Friday 28 October 2011

Salford Grad Programme talk 2/Nov: "How to use Deleuze in thinking about Screen Media"

2 November / 4.15 - 5.15 / 2nd floor lecture theatre, Adelphi House
External Speaker: Dr Felicity Colman

Dr Felicity Colman is a Reader in Screen Media in the Dept of Media at MMU. She is the author of Deleuze and Cinema (Berg 2011) and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy (2009) and co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007). She is working on a number of book projects that engage screen media forms, including Bergson and Film, and Screen Media Semiologies.





How to use Deleuze in thinking about Screen Media
Gilles Deleuze published two radical books on film: "Cinema 1: The Movement-Image" and "Cinema 2: The Time-Image". Engaging with a wide range of film styles, histories and theories, Deleuze’s writings treat film as a new form of philosophy. This cine-philosophy offers a startling new way of understanding the complexities of the moving image, its technical concerns and constraints as well as its psychological and political outcomes. In this talk I'll look at some of the key concepts behind Deleuze’s revolutionary theory of the cinema (affect, time, thought, politics, etc), and discuss how Deleuze’s radical methodology is useful for all forms of for screen media analysis.



Tuesday 25 October 2011

Oberhausen Film Festival -- Call for Entries

58th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 26 April - 1 May 2012
Press release

Calling for entries for the 2012 competitions

The 58th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is now calling for entries for its competitions. In 2012, a record 44,000 euros of prize money will be distributed.

The new Promotional Prize of the Festival is the main cause of the increase in prize money at Oberhausen. For this prize, the festival will donate 10 cents per admission. With an average of almost 18,000 admissions per year, Oberhausen is expecting to award a sum of around 1,800 euros. In addition, the prize money in the International Children's and Youth Film Competition has increased from 2,000 to 3,000 euros and the Zonta Prize for a female filmmaker in the International or German Competition was raised from 500 to 1,000 euros.

Oberhausen organises five competitions: International, German, North Rhine-Westphalian, International Children's and Youth Films and the MuVi Award for the best German Music Video. Entry forms and regulations are available as downloads from kurzfilmtage.de. The festival recommends submission via reelport.com, where films can be registered and uploaded online.


Deadlines:

- Submission deadline for international productions: 13 January 2012

(max. 35 minutes running time, produced after 1 January 2010)


- Submission deadline for German productions: 15 February 2012

(max. 45 minutes running time, produced after 1 January 2011)


- Submission deadline for the MuVi Award: 21 February 2012

(the director or production company must be located in Germany, produced after 1 January 2011)


Online:


Oberhausen, 25 October 2011
Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, T +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de

Monday 24 October 2011

Black History Month talk at Salford

Empire Pays Back

Lecture and film screening: Dr. Robert Beckford

Wednesday 26th October, 7.00pm

Dr Robert Beckford is an educator, author and award-winning broadcaster in the field of religion, culture and politics. A firm believer in teaching for social change, Dr. Beckford has retained a commitment to teaching outside of traditional contexts. In his film ‘Empire Pays Back’, Dr Beckford believes that Britain should pay reparations to the descendents of slaves, and hires a team of experts to put a monetary figure on the amount owing.


Venue: University of Salford, Lady Hale Lecture Theatre, Lady Hale Building, Peel Campus, M5 4WT

Admission: Free

For a more information and to book tickets:



T: 0161 295 9003  
E: blackhistorymonth@salford.ac.uk

If you are interested in attending then please use the email address/phone number above to book a place.

Thursday 20 October 2011

The Media, Music and Performance Graduate Programme for 2011/12

I am delighted to be able to present the full programme of talks, from Salford colleagues and visiting guest lecturers, for the current academic year. Abstracts and further information below, and everyone is welcome to attend!

This programme features a wealth of national and international expertise. We focus this year, in particular, on censorship and extreme artistic expression, on using Deleuzian theory, on class and British popular culture, and on theorising new media and old.

