StU 2019 Abstracts

Panel A

William Proctor, ‘A Dark Knight on Elm Street: Critical Industrial Practice, Regimes of (Sub)Cultural Value, and the Perils of Remaking and Rebooting Canonical Horror Cinema’

By many accounts, the first decade of the new millennium was a particularly woeful time for American horror cinema. At the centre of discourses which decry the health of the horror film industry lay a common lament, a ‘rhetoric of crisis’ (Hantke 2010) undergirded by accusations of ‘self-cannibalization’ and ‘artistic laziness’ (Tompkins 2014); of remakes and reboots that sully ‘the critical reputation of an innovative and engaging film’(Dixon 2010: 203) by pursuing ‘pure, gross commercial repetition’ (Hills 2007: 237), at the expense of ‘horror-as-art’ (Hills 2007). It is within this heightened discursive context that film studio, Platinum Dunes, produced a remake of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) in 2010, a film that failed to reboot the franchise for a new audience and a new millennium despite nonetheless becoming the studio’s most successful commercial endeavour at that juncture.

 

In this paper, I want to focus on a sample of pre-figurative promotional materials, or ‘entry-way paratexts’ (Gray 2010), that evince a discursive struggle for distinction taking place; a struggle between the original Elm Street as artefact of canonical horror cinema and Samuel Bayer’s twenty-first century remake; between Wes Craven’s subcultural status as ‘horror-auteur-director’ (Hutchings 2004: 181)—or for my purposes here, his ‘author-function’ (Foucault 1969)—and Bayer’s status as music video director and debut film-maker. Without neither brand nor author-function of his own to affix onto the promotional architecture, then, Bayer repeatedly mobilized director Christopher Nolan’s directorial signature, attached to his Batman films—at the time, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008)—in order to generate a paratextual bond between discrete film projects in order to discursively ‘append aura, author and authenticity’ (Gray 2010: 83) onto the Elm Street remake.

 

Building on the work of Michel Foucault and Will Brooker, I want to theorize the way in which Bayer strategically navigated Craven’s status as homme du (horreur) cinema, not by confronting and wrestling with it head-on, but by pointing instead towards ‘the Nolan Function’ (Brooker 2012) not as ‘author-function’ per se, but as what I am terming a ‘brand-function.’

  

Martin Fradley, ‘“This Book is about American Popular Culture in the Age of Extremism”: Cine/Telefantasy, Ideological Critique and the “Culture Wars’”’

As the key production trend in contemporary American film and television, it is perhaps unsurprising that mainstream fantasy texts have become embroiled in the 21st century’s (so-called) ‘culture wars’. From the febrile terrain of Twitter through to the mainstream media, generically diverse texts such as Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011-19), The Handmaid’s Tale (2017- ), The Walking Dead (2010- ), Wonder Woman (2017) and Black Panther (2018) — to cite only the most obvious examples — have been mobilised as ideological pawns in an often crudely polarised cultural conversation. Tellingly, this fascination with the political optics of popular culture has been echoed by the cultural industries themselves, with discourses of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ now a significant component of marketing campaigns and associated promotional apparatus. In this paper I take Peter Biskind’s recent pop-critical intervention, The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism (2018) as emblematic of this ongoing debate. Caught between the demand for ‘positive images’ on the one hand and a reactionary dismissal of the progressive potential of popular culture on the other, this paper takes Biskind’s polemic as a prism through which to asks questions about both the political efficacy of cine/telefantasy and, in turn, the ideological uses of popular film criticism.

