Title: Origins of the 21st Century: The Impact of Digital Technology on the Construction of the Cinematic Essay.
Presenter: James Slaymaker
Abstract: This paper explores the impact of technology on the practice and theorization of the cinematic essay, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which digital tools have shaped the form in the early 21st century. I first argue that the cinematic essay has been associated with technological evolution throughout its history, and then discuss recent examples of the form which utilize aesthetic strategies, editing techniques, and modes of spectatorial address that are rooted in the capabilities of digital technologies. I conceptualize the cinematic essay as a self-reflexive mode of nonfiction cinema that foregrounds the filmmaking apparatus and the production process. In doing so, the cinematic essay launches an enquiry into the ontological nature of the cinematic image, the tools which construct it, and the wider artistic landscape in which it is embedded. Drawing upon theoretical work on the essay by Theodor Adorno and Max Bense, this paper describes the cinematic essay as an experimental, non-systematic form of filmmaking, which offers a mode of resistance to standardized artistic styles and habituated viewing practices. Framing the cinematic essay as a countercultural, political art illuminates the potential it holds to help us better understand the digital networks of information that it itself is embedded within. Throughout the history of this form, prominent cinematic essayists have embraced new technologies as a means of expanding their practice. To illustrate how digitization has opened up new opportunities for essayistic expression, this paper draws parallels between the current use of digital moviemaking tools and earlier periods in which new technologies were utilized to reconfigure essayistic craft. In so doing, this paper highlights not only the differences but also the similarities between the digital cinematic essay and earlier variations of the form. By employing a theoretical framework based on genealogical investigation and sensitivity to the parallels between digital technologies and the cinematic technologies that preceded them, this paper counters a dominant trend in the study of new media which frames the digital as a revolutionary medium that has bifurcated the history of cinema into two neatly divided halves: the analogue era and the digital, or post-cinematic, era. This paper, therefore, frames the digital as the latest in a series of technological transformations that have reshaped essayistic texts. The cinematic essay has always demonstrated an impulse towards articulating a pronounced authorial voice, establishing an open-ended dialogue between the spectator and the text, and challenging traditional notions of documentary truth; the incorporation of digital technologies into the composition of the cinematic essay has refined and revitalized these aspects of the form. The three filmmakers I take as my primary case studies in this paper were central to the establishment of the cinematic essay as a mature form in the context of postwar art cinema and have since produced a variety of work in film, video and digital: Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Harun Farocki.
Bio: James Slaymaker is a PhD Student in Film Studies at the University of Southampton, fully funded by a presidential scholarship. His research topics include the cinematic essay, digital technology and contemporary European cinema. His work has been published in the journals Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Film International, as well as the essay collection ReFocus: The Films of Paul Schrader (Edinburgh University Press). His first book Time is Luck: The Cinema of Michael Mann is currently in development with Telos Publishing. As a filmmaker, his work has been screened at the London DIY Film Festival, the Concrete Dream Film Festival, the InShort Film Festival and The Straight Jacket Film Festival.
Presenter: Kalli Paakspuu Registration Number: 063 Institution: Sheridan College, Toronto, Canada Abstract: One precondition for a self-determination movement is having a common struggle, as in asserting control over identities and localities in an everyday political process. After centuries of successive occupations by Germans, Danes, Swedes, Poles and Russians, a distinct Estonian national identity emerged in response to social justice issues in the 19th century. This presentation will use a cultural studies approach to examine Estonian lyrical texts as hypertexts of nation. Estonian-Canadian composer Roman Toi conducted male choirs in Displaced Person’s Camps and in exiled communities to sing with “fists in the air” against the Soviet occupation of their homeland. Their songs reinforced a political engagement that re-ignited Estonian nationalism through the Singing Revolution that restored Estonia’s Republic in 1991. Excerpts from the feature documentary Maestro Roman Toi Beautiful Songs I Dedicate to You will be shown during this presentation. The song texts of a choral tradition in Estonia became a political engagement in a separatist movement from the Russian Empire. "Nationalist ideologies use cultural devices to demonstrate the process of collective self-definition, to provide feelings of pride and hope connected with symbolic forms so that these can be consciously described, developed and celebrated" (Geertz 1973:252). How we understand who we are in the contemporary world is shaped by sites of identity production, what Stuart Hall (1992) calls “narratives of nationhood,” constructed by media, the arts, and institutions like museums and galleries. Definitions of nationhood are also created from "below" as during Ärkamisaeg, the Estonian Age of Awakening in the 19th Century, when Estonians acknowledged their right to govern themselves, which culminated into the Republic of Estonia by 1918. The inception of the first Laulupidu, Estonian Song Festival, in Tartu in the summer of 1869 was when Estonian choral performance evolved from folk song arrangements into living carriers of Estonian cultural values and national solidarity celebrating 50 years of emancipation from serfdom. "'Narratives of nationhood' are stories that an ‘imagined community’ shares and connects to what pre-existed and will outlive them” (Hall 1992, p. 293). Choral music demands connection and for singers is a self-performance of social expression. Emergent narratives are constructed throughout our daily actions to help us remember, understand, categorize and share experience (Galyean, 1995). The song festival had an electric effect on the growth of organized music and the formation of choirs and instrumental ensembles (Puderbaugh, 30). The same time one singer is performing, another singer is listening and singing with him. Narratives emerge as products of our interactions and goals as we navigate our worlds. A story produced by a group of improvising actors emerges from the interactions among the members of the group—similar to the spontaneous expression of a choir evoking embodied memory through the sensual and somatic. A poem becomes a driving de-colonizing force, building community in a hypertext of activism and as a narrative of nation.
