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Julian Hanich: I, You and We

 

Ideas for a Phenomenology of the Collective Cinema Experience

Isn’t watching a film with others in a cinema crucially different from watching a film alone? When we laugh together, this amplifies the enjoyment. When we watch a film in communal rapt attention, this can intensify the experience. When annoyed by talking neighbors, we are distracted. Attending a film in a cinema implies being influenced by others – an influence that is particularly noticeable once affective responses play a role. Film scholars have almost always taken the relation between individual viewers and films as default. However, this is an artificial abstraction click here to investigate. Without considering the effects of collective viewing our understanding of the cinema experience remains incomplete. This talk tries to sketch some ideas toward a phenomenology of the collective cinema experience.

 

Professor Julian Hanich is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen. From 2009 to 2012 he held a position as postdoctoral research fellow at the interdisciplinary research center “Languages of Emotion” at the Freie Universität Berlin. He studied North American Studies and Film Studies in Berlin, Berkeley and Munich and was a visiting researcher at UCLA and the University of Amsterdam. In 2010 he published a monograph on the phenomenology of fear at the movies, entitled Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers. The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (Routledge). He also co-edited a volume of the German online journal Nach dem Film on Laughter in the Movie Theater and a book on filmic suggestion and the viewer’s imagination entitled Auslassen, Andeuten, Auffüllen. Der Film und die Imagination des Zuschauers (Fink). His articles have appeared in Screen, Projections, Necsus, Cinema Journal (forthcoming), Film-Philosophy,Movie, Jump Cut, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts,Montage/AV, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and Amerikastudien/American Studies.

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Dominic Topp – Nouveau cinéma: from fragmentation to unity, or What Cahiers du cinéma did next…

Wednesday 9th December, 5pm – 7pm. in GLT3

Dr Dominic Topp, School of Arts, University of Kent

In the mid-1960s a new generation of critics at Cahiers du cinéma, who had taken over from the ‘young Turks’ of the 1950s, moved the journal away from the veneration of Hollywood auteurs and the exploration of mise en scène for which it is still best known. Instead, they began to write about and to actively promote what they dubbednouveau cinéma (new cinema). This term was applied to the work of a wide variety of filmmakers from many different countries, but broadly speaking it can be seen as designating a modernist film practice. Drawing on examples from films by, among others, Věra Chytilová, Agnès Varda and Jerzy Skolimowski, this paper will describe some of the features of nouveau cinéma as they were outlined by Cahiers critics such as Jean-Louis Comolli, Noël Burch and Serge Daney: discontinuity and ambiguity at the levels of both subject matter and form, a creative tension between fragmentation and unity, and a reflexivity that could be understood as self-critical, and even oppositional, in nature. It will suggest that the concept of nouveau cinéma can be understood as an interpretative schema that allowed Cahiers readers to make sense of a diverse range of challenging new films by considering their formal and stylistic practices as their true subject matter, and offered a set of viewing strategies by which formal experimentation and political engagement could be seen not as mutually exclusive but as profoundly interrelated.

 

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Sarah Cardwell: research seminar

 

Monday 26th October, 5pm – 7pm. in KS14

‘Framing television: the dramatic implications of aspect ratio’

Within television studies, and even within television aesthetics, ‘aspect ratio’ is frequently overlooked or naively characterised. Yet it plays a fundamental, determining role in forming and framing television’s dramatic spaces and in turn, its stories and meanings. A balanced reappraisal of television’s varied aspect ratios and its impact upon TV’s unique dramatic and aesthetic possibilities can enhance our close analyses and further our understanding of television’s fascinating ‘art history’.

In this paper I will challenge some residual myths, misunderstandings and preconceptions about TV’s aspect ratios and their spatial properties. I would like to counter prevailing pro-widescreen rhetoric, by tracing some of the dramatic and aesthetic qualities of 4:3 that have been lost in the movement to 16:9; in pursuit of this, I’ll consider the example of Marion and Geoff (BBC, 2000 & 2003). I aim to make the case for more overt and sustained attention to be paid to aspect ratio within television aesthetics.