 

Ewan Kirkland, ‘The Gothic Gameplay of What Remains of Edith Finch

This talk explores What Remains of Edith Finch as illustrating close proximities between videogames and Gothic media. Videogames have historically drawn on Gothic tropes across a range of genres, from dungeon crawlers to adventure games, from first person shooters to survival horror. Such tropes suit many spatial, temporal and storytelling dimensions affordances, limitations and qualities of the medium. This is exemplified in Edith Finch, a narrative-based game in which a woman investigates her old family home. The house is central to Edith Finch, a familiar labyrinthine videogame space, filled with secrets relating to its long-departed inhabitants. Play involves infiltrating various sealed rooms which, consistent with the videogame trope of environmental storytelling, are filled with artefacts reflecting the lives of each Finch family members. Every room contains a single document, a diary, a poem, a comic book, a letter, which tells of a Finch’s final moments, reproducing the Gothic trope of nested narratives employing different voices, registers and media. In transporting the player into these different doomed characters the game combines the medium’s capacity to re-embodying players with Gothic concerns relating to identity, subjectivity and complicity. In these interactive sequences the player is compelled to lead each Finch to their death. The game’s determining infrastructure thereby produces a sense of forces beyond the player’s control influencing events, effectively ludifying the curse haunting the Finch family.

 

Panel B (i)

Douglas McNaughton, ‘Acting, Performance and Excess in 1970s Telefantasy’ 

The futuristic space opera Blake’s 7 (BBC 1978-81) concerned the political revolutionary Roj Blake and his attempts to bring down the repressive Terran Federation. Using Cantrell and Hogg’s (2016) distinction between television acting and television performance, this paper examines the way in which certain flamboyant acting performances play against the serial’s dystopian atmosphere, supported by the contributions of creative production staff. Despite Blake’s 7’s ideological commitment to examination and critique of authoritarian regimes and surveillance society, its costumes and acting frequently tip the series into forms of camp spectacle. The paper concludes that across its four seasons Blake’s 7 contains a problematic tension between gritty realpolitik and camp excess which is largely a function of performance by actors, designers, sets and costumes.

  

Jean Martin, ‘The Sinister in Electronic Sound’

Sound is by nature invisible and ephemeral. This makes it useful for the sound design of Horror and Science-Fiction films, where the imagined dangers have real sonic presence. The quality of electronic sound lends itself particularly well as a metaphor for the alien, the other. The absence of human agency, specifically the musical performer, has been interpreted by viewers as strange or even sinister. In 1950s sci-fi films the association between electronic sound and adventures in distant galaxies was firmly established. Film viewers made sense of the non-human quality of electronic music by associating it with the wider context of science and technology. I will trace the sinister in early electronic avant-garde music and films that explore themes of science fiction, dystopia and the psychopathic.

 

Amy Godliman, ‘Doggerland Radio: A Multimedia Landscape of Historical Flotsam’’

Doggerland Radio was initially intended to be a video game exploring a haunted British landscape inspired by a mixture of contemporary videogame work like Kentucky Route Zero and classic 1970s folk horror such as Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tapes. Through the course of my research and experimentation I came to conclude that the best way to really evoke the sense of place I wanted was to abandon has much as possible any traditional notions of linear storytelling. To focus entirely onto creating an environment in which the audiences role is more akin to that of an archaeologist, giving them the pieces of a location and a history from which a story could be built, but from which no one “correct” story can be extracted. Where the only goal is to explore, and each persons experience will be particular them.

 

Panel B (ii)

Lindsay Hallam, ‘Drink Full and Descend: The Horror of Twin Peaks: The Return

Throughout the work of director and co-creator David Lynch images of horror recur, as the mundane and the ordinary becomes ominous and terrifying. The home and the self – central to feelings of safety and security – are destabilized in Lynch’s works, revealed as inherently unstable and subject to constant change. The fragmented self destabilizes everything around it, reverberating throughout the home and even further still, destabilising deep-rooted ideas about America’s sense of itself as a place of steadfast reason and righteous justice. This paper explores the use of horror in Twin Peaks: Season Three, from its employment of common genre tropes to its engagement with deeper philosophical ideas about horror as something that goes beyond just thrills and scares.

 

Sally Miller

David Cronenberg’s Crash(1996) was widely acclaimed as a successful adaptation of Ballard’s novel, not least by Ballard himself who described it as being true ‘in letter and in spirit’. However, a number of critics have noted that there are incommensurable differences between the novel and film. In this paper I use Lacanian theory to read the correlations and discontents of Cronenberg’s cinematic interpretation of Crash.

