many fields will be sorely missed yet will have an ongoing influence well into the future. Rest in peace Thomas.

PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT     

‘Understanding Australian Academic Authors in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Their Publishing Experiences, Values, and Perspectives’ by Agata Mrva-Montoya, Edward J. Luca, and Henry Boateng

Journal of Scholarly Publishing
University of Toronto Press
Volume 51, Number 1, October 2019
pp. 38-62

Abstract: Publishers of academic books in Australia have evolved in response to the crisis in scholarly publishing by adapting to the opportunities afforded by digital technologies for faster, cheaper, and more dynamic publishing approaches. Academic authors are at the core of the scholarly publishing landscape, so publishers need to understand their motives and needs. This paper examines data from a survey of academic authors in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) in Australia. Our aim for the survey was to understand the publishing experiences, behaviours, and perceptions of these authors. We discovered their expectations for publishers are high. They want fast turnaround, high-quality editing and production values, and cheaper books, which run up against three principal constraints for all scholarly publishers: quality, time, and cost. The prestige and reputation of a publisher are critical, and authors are primarily interested in traditional success measures of academic performance. Societal impact or engagement with research end-users was seen as less important. The findings of this project highlight a number of contradictions and tensions within the scholarly publishing landscape, and they have tangible implications for practices in HSS for authors and publishers, as well as for grant funders and university administrators who adopt policies and assign criteria for research evaluation.

Full text available here: https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/full/10.3138/jsp.51.1.03

Also available through Project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/739130


SEMINAR AT MONASH UNIVERSITY

School of Media, Film & Journalism

History for Losers: Cinema and Rising Nationalism in Postcommunist Eastern Europe

Abstract: The end of state socialism brought a significant rise in nationalist sentiment in the newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe, often fuelled by feelings of abandonment, disorientation and insecurity in the context of a new world order. More recently, various paramilitary and extreme racist organisations are active throughout the nation–they own television channels and other media outlets, organise training camps, and in general control the patriotic narrative of the respective countries’ public space. The new enemies that the nationalists construct–members of the ethnic minorities, the Roma, or refugees–are the subject of hate speech and pogroms. In this talk I will discuss films made across various countries of the former Soviet sphere that are charting the evolution of radical nationalist sentiment and rhetoric in the region. Examples include Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Poland.

Bio: Dina Iordanova is Professor of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures at the ancient University of St Andrews in Scotland; she is also visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong. Working in the paradigm of transnationalism, she has published extensively in two areas of film studies. As specialist on Eastern European film, she has explored matters such as the cinematic representations of the wars for Yugoslav succession, of various aspects of post-communism, of European migrations, and of ethnic groups such as the Roma. As specialist on global film industries, her focus has been on the circulation of cinema made within the smaller traditions, outside of the main centres such as Hollywood. She has led work on film festivals, diasporic distribution and internet communities, and film on global airlines.

Date: Thursday, 31 October 2019

Time: 6.00 pm – 7.30 pm

Venue: Monash Conference Centre, Level 7, 30 Collins Street, Melbourne, VIC 3000

For more information please contact Deane Williams: deane.williams@monash.edu


SEMINAR AT MONASH UNIVERSITY

School of Media, Film & Journalism

Transnational Film Studies Approaches in the Digital Era

Abstract: In this seminar I will discuss new trends in the global circulation of narrative film, aiming to highlight the relevance of a transnational film studies approach. This will be premised on the understanding of cinema as a profoundly transnational form of cultural production, paired with the understanding that there are several distinct global circuits of production, dissemination and consumption that rarely intersect and interact. I will zoom in on matters related to the dynamics of film festivals, diasporic channels and online communities, and film on global airlines and revisit the ‘long tail’ theory from a present-day point of view.

Bio: Dina Iordanova is Professor of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures at the ancient University of St Andrews in Scotland; she is also visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong. Working in the paradigm of transnationalism, she has published extensively in two areas of film studies. As specialist on Eastern European film, she has explored matters such as the cinematic representations of the wars for Yugoslav succession, of various aspects of post-communism, of European migrations, and of ethnic groups such as the Roma. As specialist on global film industries, her focus has been on the circulation of cinema made within the smaller traditions, outside of the main centres such as Hollywood. She has led work on film festivals, diasporic distribution and internet communities, and film on global airlines.