Dr Sarah Cardwell is Honorary Fellow in the School of Arts, University of Kent, where she was previously Senior Lecturer. She is the author of Adaptation Revisited (MUP, 2002) and Andrew Davies (MUP, 2005), as well as numerous articles and papers on film and television aesthetics, literary adaptation, contemporary British literature, and British cinema and television. She is a founding co-editor of ‘The Television Series’ (MUP), Book Reviews editor for Critical Studies in Television, and on the advisory board for the new series ‘Adaptation and Visual Culture’ (Palgrave Macmillan).

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Diarmuid Costello: “Standard Philosophy of Photography: Tracing the Roots of the Orthodox Paradigm”

Oct 6, 6-8pm, KLT2

 

My research draws on both analytic and continental approaches to aesthetics and the philosophy of art, and is informed by recent debates in art history and theory. Recently, it has focused on two main goals:

1. To defuse antipathy to aesthetics in art theory by showing that kinds of art typically thought challenging to aesthetics can be accommodated by a sufficiently rich aesthetic theory. To this end I have drawn on the neglected semantic potential of Kant’s supposedly formalist theory of art, and endeavoured to show that a variety of supposedly anti-aesthetic artforms can be accommodated by the resulting aesthetic theory.

2. To contest widespread assumptions in the philosophy of photography regarding the nature of photography, particularly as an artistic medium, in part by showing that it is predicated on a narrow diet of examples that distorts philosophers’ understanding of the field, and in part by developing an alternative conception of photographic agency. The former draws on resources in art history, the latter on the philosophy of action.

I am currently working on two books, each associated with one of these goals: ‘Art after Aesthetics? A Critique of Theories of Art after Modernism’ and ‘On Photography’. Both involve substantive engagement with recent art. Artists whose work has been important for these projects and also figures in the publications below include: Brian Barry, Lawrence Weiner, Art & Language, Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper, Richard Long; James Welling, Jeff Wall, James Coleman, Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra, Lee Friedlander, Ed Ruscha; Gerhard Richter, Chuck Close, William Kentridge, and Phillip Guston.

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Ted Nannicelli: Making Do With Agency

Agency, Authorship and the Appreciation of Television

Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of Queensland
22 June 2015, MLT2

Chair: Murray Smith

Abstract

This paper addresses a puzzle regarding the creation and appreciation of television. Recent scholarship has made it clear that the material production of television is a fundamentally collaborative enterprise. Particularly in the case of serial television drama, an astonishing number of “above the line” workers like writers, producers, and directors and “below the line” workers like cinematographers, art directors, sound designers, and editors contribute to the creation of an overall series. This essentially collaborative nature of television production has led some theorists to conclude that television (and sometimes film) is therefore essentially collectively authored (Caldwell 2008; Gaut 2010). While others have questioned whether such contributors have the proper control or authority to be regarded as authors (Livingston 2009), I focus on another problem with this view — namely, the problem of properly attributing blame to those individuals responsible for the relevant features of artistically and ethically flawed works. However, even weaker views (e.g. Livingston 2009), according to which film is only sometimes collectively authored, don’t translate as satisfactory accounts of collective authorship in television. I argue that inasmuch as Livingston’s account of joint-authorship is indebted to Bratman’s work on shared agency (1999, 2014), it cannot account for collective creation in hierarchically-organized groups like television production teams. And yet it seems like the appreciation of television as an art form requires some concept of authorship. I offer a number of desiderata any account of television authorship must meet, and I suggest that although authorship rarely obtains in television, we can, in most appreciative contexts, make do by simply speaking of “agency.”
Ted Nannicelli is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland. He is the author of A Philosophy of the Screenplay (2013) and co-editor of Cognitive Media Theory (2014). He is currently working on a new book, Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective, to be published by Routledge.