Photo by Sergei Kibus
Bio: Kalli Paakspuu was awarded a doctorate from the University of Toronto for her research on early indigenous use of photography in international relations. She has published widely on film and media and teaches in the animation and design programme at Sheridan College in Oakville, Canada. Her dramatic and documentary films have toured internationally. Currently she is completing the biography music documentary, Maestro Roman Toi Beautiful Songs I Dedicate to You and developing a documentary about choral music as healing therapy.
"If you think writing for children is just practice for writing for grown-ups, think again. [Children] can spot a fraud a mile away." Andrew Melrose
Presenter: Pavlina Ferfeli Registration Number: 016 Institution: University of Athens, Greece
Abstract: This paper examines the staggering rejuvenation of children’s picture books in the last decade, as a direct result of emerging narratives that celebrate racial identity, underrepresented culture, and heritage at the point of extinction. Awarded works such as Kwame Alexander’s The Undefeated, Carole Lindstrom’s We are Water Protectors, and Tami Charles’ All Because You Matter, push the boundaries of children’s literature to its limit, by challenging concepts related to appropriacy, narrative structure, subject matter, iconicity, and reception. Simultaneously, the Covid pandemic influenced the children’s publishing world no less than the “Own Voices” picture book, contributing to an entirely new landscape in the domain of digital storytelling. In a post-pandemic world, we witness a dramatic change in the practices of most publishing houses, which dare to explore uncharted copyright territory, and graciously grant more permissions to writers, teachers, and librarians to share picture book content through various media platforms. The combination of the momentum of the “Own Voices” picture book and the newly emerging licensing landscape had amazing repercussions in both storytime reception and children’s publishing dynamics. Apart from an unprecedented boost of sales, rise in readership, and the founding of new imprints, the very fact that in digital read-aloud storytime a staggering amount of artistic media intersect, leads to the birth of a hybrid new genre – that of the picture book video. However, although this uncharted intermedial territory of “Own Voices” picture book video is one to follow, there are additional voices raised that speak of cacophony. In March 2021, BIPOC young adult author Rin Chupeco made an unusually poignant remark. Unhesitatingly sincere, Chupeco tweeted that the #ownvoices picture book has been metamorphosed into a punitive “cudgel” used on the part of publishers. The tweet soon gathered thousands of likes, raising a fiery and challenging question: Has the “Own Voices” literary edifice painstakingly erected itself into a prison cell with bars of freedom?
Pavlina Ferfeli portrait
by Lily Kapetanaki
Pavlina Ferfeli is an independent scholar from Greece who was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Athens for her work on the American poet Mina Loy. Her academic work has been presented, published, and reviewed internationally. Her monograph Poetics of Identity: Mina Loy Voicing the Fluid Female Body, is available from Peter Lang. She has been awarded various poetry prizes, notably from the British Council, and forms an active member of SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and illustrators). Her research interests include postcolonial theory, corporeality, representation, and the semiotic intersections between poetry and the fine arts, with a special focus on media and media art.
Presenter: Damini Kulkarni Registration Number: 046 Institution: Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India
Abstract: The advent of digitality has vastly reconfigured the ways in which cinema audiences negotiate with the metaphorical and literal distance between technologies of cinematic representation and their everyday lives. As audiences come to own the screens on which they consume cinema, holding them close to their bodies and identities, the films they watch on them interact in complex and diverse ways with their embodied sense of self. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to violently underscore both, the precariousness and the pre-eminence of corporality, audiences’ bodily engagement with these screens is apt to undergo a range of shifts. When India attempted to control the spread of the disease with the most stringent lockdown in the world, audiences of a nation that has been famous for its fevered penchant for cinema confronted locked theatres: people with the privilege of access to digital technology turned to screens that were accessible within their homes or other safe spaces. This study examines the gendered dimensions of these audiences’ embodied interactions with the digital screens on which they watched cinema while enduring the COVID-19 pandemic. In the process, the study attempts to underline the interplay between gendered identity and the affordances of the digital in the face of widespread inaccessibility to public spaces of film exhibition. Heightened focus on corporal vulnerability in public discourse in the wake of the pandemic, coupled with large, intricate and interconnected changes that the threat of the disease triggered in the material realities of the everyday life of women, led to a reconfiguration in their relationship with the devices on which they watched cinema. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with over forty women from predominantly urban India over the course of two months, this study finds that these reconfigurations have primarily proceeded along three axes: shifts in the linguistic and ideological rubric within which the body’s investment in the digital screen is emplaced, emergence of new constellations of women’s communities around cinema, and increased introspection among women about the kind of cinema they watch on the digital screens, and the way in which it impacts their gendered identity. Since most of the interviews were conducted remotely, the study also gestures towards some methodological implications associated with conducting a study of audiences consuming cinema on digital devices via predominantly digital channels. The study also outlines the epistemic implications for the process arriving at a philosophy of the digital in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bio: Damini Kulkarni is currently pursuing her PhD in Media and Communication Studies as a UGC Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Media and Communication Studies in Savitribai Phule Pune University. Her research interests include popular cinema, cinema spectatorship, Hindi film audiences, film philosophy and questions of gender and representation in cinema. Her work has previously appeared in publications such as Film International, Film Criticism, Economic and Political Weekly, Scroll.in, Critical Collective, and Himal Southasian, among others. Her poems and short stories have appeared in publications such as Vayavya, Mad Swirl, and New Woman, among others.