 

Aris Mousoutzanis

The paper will present major ideas, arguments, areas of focus and interest in an ongoing research project on the relations between utopianism/dystopianism and biopolitics. To date, there is a striking lack of critical attention to this area in either utopian/dystopian studies or in theoretical discussions of biopolitics and biopower. And yet, the work of Michel Foucault, one of the philosophers whose work has been fundamental to biopolitical theory, is marked by a pivotal interest in the relations between space and power – in the ways in which different configurations of space reproduce or challenge existing power relations. Indeed, major ideas in his philosophy, such as panopticism, are recurring tropes in dystopian discourses and texts whereas Foucault himself explicitly theorised the dynamics of alternative spaces in his work on ‘heterotopias’. More specifically, this research aims at exploring the ways in which, during the period of modernity, utopianism demonstrated an increasing preoccupation with issues and concerns pertinent to biopolitical governance, such as the importance of citizens’ bodily health and fitness in the service of the State, the monitoring of procreation and reproduction, and the management of populations. The topos of utopia became less a territorial space and more a corporeal space, in a shift of focus within utopianism from outer space to inner space, from geopolitics to biopolitics. The paper will focus on the ways in which the emergence of dystopianism – the uncanny counterpart of the utopian – from the late nineteenth century onwards imbues the above issues and concerns with a more distinctly nightmarish element and tone. When exploring the issue of the management of populations, the discussion will turn to the work of Giorgio Agamben and identify ways in which these texts associate dystopianism with what he refers to as ‘states of exception’ as well as with the identification of certain types of citizens as homines sacri, subjects whose lives can be expendable for the sake of the state.

 

Panel C

Emma Withers, ‘Posthumanism in Claire Dennis’s High Life

Claire Denis’ films are often read in terms of their emphasis on embodied sensation, and on the continuity between bodies and nonhuman phenomena – animals, plants, landscapes. Her work is also very often marked by narrative scarcity and spatiotemporal uncertainty – from the unreliable narrator of Beau Travaille to the indeterminate oscillations between flashback, memory and fantasy in L’Intrus.  I argue that working in the context of science fiction, Denis expands and transplants these destabilising concerns in ways that take up and expand the genre’s proclivity to produce new visions of being that speak to the experience of an increasingly posthumanist world. Uniting posthuman theory with Laura Marks’ work on haptic visuality, I examine how High Life strips back the human experience to its base components of sensation and desire, constituting a deeply ambivalent and critically productive impression of the ever-decreasing stability of the human as a category.

  

Stacey Abbott, ‘When Aliens Meet Vampires: Near Dark (Bigelow 1987) as Gothic Action Film’

Kathryn Bigelow’s first solo-directed film Near Dark (1987) offers a complex matrix of genre hybridity, weaving together elements of Gothic, with other genres as a means of re-imagining the vampire. The aim of this paper will be to examine the integration of the Gothic with the action film, a genre with which Bigelow has long been associated.  To consider the effect of this generic interplay, this paper will focus upon the trio of vampires played by Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, and Bill Paxton – actors immediately recognisable for their appearance in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) released the year before Near Dark.  This casting choice plays a key role in her construction of these cool but dangerous ‘poor white trash’ vampires. Through this integration of the action film with the Gothic, the film offers a morally complex and unsettling exploration of these vampires as outsiders, deliberately undermining their narrative presence as antagonists.

 

Kate Meakin. ‘A White Feminist Dystopia: Chrononormativity and Historical Amnesia in The Handmaid’s Tale Protests’

Connections have been established between dystopian worlds and societal critique, yet the role of the dystopia in motivating social movements has gone relatively unexamined. The TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale has been lauded for its relevance to current debates on reproductive rights and has inspired a range of feminist protests across the world. However, the show has been widely criticized for its depiction of a seemingly utopian post-racial North American society, disregarding the histories of slaves forced to complete reproductive labour for white women, slave children being sold from their families, and children of indigenous families being stolen to be “civilized” in boarding schools. Utilising Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of chrononormativity (2010) and Fredric Jameson’s historical amnesia (1985), this paper argues that, despite its visually striking nature, contemporary activist engagement with The Handmaid’s Tale frequently only challenges certain constrictions on reproductive rights leading to the elevation of white feminism.