My thanks to MMP PGRs for their requests and recommendations, which have been formative in shaping the programme. Look forward to seeing you there ---



Dr Benjamin Halligan

Director of the Graduate Programme, MMP


Times for All Sessions:
3.10 – 4pm:     Internal Speaker / PGR presentations
4.15 - 5.30:      External Speaker
5.30:                King’s Arms for refreshments


Location:
All sessions: second floor lecture theatre, Adelphi House
Building 3 on page 3 of this map: http://www.salford.ac.uk/travel/campus-map.pdf
(NB: Not Adelphi Building, and beware of Google Maps that confuses the two).
If you need parking, please let Ben Halligan know ahead of time: b.halligan@salford.ac.uk


19 October:

External speaker: Dr Toni Sant

(Host: Richard Talbot)



Dr Toni Sant is Director of Research at the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media in Scarborough. He has also lectured about performance and new media at New York University and the University of Malta. For more see http://www.tonisant.com



Preserving a History of the Future:

Archiving the Avant-Garde in a Digital Environment at Franklin Furnace
Established since 1976, Franklin Furnace is a renowned New York-based arts
organization whose mission is to preserve, document, and present works of
avant-garde art by emerging artists - particularly those whose works may be
vulnerable due to institutional neglect or politically unpopular content.
Drawing on his book Franklin Furnace & the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: A
History of the Future (Intellect, 2010), Toni Sant discusses how new
technology raises new issues in regard to preservation and archiving for
Franklin Furnace. Aside from the issues that arise during the creation and
primary dissemination of works on the Internet, long-term distribution
arrangements and digital-rights management are relevant for making the art and its documentation available on demand as part of a long-term plan for
preservation and dissemination. Identifying the best preservation strategies
is the first step, but there are also intellectual-property matters to
consider. Such issues have become major concerns for Franklin Furnace since
the late 1990s and it has not only braced itself to tackle them but also
pushed itself into the frontline of finding solutions for them, along with
others who have similar concerns.





2 November:

External Speaker: Dr Felicity Colman

(Host: Ben Halligan)



Dr Felicity Colman is a Reader in Screen Media in the Dept of Media at MMU. She is the author of Deleuze and Cinema (Berg 2011) and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy (2009) and co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007). She is working on a number of book projects that engage screen media forms, including Bergson and Film, and Screen Media Semiologies.



How to use Deleuze in thinking about Screen Media
Gilles Deleuze published two radical books on film: "Cinema 1: The Movement-Image" and "Cinema 2: The Time-Image". Engaging with a wide range of film styles, histories and theories, Deleuze’s writings treat film as a new form of philosophy. This cine-philosophy offers a startling new way of understanding the complexities of the moving image, its technical concerns and constraints as well as its psychological and political outcomes. In this talk I'll look at some of the key concepts behind Deleuze’s revolutionary theory of the cinema (affect, time, thought, politics, etc), and discuss how Deleuze’s radical methodology is useful for all forms of for screen media analysis.





16 November:

Internal session: Dr Benjamin Halligan



Questions of Anti-Establishment Art

How is the history and ontology of the “English establishment” preserved and maintained in postmodern times? This presentation of current research examines Jarman’s 1992 painting “Queer”, the 2002 track “Time for Heroes” by The Libertines, and Mario Testino’s official wedding photograph of Kate Middleton and William Wales from 2011. To what extent do these three texts from the last two decades seek to subvert and/or renew notions of the establishment - its aesthetics, ideology, rituals and prejudices? In what ways is this establishment both called into creation, and called to account, in these three documents? And how does the radical or bohemian tradition of English modernist art fare in this context? The discussion will take as its starting point Stephen Frears’ gelding for the 2006 film The Queen.





External Speaker: Dr Eithne Quinn

(Host: David Sanjek)



Dr Eithne Quinn of the University of Manchester is author of Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (Columbia University Press, 2005). She is currently completing a book entitled A Piece of the Action: Race and Labour in Post-Civil Rights Hollywood.


Taking the Rap:

The Use of Violent Grime Lyrics in Criminal Cases
In three recent murder cases in London, prosecution counsels presented violent ‘grime’ rap lyrics written by defendants as evidence of guilt. As author of a scholarly book on gangsta rap, Eithne Quinn acted as an expert witness for the defence in the three trials. This paper gives an account of the legal use of violent rap and argues that, in these cases, lyrics should not be admissible as evidence.



30 November:

PGR presentations



External Speaker: Professor Brian Ward

(Host: David Sanjek)



Brian Ward is Professor of American Studies at the University of Manchester, UK, having previous taught at the Universities of Florida and Newcastle upon Tyne.
His major publications include Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998), Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2004), and The 1960s: A Documentary Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). He is just completing editorial chores on a three volume series of books devoted to new directions in the study of the American South, is just starting a book on pre-World War Two Artists and Repertoire men, and is perpetually working on a book about the relationships between the American South and the world of British popular music from Delius to the Kings of Leon.