Date: Wednesday, 30 October 2019

Time: 2.00 pm – 4.00 pm

Venue: S9.01, Level 9, Building S, Caulfield Campus

For more information please contact Deane Williams: deane.williams@monash.edu


PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT            

Urban Shadows

By Paul Drewitt

Kirra is a 17-year-old girl growing up in the Aboriginal community of Karinya in urban Darwin. Her life revolves around her Aunty and boyfriend called Banjo. Kirra seeks a better life for herself and her people, as she is constantly subjected to extreme poverty and abuse; until one day, Banjo wins a prize – an all-expenses paid stay at the local resort. Here they are mistakenly identified as robbers and pursued by the police. Through Kirra’s journey of self-discovery, she grows as a leader of her community and takes over. Through self-determination, she creates a movement towards a mutual understanding of contemporary Aboriginal issues in which newly educated people took action to address injustices suffered by Aboriginal people.

Paul Drewitt is a senior teacher from Darwin, Australia. He holds a Bach. Education from Charles Darwin University from Australia

MediaMatters

June 2019

194 pages

Paperback

ISBN 978-0578525556

£12 / AU$27 / US$16

Order your copy of Urban Shadows here! See below

https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B07TPHW74M?

 For any press enquiries and for information on receiving a review copy, please contact marketing@aup.nl.

 Recommend this book to your library using our library recommendation form.


Valuing Web Series: Economic, Industrial, Cultural and Social Value.

This project investigates the value of web series as a form of online screen entertainment characterised by original and diverse content produced by emerging creatives. It will deploy the theoretical frame of ‘total value’ to assess the role and viability of web series: value accrued as career development opportunities for digital content makers; value accrued by the audiences who consume web series; and the value accrued by the Australian screen industry as web series contribute to innovation in a rapidly evolving global screen ecology. We have partnered with four leading web series festivals who will benefit directly from a hosting a number of forums for the discussion and dissemination of our comparative findings.

The four-year project is funded by an Australian Research Council grant.

Researchers: Professor Susan Turnbull; Professor Stuart Cunningham; Dr Steinar Ellingsen; Dr Nicola Evans; Dr Mark Ryan; Dr Emilia Zboralska


CFP: Cine-feminisms and the Academy Symposium

UNSW Sydney, 12-13th December 2019

The contemporary media landscape is shaped by increasing precarity and awareness of gendered issues. The global screen industry is grappling with the cultural and industrial shifts precipitated by the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. For some, the Harvey Weinstein revelations and subsequent scandal resulted in a re-evaluation of the gendered operation of Hollywood. The industry has responded on the red carpet, through the media and in film festival juries. What role do – and can – forms of film feminisms (or cine-feminism) play within this context?

This symposium will explore questions around the state, place and forms of contemporary cine-feminisms. There is little question that women’s filmmaking is gaining new currency and profile in film festivals, in film funding and in academic publishing. Calls for greater gender equity in the film industry are resulting in shifts in the ways (some) film funding bodies allocate resources and in how (some) film festivals select and program work. Decades of lobbying by women working both within and on the margins of the film industry have been the driving force in creating these shifts, often in engagement with the long history of feminist film scholarship on the work of women behind the camera, in front of the camera, and in front of the screen. The recent commitments to greater gender equity in the film industry can also, of course, be understood as one way that the industry has responded to negative publicity (in particular, the high-profile cases of sexual harassment, sexual assault and gender-based discrimination that have captured public attention) and economic opportunity (targeting female viewers).

While this (re)newed interest in women’s filmmaking has been enabled by cine-feminisms to what extent and in what ways does – or can – it create opportunities for feminist teaching and research in the academy? What place does cine-feminism have in the academy today? When, where and how does it shape and inform how both film history and film theory are understood and taught and how questions of authorship, genre, performance, intermediality, and industry are explored? In the shifting university sector, are there particular issues that cine-feminist work bumps up against in terms of syllabus design, recognition of engagement and outreach, research funding and publications?