 

Panel D

 Monica Germanà, ‘The Resistance of the Undead in Sicilian Ghost Story (Piazza 2018)’

As the title suggests, Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza’s Sicilian Ghost Story (2018), centres around the spectral in multiple ways. Based on the real story of eleven-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo’s abduction by the Sicilian mafia in 1993, the ghost-story of the film title is, in this sense, the ‘real’ ghost of Sicily’s mafia history. As the film captures one of the most brutal, and exemplary, chapters of a recent past that still haunts contemporary Sicily, its aesthetics, heavily influenced by the darkly surreal and magical-realist mise-en-scène of Jane Campion and Guillermo del Toro’s cinematography, raise questions about genre classification and tone. But Giuseppe’s ghostly condition is problematic in other ways. On one hand, in a way comparable to Argentina and Chile’s desaparecidos during Operation Condor and, in general, under Pinochet’s regime, what turns Giuseppe into a ghost is the invisibility created by the community’s indifference to his disappearance, which his high-school sweet-heart, Luna, resists and campaigns against. Simultaneously, however, the film constructs the ghost-story as a narrative of psychic intelligence, through which Luna comes to solve the mystery of Giuseppe’s disappearance, against the façade of pretence put up by Giuseppe’s family. Significantly, in Luna’s psychic world, Giuseppe’s ghost survives the physical ordeal his body endures in a way that juxtaposes the ethereal and eternal spirit of the undead to the abject and visceral abuse of the living body. The film’s multiple spectral embodiments converge, at the end, in Giuseppe’s dissolved body, which becomes, in spite of the mafia’s attempts to annihilate it completely, a perpetual part of Sicily’s living ecosystem. What the film’s treatment of spectrality intimates, then, is the erosion of neat boundaries between physical horror and intellectual terror, as both, problematically co-exist in the unsettling dismantlement of real/fantasy, living/dead, spiritual/physical categories in Sicilian Ghost Story.

 

Christine Hui

Of all the Japanese animation studios, Studio Ghibli is arguably the most well-known worldwide. Ghibli’s international status makes the studio a valuable contributor to Japan’s cultural tourism and soft power initiatives. This paper focusses on The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013), Ghibli co-founder Takahata Isao’s adaptation of the oldest extant Japanese folktale The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and how the film constructs ideas about the nation.  By examining the depiction of nature and space, the use of self-referential art and animation techniques, and the role of the girl, I propose that the film is an assemblage of fragments of national cultural ideas and values that at times contradict each other. They are packaged and presented in a way that is imbued with ‘cultural odour’ (Iwabuchi 2002) – or rather, cultural fragrance. Thus, I describe these fragments as ‘notes’ of cultural fragrance that can act as a response to anxieties about the future as well as a way of reaffirming the transmission of national culture.

 

Prof Deborah Phillips, ‘Utopia, Nostalgia and National Identity in British Bake Off

tbc

 

School of Media Student and Staff Work

On Display in room ES305

Films

  • ‘Bloodborne’, Sam Blake (BA Digital Music & Sound Arts)
  • ‘Dot to Dot’, William Hanekom (BA Design for Digital Media)
  • ‘Freak Observer’, Jedd Winterburn (BA Digital Music & Sound Arts)
  • ‘Soldier Side’, James Cox (BA Design for Digital Media)
  • ‘Snowflake’, Tamara Stidwell (BA English Language and English Literature)
  • ‘What’s the Time’, William Hanekom (BA Design for Digital Media)
  • ‘Whitewater’, Tom Hamilton (Brighton Film School)

 

Academic posters by Film & Screen Studies students

 

Photography by Fergus Heron

Print Friendly, PDF & Email