“The ‘C’ is For Christ”:

The Beatles, Arthur Unger and Datebook Magazine
While much has been written on the “more popular than Jesus” controversy which engulfed the Beatles in 1966 during their final US tour, little attention has been paid to Arthur Unger, the man whose decision to re-print an English interview with John Lennon in his magazine Datebook sparked the furore. This talk explains that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Datebook was not a typical teen magazine, but a vehicle for the progressive politics of its publisher-editor Unger who had been using it for years to expose various kinds of intolerance and bigotry to American teens. Moreover, the Beatles had known Unger and supported his magazine's covert politics long before 1966. Indeed, far from cynically ripping Lennon's quote on religion—and an equally important one from Paul McCartney on racism—out of context and without permission to make a quick profit, it was the band’s own management which initially encouraged Unger to use the interviews. Ultimately, the argument here is that it is impossible to understand impossible to understand the genesis, evolution, or cultural significance of the “Jesus” controversy without attention to Unger.



14 December:

Internal speaker: Dr Yu-Wei Lin



Technofeminism and Media Technologies
Following up my introductory talk on technofeminism last academic year, this talk will provide not only a more advanced view on technofeminism and other related theories around feminist technoscience studies, but also my own experience of adopting this analytical approach for the research on women in Free/Open Source Software communities and gendered participatory cultures in an age of media convergence.





External Speaker: Dr Andrew Burke

(Host: Ben Halligan)



Andrew Burke is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg where he teaches critical theory and cultural studies. His current project is on the representation of memory and modernity in contemporary British cinema.



The Sound of Straight-to-Video:

VHS Head’s Trademark Ribbons of Gold

Comprised primarily of samples drawn from a collection of 80s videocassettes layered over frenetic and fractured beats, the music of VHS Head points to the way in which memory and technology intersect. Occupying the space where glitchy electronica meets hypnogogic pop, the tracks on VHS Head’s debut album Trademark Ribbons of Gold trace a trajectory from the VCR to the mp3. The analogue remnants of the recent past are digitally reprocessed and reconfigured in a way that amplifies their force and menace. The work of VHS Head does not simply represent another example of the contemporary enthusiasm for dead media and obsolete technologies, but also serves as a model for how the recent past resides in the present day: as a discontinuous and disorienting barrage of fragments that continue to haunt and unsettle the present. Drawing on memory studies and thing theory, this paper examines the uncanny as it is embodied in the ungainly material form of the videocassette and let loose through the music of VHS Head.



followed by our Christmas Party (including buffet)





18 January:

Internal Speaker: Mary Oliver



Mary Oliver has been a performance artist for almost 30 years working across the fields of theatre, music, fine art and creative technology. For over a decade she has focussed on the creation of digital performance works and has collaborated with animators, film-makers, composers, computer programmers and most recently with a cognitive psychologist on the creation of interactive performance works that often play with the humour of the human-technological interface. Mary is Reader in Performance, Head of the Performance Research Centre and is leading the development of Digital Performance Research at the new Digital Media Performance Lab at MCUK.


“Practice as Research” Seminar
This session will be useful for anyone interested in research methods for creative practitioners. Mary's will use a number of her recent interdisciplinary performance and technology projects as case studies with which to distinguish the differences between practice and practice-as-research. She will focus on planning, writing proposals, execution (specifically working in interdisciplinary teams) documentation and dissemination of PAR.



External Speaker: Dr Xavier Mendik

(Host: Ben Halligan)



Xavier Mendik is Director of the Cine-Excess International Film Festival and DVD label at Brunel University, from where he also runs the Cult Film Archive and research centre. He has written extensively on cult and horror traditions, and some of his publications in this area include The Cult Film Reader (2008), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (2004), Shocking Cinema of the Seventies (2002), Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (2002) and Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (2000). Xavier has recently completed 100 Cult Films (with Ernest Mathis), to be released in October 2011 as part of the BFI/Palgrave film guide series, and is currently completing a monograph on 1970s Italian cult film. Beyond his academic writing, Xavier has an established profile as a documentary filmmaker and distributor. He was responsible for the 2011 high-definition UK restoration of Dario Argento’s Suspiria for the Nouveaux Pictures / Cine-Excess. Further details of these activities can be found on www.cine-excess.co.uk



The Long Road Back From Hell:

Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust

A Documentary Screening and Discussion

In 1979, Italian director Ruggero Deodato created Cannibal Holocaust, a film that was to revolutionise and scandalise the nature of realist horror cinema. Deodato’s influential and infamous tale centres on four intrepid documentary filmmakers who go missing in the Amazonian wilderness, leading to fears that they have been butchered by local ‘savages.’  However, when the famous NYU anthropologist Harold Monroe discovers the group’s final filmed diary, a far more shocking tale emerges…

With its complex narrative and innovative use of documentary style techniques, Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust initiated a trailblazing trend of ‘found footage horror’ that continued through to The Blair Witch Project (1999) and beyond. However, the film’s stylishness was overshadowed by it savage imagery, which lead to the movie being banned and heavily censored in many European countries.