We invite proposals on any area related to cine-feminisms/film feminisms, including but not limited to:

  • Contemporary and historical cine- and media feminisms
  • Feminist screen theories and pedagogy
  • “Doing” feminist screen studies
  • Feminist cine-activisms – on screen, online, in press, on the streets
  • Diverse feminist screen cultures in the digital age

Keynote will be delivered by Dr Anna Backman Rogers (University of Gothenberg, Sweden)

Dr Anna Backman Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in Feminism and Visual Culture at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and The Crisis Image (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (Berghahn 2018). She is also the co-editor with Laura Mulvey of Feminisms (Amsterdam University Press, 2015) and the co-editor with Boel Ulfsdotter of Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics and Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity, and Activism (both with Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Her current research is on the films of Lynne Ramsay and Barbara Loden’s WANDA.

CFP closes 13th of September 2019. Please send your proposals including a title, an abstract (250 words), and a short biography (80 words) to Dr Jessica Ford jessica.ford@newcastle.edu.au and Dr Jodi Brooks j.brooks@unsw.edu.au by 13th of September 2019.


PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT            

Movie Circuits

Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology

By Gabriel Menotti

This book attempts to grasp media in the making. It delves into the underbelly of cinema in order to explore how images circulate and apparatus crystallize across different material formations. The indisciplinary experience of curators and projectionists provides a means to suspend traditional film studies and engage with the medium as it happens, as a continuing, self-differing mess. From contemporary art exhibitions to pirate screenings, research and practice come together in a vibrant form of media scholarship, built from the angle of cinema’s functionaries – a call to reinvent the medium from within. 

Gabriel Menotti is a lecturer in Film and Multimedia at UFES (Brazil). He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths (University of London).

MediaMatters

February 2019

210 pages, 21 b/w illustrations

Hardback

ISBN 978 90 8964 890 7

e-ISBN 978 90 4852 754 0

€95.00 / £85.00 / $115.00

€94.99 / £84.99 / $114.99

Order your copy of Movie Circuits here!

 For any press enquiries and for information on receiving a review copy, please contact marketing@aup.nl.

 Recommend this book to your library using our library recommendation form.


CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Fan Studies Network Australasia Conference, 2019

 

Venue: Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

 

Date: 11-13th December, 2019

 

Proposal Deadline: 15th July, 2019

 

The 2019 FSN Australasia Conference focuses on the impact of technological, cultural, and media change on shifting fan practices, and vice versa: the impact of fan practices on technological, cultural, and media change. The Conference aims to showcase diverse approaches to a wide range of fan communities and practices across four core areas: screen and digital cultures (such as film, television, videogames, online and other digital media); public leisure cultures (such as sport, theme parks, festivals and conventions, popular culture stores, and concerts); audio cultures (such as podcasts, radio, and music); and material cultures (such as comic books, toys, books, and board games). Please see attached CFP for further information on suggested presentation topics.

 

We invite submissions for individual research papers of 20 minutes as well as pre-constituted panels of three to four presenters. Proposals of no more than 300 words (with 150 word bio) should be sent to Jessica Balanzategui jbalanzategui@swin.edu.au by 15th July 2019, as should any queries.

 

Keynote speakers:

 

Dr Bertha Chin

Lecturer of Social Media and Communication

Swinburne University of Technology, Sarawak, Malaysia

Editor: Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics, and Digital Society (with Lucy Bennett & Bethan Jones, 2015)

Editor: Crowdfunding Issue of New Media and Society (with Bennett and Jones, 2015)

Editor: Transcultural Issue of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies (with Lori Morimoto, 2015).

 

Dr Benjamin Woo

Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Communication

Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Author: Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture (2018)

Author: The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (with Bart Beaty, 2016)

Editor: Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective (with Stuart Poyntz and Jamie Rennie, 2016).