In Britain, the film became the most notorious ‘video nasty’ of the early 1980s, and was only subsequently released in the UK in a heavily censored version. However, in 2011, Cine-Excess and Brunel University academics including Xavier Mendik and Professor Julian Petley framed the official BBFC submission of the new HD master of Cannibal Holocaust on behalf of the distributor Shameless Films. This application resulted in a landmark BBFC ruling, which now allows the most complete cut of Cannibal Holocaust to be released across the UK in September 2011.

To tie in with this newly restored, high definition release of the film, Xavier Mendik will be discussing the long road back from hell for one of cinema’s most contentious titles. The seminar includes a screening of his new documentary The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust, which is included on the new Shameless Films Blu-ray and DVD release of the film. The documentary charts the film’s controversial history, as well as its even more confrontational use of realist techniques, whilst also assessing its socio-cultural context in relation to Italy’s turbulent ‘Years of Lead’. 





1 February:

Internal Speaker: Dr Phoebe V Moore-Carter



Arts work and subjectivity in the era of austerity

Walter Benjamin, in 1921, notes that ‘capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers’. The way capitalism and contemporarily, neoliberal capitalism, manifests itself biopolitically is through work and production, but the ‘cult’ of capitalism does not offer the luxury of a differentiation between weekends and ‘weekdays’ but instead, ‘creates guilt, not atonement’. The attempted subsumption of labour to capital is seen particularly in precarious digital work environments such as peer to peer production, as I have argued elsewhere.

This paper will provide case studies that demonstrate the value of production within the culture industries in the context of recent cuts to arts budgets for the sake of austerity measures, to identify how work within arts communities is intimately linked to subjectivities. Empirical evidence will be supplied with interviews conducted with cultural workers in Manchester and in London in the contemporary context of the recent policy, linking this to the propaganda noted in Big Society policies and their subjectification. People responsible for the production of arts and culture survive in industrialised capitalist economies despite generally precarious labour conditions, and rely on immeasurable returns rather than capital returns, despite ongoing commitment and a work ethic of loyalty and willingness to work for no pay. I have interviewed a number of arts workers and will include this data in support of my arguments.





External speaker: Prof Jackie Stacey

(Host: Kirsty Fairclough)



Professor Stacey’s academic background is an interdisciplinary one, combining European Studies (Sussex), Women’s Studies (Kent) and Cultural Studies (Birmingham). She currently works at the University of Manchester, specializing in feminist cultural theory and its bearing upon questions of political transformation. As well as being a co-editor of two journals, Screen and Feminist Theory, her publications include Star Gazing: Female Spectators and Hollywood Cinema (1994) and Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997) and (as co-author with Sarah Franklin and Celia Lury) Global Nature, Global Culture (2000). She has also co-edited a number of books, including Romance Revisited with Lynne Pearce (1995), Screen Histories: A Screen Reader with Annette Kuhn (1998), Thinking Through the Skin with Sara Ahmed (2001) and Queer Screens with Sarah Street (2007).


The Uneasy Cosmopolitans of Code Unknown
Across the humanities and social sciences we are currently witnessing a move towards a renewed cosmopolitanism. In these debates, cosmopolitan ideals blend a liberal notion of ‘openness to others’ with a sense of 'worldliness' that might welcome the flow of diversity and proximity to the unfamiliar. This talk questions the celebratory tone of this renewed cosmopolitanism through a reading of Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000). If the promise of the cosmopolitan project is to be found in the notion of what we might call a more ‘open sociality’, then this talk explores how Code Unknown turns the processes of spectatorship into the ethical testing ground for such a vision.





15 February:

Internal session: Professor Stephen Davismoon



Accordion Resonance
In this presentation Steve will discuss and illustrate his new commissioned work from Tempo Reale (Italy) for 2 accordions and interactive electronics. He will discuss the diverse cultural traditions drawn upon for the work and how these were imbedded in the work (by way of evolving probabilistic, Markovian hierarchic structures) as well as present the compositional strategies employed for the various strands of the finished work: live instrumentalists, fixed media electronics and interactive electronics.