 

Professor Melanie Swalwell

Professor of Digital Media Heritage

Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

Editor: Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandoms, Archives (with Angela Ndalianis and Helen Stuckey, 2017)

Editor: Born Digital Cultural Heritage Issue of Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media (with Angela Ndalianis, 2016)

Lead Investigator of the digital heritage project “Play it Again: Creating a Playable History of Australasian Digital Games” in collaboration with the Australian Centre of the Moving Image.

 

Further industry events and keynote speakers to be announced.

 

Conference Steering Committee:

Dr Jessica Balanzategui (jbalanzategui@swin.edu.au)

Dr Liam Burke

Dr Naja Later

Tara Lomax

Andy Lynch

Professor Angela Ndalianis


Book Launch: Migrant and Diasporic Film and Filmmaking in New Zealand

*DATE UPDATED: see below.

The Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies invites you to the launch of Associate Professor Arezou Zalipour’s book ‘Migrant and Diasporic Film and Filmmaking in New Zealand’

This book is the first ever collection on diasporic screen production and practice in New Zealand. Through contributions by a diverse range of local and international scholars, it identifies the central characteristics, histories, practices and trajectories of screen media made by and/or about migrant and diasporic peoples in New Zealand, including Asians, Pacific Islanders and other communities. It calls for more diversity on New Zealand Screens and addresses issues pertinent to representation of migrant and diasporic life and experience on screen, and showcases critical dialogues with directors, scriptwriters, producers and other key figures whose work reflects experiences of migration, diaspora and multiculturalism in contemporary New Zealand.

Date: Thursday 23 May, 4:30pm – 5:30pm
Location: AUT City Campus
WA Building, Level 6 – Design and Creative Technologies Faculty Lounge.
Auckland 1010
New Zealand
Contact: arezou.zalipour@aut.ac.nz

East European Film Bulletin

Call for Papers

CFP: The Films of Kira Muratova

Proposals: 15th of May 2019

Papers due: 15th of August 2019

As part of its Ukraine focus 2019, the East European Film Bulletin is preparing a special issue on the films of Kira Muratova. We are looking for contributions on the films discussing and contextualizing their censorship, fabrication, and their role in the construction of a national Ukrainian film-identity.

With a film career spanning over 50 years, Muratova saw radical changes in her homelands, from the Kingdom of Romania where she was born in 1934, to the port city of Odessa where she spent most of her career. Near the end of her life, she supported the Euromaidan protesters and called for a pacifist Ukrainian revolution. She died in 2018 at the age of 83, having contributed a filmography of 44 surprising and radical films to this world.

We are particularly interested in essays reevaluating major themes in her work, especially as they relate any of the following films:

By the Steep Ravine (У Крутого Яра, 1961)

Brief Encounters (Короткие встречи, 1967)

The Long Farewell (Долгие проводы, 1971)

Among Grey Stones (Среди серых камней,1983)

The Asthenic Syndrome (Астенический синдром, 1989)

Three Stories (Три истории,1997)

Proposals of 250 words should be sent to editors@eefb.org by Wednesday, May 15, 2019. A selection of the published papers is scheduled to be republished as part of a print edition of our regional focus on Ukraine 2019.

Stylistic guidelines for essays published in our journal can be found here: https://eefb.org/contribute/

East European Film Bulletin

22 rue des Envierges

75020 Paris

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/EEFB.org/

http://eefb.org

-Colette de Castro ( colettedecastro@gmail.com )


Issue 14 of fusion, an international, open access, online scholarly journal for the communication, creative industries and media arts, is now live.

http://www.fusion-journal.com/014-intersections-in-film-and-media-studies/

Guest edited by Jodi Brooks (UNSW Australia), Kathleen Williams (University of Tasmania, Australia), Jessica Ford (University of Newcastle, Australia) and Melanie Robson (UNSW Australia), this special issue publishes a collection of articles exploring film and media intersections, offering innovative ways of understanding how hybridisation processes inform what and how we consume, produce, teach, learn and enjoy about the screen.