External Speaker: Professor Mark Wheeler

(Host: Seamus Simpson)



Mark Wheeler is Professor of Political Communications at London Metropolitan University. Publications include Politics and the Mass Media (Oxford: Blackwells, 1997), European Television Industries (with Petros Iosifidis and Jeanette Steemers) (London, British Film Institute, 2005) and Hollywood: Politics and Society (London: British Film Institute, 2006).



The Democratic worth of Celebrity Politics in an era of Late Modernity

As there has been an exponential increase in celebrity political interventions a debate has emerged about the worth of celebrity and democracy. In post-democratic societies, Henrik Bang and John Keanes’ respective constructs of Everyday Makers and Monitory Democracy have placed an emphasis on the importance of ‘involvement’, ‘voice’ and ‘output’ in terms of political representation, and provide an ideological framework through which to capture the value of celebrity politicians. Subsequently, it may be argued that Barack Obama utilised a form of ‘liquid’ celebrity in his 2008 United States (US) Presidential campaign to reconnect with a disenfranchised American electorate. However, this article contends that it remains necessary to consider how far celebrity politicians have ‘inputed’ aggregated forms of ‘agency’ to affect political outcomes. From these differing perspectives, it seeks to define a normative position concerning the worth of celebrity politics in an era of late modernity.





29 February:

Internal session: Professor Seamus Simpson


Public Service Journalism and Converging Media Systems
Concepts and practices of public service have been an integral part of the evolution of communication media systems for decades in Europe and beyond. However, the process of media convergence has called forth an examination of the place of public service in communications. Ideas of public service have been an important part of the development of journalism and have too come under increasing pressure in the era of media convergence. This session will commence with an exploration of some of the key ideas that have shaped articulations of public service in media systems and journalism. It will then go on to explore some of the challenges and opportunities for public service journalism which have arisen from the development convergent media platforms and services. It will conclude by exploring the extent to which public service journalism is relevant today in our diverse-yet-converging, highly commercialised, digital multi-media systems.





External Speaker: Dr Sian Barber

(Host: Ben Halligan)



Sian Barber is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She completed her PhD at the University of Portsmouth as part of the AHRC-funded 1970s project and has published on British cinema and cinema going. She has recently completed a book on the British Board of Film Censors in the 1970s which draws heavily on unused archive material. Her other research interests include cultural history in an online environment and the challenges posed by websites and the internet to methods of research. She is currently working on the EUscreen project which aims to provide online access to Europe’s television heritage.



Reading the BBFC archive: Film Censorship in the 1970s
This seminar will draw upon work recently undertaken at the British Board of Film Classification to explore film censorship in Britain in the 1970s. My examination of over 250 files offers new evidence about the operation and implementation of active film censorship in this period. Yet what can these individual files tell us about standards of permission and popular taste in a given period? And how can this material be used to further debates about film and censorship?

The BBFC files provide a wealth of unused material which reveals the operation, history and development of a crucial and often secretive part of the British film industry which deserves critical attention. Yet the BBFC itself is uncertain how best to present its material to researchers and is concerned about the way in which such material may be used and how it reflects upon them as an organisation. This talk will consider the ethical and practical issues of ‘reading’ this archive and how these challenges can be addressed to provide new insights into British film censorship, both historic and modern.





14 March:

Internal speaker: Dr Richard Talbot



Opportunities and challenges of an Internet-based PhD submission.

Richard Talbot will discuss the process of a web-based PhD project in Performance Studies. The discussion will consider the process of designing, programming, creating and developing content, content- management systems and the user interface. This paper will touch on some challenges with performance documentation and reflection in the context of PhD viva and final submission criteria. He will draw primarily on his own PhD by practice-as-research The Clown Who Lost His Memory: Multiple Faces of the Clown in Practice & Theory (University of Roehampton, 2008). See www.ninaandfrederick.co.uk/pollard



External Speaker: Owen Hatherley

(Host: Michael Goddard)



Owen Hatherley’s recent publications include the widely acclaimed A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain (Verso, 2011) and Militant Modernism and Uncommon (Zero Books, 2009, 2011), as well as a chapter for Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics (ed. Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan, Ashgate, 2010). Hatherley is a regular contributor to Building Design, New Statesman and New Humanist and has also written for The Guardian, Icon, Socialist Worker and Socialist Review. He sits on the editorial boards of Archinect and Historical Materialism, and maintains three blogs, Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, The Measures Taken and Kino Fist.