CONTENTS

Editorial: Intersections in film and media studies by Jodi Brooks, Kathleen Williams, Jessica Ford and Melanie Robson

Reviewed Articles

Inhabiting the image of collisions: Virtual reality cinema as a medium of ethical experience by Adam Daniel

Feminist cinematic television: Authorship, aesthetics and gender in Pamela Adlon’s Better Things by Jessica Ford

Memories in the networked assemblage: How algorithms shape personal photographs by Tara McLennan

Across and in-between: Transcending disciplinary borders in film festival studies by Kirsten Stevens

The Netflix documentary house style: Streaming TV and slow media by Daniel Binns

Sip My Ocean: Immersion and optical color by Wendy Haslem

Non-reviewed Articles

Media convergence and the teaching of film studies by Melanie Robson

Women, film and independence in the 21st century: A public forum

Jodi Brooks, Therese Davis and Claire Perkins (Eds.)

Jodi Brooks (Facilitator) with Santilla Chingaipe, Lisa French, Kristy Matheson, Margot Nash and Claire Perkins (Participants)

-Dr Jessica Ford | Sessional Academic 


NEW CFP: Television drama, law and national identity

Symposium Announcement and First Call for Papers

Friday 6 September 2019
University of Westminster

Television drama plays a seminal role in the cultural life of nations, and the way in which it depicts national identities merits scholarly exploration. In this regard national identity’s relationship with law as its crystallisation is particularly worthy of academic attention and lends itself to interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives. Police, crime, justice and dystopian dramas frequently place law and social attitudes to law centre-stage in the delineation of national identity.

Television drama may be perceived as a communicative event in which history is transformed into myth through a stylised set of codes. The transmission of coded messages about national identity, and their interpretation (both hegemonic and oppositional) become particularly worthy of analysis as the nation comes under strain through patterns of globalised and regional integration coupled with acts of national resistance. Multiple genres of television drama provide scope for the expression of national identity, including the use by period dramas of creative nostalgia to represent the contemporary nation or the warnings to the nation posed by science fiction television. In all contexts the interplay between projections of national identity and television’s treatment of race, class and gender warrants critical scrutiny.

Proposals for 20-minute papers are therefore invited for a symposium on 6 September 2019, to be held in the University of Westminster’s historic Regent Street building just metres away from BBC headquarters. Possible subjects for papers might include, but are by no means limited to:
• is national identity empirical or normative in television drama?
• internet/social media amplification of debates on TV drama, law and identity
• national identity on television as ideology
• depictions of trials and national identity
• national security dramas: ‘war against terrorism’, identity and law(lessness)
• political dramas: uniform global elite or national diversity?
• fan responses to the portrayal of the nation
• globalisation/globalised law – depicted as threat to national identity?
• feminist crime drama and national identity
• science fiction or dystopian fiction, law and national identity
• ‘heritage’ drama: commodification of (rose-tinted) ideas of national identity for global consumption?
Abstracts should be 250 words in length, accompanied by a 100-word biography of the author, and sent to nicold@wmin.ac.uk by the deadline of 1 February 2019.

-Professor Danny Nicol ( nicold@westminster.ac.uk )


NEW CFP: Not Another Brick in the Wall: Teaching and Researching the Audio Video Essay A Two-Day Symposium

19th and 20th November 2018, Monash University, Melbourne

According to Vilém Flusser (2014), the “gesture of making” constitutes a kind of thinking with one’s hands; in this symposium our aim is to consider the effectiveness of the audio-visual essay for facilitating creative and intellectual enquiry in film, television, and media studies. The symposium will include:

  • a screening of audio-video essays
  • hands-on interactive workshops on video essay best practice
  • papers and presentations
  • Keynote Speakers: Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López
  • Panel Presentation: Sean Redmond and Jo Tai, Deakin University: Assessing (with) The Video Essay: A Pilot Case Study

The audio video essay has become a central pillar in the way that film, television, and media scholars, in particular, publish their research since it allows scholars to:

Explore the ways in which digital technologies afford a new mode of carrying out and presenting film and moving image research. The full range of digital technologies now enables film and media scholars to write using the very materials that constitute their objects of study: moving images and sounds (Grant et al, 2014)

The audio video essay is also used increasingly in schools, colleges and universities, in the arts and humanities, as a rich and invigorating ‘non-standard form’ of course assessment and mode of creative and intellectual enquiry. The reason for this development is fourfold: first, applied knowledge and understanding is seen to foster the best learning outcomes; second, assessment logo-centrism is seen to fail many students, particularly those with little cultural capital from low socio-economic backgrounds; third, in a highly mediated modern world, where screen presentations occur in all walks of life, the audio video essay is seen as an incredibly important transferable tool; and finally, it is born out of a recognition that learning and understanding is not a closed book and that the audio video essay fosters resourceful, open learning.

To date, however, there has been very little research on the use, value or impact of the audio video essay on learning and teaching. Research has been carried out on video production as an effective learning and assessment tool (see Elizabeth Mavroudi and Heike Jöns, 2011) but nothing that fully examines this particular form. Similarly, within education research there has not yet been a move to presenting research findings through this method.

The Research questions that thus energise this symposium include:

  • How might use of the audio video essay as a mode or tool of teaching improve students’ educational experience and learning outcomes?
  • Does the audio video essay work as an empowering assessment item within the arts and humanities disciplines?
  • How might it be taken up in STEM disciplines?
    Do students view it more favourably than written or examined forms of assessment?
  • How might we best employ the audio video essay to represent our scholarship within education, and the disciplines we represent?

The Symposium invites critical and/or creative abstracts, including audio-video presentations, for individual 20- minute papers, or pre-constituted panels of 3 x 20-minute papers, on any topic or theme related to the deployment of the audio-video essay in learning and teaching, and in research.This could include empirical research, the analysis of the audio-video essay in the classroom, and its use as a new form of research output.

The symposium is aimed at teachers and researchers new to the video essay as well as those who already incorporate it into their teaching and research. We invite teachers, academics, researchers, and public institutions, from across the discipline areas to attend one or both days. You do not have to be presenting a paper to attend.

Registration fees will be set at $75 per delegate.

Individual Abstracts: 250 words, plus a 50-word biography. Please indicate if a postgraduate student.

Pre-constituted Panels: 150-word overview, plus 3x 250-word abstracts, and 3x 50-word biography, plus name of lead contact.

Deadline for individual and panel abstracts: September 17th 2018

Delegates will be notified of decisions by: October 1st 2018

We will award a small bursary for the best PhD abstract submitted (also notified on October 1st )

Please direct all abstracts and any enquiries to:

Catherine Fowler: catherine.fowler@otago.ac.nz

Claire Perkins: claire.perkins@monash.edu

Sean Redmond: s.redmond@deakin.edu.au


NEW CFP: Special issue on “Emotions” in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, edited by Jane Stadler, Julian Hanich and Jens Eder

Closing: 15 September 2018

For more than two decades emotions have been a major topic of discussion and contention in film and media studies. From cognitive theories and phenomenology to affect studies, many different approaches have been suggested, many books written, and many insights won. However, some crucial questions have barely been discussed. This special section #Emotions takes stock and seeks to advance the field in new directions. We suggest a conceptual, a contextual, an ethical, a political, and a media-comparative expansion, thus showing the urgency of thinking further about the interconnection between contemporary media and the emotions of their audiences.

We are primarily interested in contributions that focus on emotions that are actually felt by viewers, readers, gamers, users, or prosumers, and not emotions represented in media, for instance by way of characters. We are also looking for thick descriptions of emotional experiences and well-chosen examples of how it feels to undergo a specific emotion in concrete media engagements and environments. Moreover, we are interested in the specific dynamics of situated, collective emotional experiences of different kinds and groups of viewers and users.

Contributions may focus on but are not restricted to the following topics:

# Conceptual clarifications: What distinguishes emotions from affects, moods, feelings, desires, and other cognitive and embodied responses to media texts, technologies, and experiences?

# Unnamed emotions: Which emotions do we experience when we engage with films, television series, or computer games, and which of them do not have a name (yet)? Do some societies and cultures have names for emotional experiences which others lack (e.g. rasaSchadenfreudeijirashi)?

# Collective emotions: When, why, and in what media contexts do we experience collective emotions? What does it mean to share an emotion when engaged with a film, a television series, a computer game etc.? Can this have moral or political effects?

# Emotions and media specificity: How do media differ in their potentials and strategies of eliciting emotions? For instance, how do social media or virtual reality experiences steer user emotions? What are the emotional characteristics of different algorithms, applications, and platforms on the internet and what affective labour is involved? What can video games do that films cannot, and vice versa?

# Emotions of different audiences: How and why do the emotions of media users, of social groups, political factions, or cultural spheres differ? How can it be explained, for instance, that one and the same tweet or video triggers glee in one part of the audience and outrage in another part?

# Emotions and attention economies: How do changing economies of attention (for instance, in the context of new media or ‘hybrid media systems’ as described by Andrew Chadwick) impact on viewer/user emotions?

# Affective algorithms, emotional AI, and emotion capture: How do digital and sensory media capture and process user emotional responses? What forms of emotion capture are emerging, for instance, in virtual assistants, fitness trackers, software for emotion recognition, or sentiment analysis? What are their political, legal, cultural, and moral implications?

# Emotions, media, and ethics: How are emotions of media audiences and users connected to moral questions and ethical issues? When and how, for instance, do media manipulate emotions? Can insights from affective computing and critical perspectives on algorithmic culture help us to understand the ethics of new media and the emotions they elicit?

# Emotions, rhetoric, and persuasion: How are emotions used for persuasive purposes in the media? Which are the most important forms of emotional persuasion?

# Emotions, media, and politics/the political: How do different kinds of media elicit political emotions like outrage, fear, hate, pride, or hope? How do they construct power relations by triggering those and other emotions? How do they block empathy or compassion?

We invite authors to submit an abstract of 300 words plus 3-5 bibliographic references and a short biography of 100 words by 15 September 2018. Please make sure your attachment file name is formatted with your last name and your abstract title. Abstracts should be sent directly to the NECSUS editorial board at the following address: g.decuir@aup.nl. On the basis of selected abstracts, authors will be invited to submit full manuscripts of 5-7,000 words by 15 February 2019, which will subsequently go through a double-blind peer review process.


Mentees wanted for the SSAAANZ Mentoring Scheme, Higher Degree Research (HDR) students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs)

SSAAANZ is introducing a mentoring scheme that will pair Higher Degree Research (HDR) students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) with established scholars in the field. The scheme is open and exclusive to current SSAAANZ members. The primary purpose of the mentoring scheme is to support HDR and ECR members by linking them with senior scholars for mentoring support. Mentoring will be task or project based (for instance, towards publishing a scholarly essay or preparing a conference paper) and will be for 3 or 6 month periods.

SSAAANZ is currently seeking expressions of interest from mentees available to participate in the scheme in 2018. Mentees must be current SSAAANZ members and either HDR students enrolled in a PhD program at an Australian or New Zealand university or ECRs who have been working for a university for less than five years since graduation.

We are requesting that interested HDR or ECR members submit an expression of interest to the SSAAAANZ executive via email by 1 July 2018.

The scheme is administered by members of the SSAAANZ Executive Committee and both mentors and mentees will sign an agreement of terms prior to commencement of the mentorship. SSAAANZ will be offering three mentorships in 2018. All participants will receive a letter of acknowledgment on successful completion of their mentoring contract.

For any questions or further information please contact: Jodi Brooks via her academic profile.

SSAAANZ2016 Special Journal Issues now available

The 2016 SSAAANZ Conference Sea Change: Transforming Industries, Screens, Texts in Wellington produced three journal special issues which are now available at the links below:

MEDIANZ vol. 17 (2), 2017

Editorial

Sea Change: Transforming Industries, Screens, Texts
Alfio Leotta

Articles

Framing the Border: Securing Mobility and Representing the Nation
Rachael Anderson
New Land, New Opportunities, New Language: Māori Television and Migrants Learning Te Reo
Susan Nemec
The Dub Encounter in New Zealand Film
Alan Wright
Et in Arcadia Ego: New Zealand’s Rural Landscape in Visual Culture and Early Amateur Film
Rosina Hickman
Storytelling for Our Own People: A Reflection on Working with Māori Filmmaker Barry Barclay
Christina Milligan
Paratexts, Industrial Reflexivity, Affective Labour and King Kong: Peter Jackson’s Production Diaries
Thierry Jutel

Screening the Past Issue 43 Special Dossier

Screen Studies Conference Dossier: Introduction by Tim Groves

The Affective Force of the Scream in the Cinema of Philippe Grandrieux by Michel Rubin

Escape to the Terraform Tropics: Geography and Gender in Marine Adventure Films from Queensland by Allison Craven

Denegation and the Undead in Lake Mungo by Kevin Fisher

“Something Short of Fascinating”: Re-examining Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners (1960) by Adrian Danks

Murder by Imitation: The Influence of Se7en’s Title Sequence by Tim Groves

A Double-layered Nostalgia: ‘The Sixties,’ the Iraq War and The Beatles in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007) by Phoebe Macrossan

Studies in Australian Cinema, Vol 12 (1) 2018

Essays from the inaugural Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand conference (2016)
Constantine Verevis & Mark David Ryan
Before and after ACMI: a case study in the cultural history of Australia’s State film centres
Deane Williams & Constantine Verevis
Changing accents: Place, voice and Top of the Lake
Tessa Dwyer
Making neighbours of the natives: colonial development, political independence, and documentary depictions of Western Samoa
Simon Sigley
The emerging televisual: technology futures and screens for all things
Toija Cinque & Jordan Beth Vincent
Understanding the dynamics between the United States and Australian film markets: testing the ‘10% rule’
Vejune Zemaityte, Deb Verhoeven & Bronwyn Coate
Australian screen studies: pedagogical uses of Australian content in tertiary education
Mark David Ryan

Recent Books by SSAAANZ members

American–Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections
Edited by Adrian Danks, Stephen Gaunson, Peter C. Kunze

This edited collection assesses the complex historical and contemporary relationships between US and Australian cinema by tapping directly into discussions of national cinema, transnationalism and global Hollywood. While most equivalent studies aim to define national cinema as independent from or in competition with Hollywood, this collection explores a more porous set of relationships through the varied production, distribution and exhibition associations between Australia and the US.  To explore this idea, the book investigates the influence that Australia has had on US cinema through the exportation of its stars, directors and other production personnel to Hollywood, while also charting the sustained influence of US cinema on Australia over the last hundred years. It takes two key points in time—the 1920s and 1930s and the last twenty years—to explore how particular patterns of localism, nationalism, colonialism, transnationalism and globalisation have shaped its course over the last century. The contributors re-examine the concept and definition of Australian cinema in regard to a range of local, international and global practices and trends that blur neat categorisations of national cinema. Although this concentration on US production, or influence, is particularly acute in relation to developments such as the opening of international film studios in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and the Gold Coast over the last thirty years, the book also examines a range of Hollywood financed and/or conceived films shot in Australia since the 1920s.
Website: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319666754
Australian Screen in the 2000s
Edited by Mark David Ryan and Ben Goldsmith
This book provides coverage of the diversity of Australian film and television production between 2000 and 2015. In this period, Australian film and television have been transformed by new international engagements, the emergence of major new talents and a movement away with earlier films’ preoccupation with what it means to be Australian. With original contributions from leading scholars in the field, the collection contains chapters on particular genres (horror, blockbusters and comedy), Indigenous Australian film and television, women’s filmmaking, queer cinema, representations of history, Australian characters in non-Australian films and films about Australians in Asia, as well as chapters on sound in Australian cinema and the distribution of screen content. The book is both scholarly and accessible to the general reader. It will be of particular relevance to students and scholars of Anglophone film and television, as well as to anyone with an interest in Australian culture and creativity.
Website: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319482989

About SSAAANZ

The Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand is a membership-based professional organisation that aims to strengthen Screen Studies scholarship and its institutional recognition and support in Australia and New Zealand.

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