Britpop vs Class Consciousness - the case of Pulp

Though it is doubtful that actual musicians ever saw it that way, the welfare state and British pop music were mutually dependent phenomena, and both died around the same time. This talk will consider how this starts to come to consciousness in the work of Pulp, an arguable final member of the art school pop lineage, who brought to the surface the largely suppressed class politics of the poujadist 90s pop movement known as Britpop.




28 March:

Internal speaker: Dr Carole O’Reilly



‘Facts are not for me’: Journalism and Ethical Dilemmas

Facts are not for me. They are sordid, narrow; they cramp my soul’. So wrote Henry Franks, a nineteenth century Manchester journalist. Franks’ candid admission suggests that ethics (or lack of them) played an important role in the history of journalism and profoundly affected the pursuit of the trade. Many early journalists found themselves working for newspapers with unashamedly political origins and owners and negotiating critical relationships with leading business and commercial interests. This paper examines the development of ethical dilemmas in the history of British journalism and considers why these dilemmas continue to plague the practice of journalism.



External speaker: Dr Rachel Moore

(Host: Michael Goddard)



Dr Rachel Moore teaches in the Media and Communications Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her current project, In the Film Archive of Natural-History, which investigates the use of old movies and footage in current artistic practice.  She is the author of (nostalgia) (Afterall/MIT Press, 2006), Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Duke, 2000), as well as articles on various film-makers including Patrick Keiller (LUXonline), James Benning, and Kenneth Anger (Afterall). She is a member of the Leverhulme Spaces of Media Project investigating the use of screens in urban spaces today in Cairo, London and Shanghai.





Tesseract: The beginning of the end.
Digital Media have forced us to look again at what distinguishes photography from film as well as the values we attach to them. This paper goes back to photography's origins to re-evaluate 'the instant' drawing on Hollis Frampton's recently republished theoretical work.





May 9:

Internal speaker: Professor David Sanjek



You’re Either On The Bus or Off The Bus:

Images of Inclusion & Exclusion in the 1960s

The period of the 1960s is somewhat stereotypically thought of as a time when barriers were toppled and divisions dissolved. Recent revisionist historians of the period have reminded us that painting the period in such a broad fashion can lead to sloppy brush work. This presentation will examine some of the complexities of the period through recent research on media and music figures, including Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Wild Man Fischer.



External Speaker: Professor Martine Beugnet

(Host: Michael Goddard)



Martine Beugnet is Professor in Film Studies, and heads the film studies section at the University of Edinburgh. To-date she has completed four books: Sexualité, marginalité, contrôle: cinéma français contemporain (L'Harmattan, 2000), Claire Denis (M.U.P, 2004) and, together with Dr Marion Schmid, Proust at the Movies (Ashgate, 2005). Her fourth book, entitled Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression was published by Edinburgh University Press in September 2007 with a second edition due in 2012. She has written articles and essays on a wide range of contemporary cinema topics.



Encoding Loss:

Corporeality and (Im)materiality in the Age of the Digital

Focusing on film-based works by contemporary French film-makers and multimedia artists (De Van, Calle, Akerman amongst others), this talk explores tropes that are associated with interrogations or anxieties about the seemingly dematerialising power of contemporary, technology-driven modes of existence, in particular where the female body is concerned. I look at the conscious or implicit responses that these works offer to the growing sense of immateriality arguably endemic to the age of digital encoding and – to paraphrase Baudrillard’s classic quote  – ‘superfluous’ bodies. 





May 23

PGR presentations



External Speaker: Dr Christopher Weedman

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgina Institute of Technology



British Cinema and Modernity: Losey, Pinter, Bogarde

Abstract forthcoming.





June 6:

Internal Speaker: Dr Michael Goddard



A Deleuzian 21st Century?: Deleuze and Contemporary Media and Cultural Research

Of any of the post-structuralist theorists associated with the ‘68 generation (Foucualt, Derrida, Lyotard etc), Deleuze’s work is perhaps the most contemporary with the present. In the 1970s Foucault said “perhaps the [20th] Century will become known as Deleuzian” but, in fact, Deleuze’s work, especially in an Anglo context, has had something of a delayed impact. It is only now that this work is beginning to take root in the academy while still enjoying the popularity it has had for decades among art students, postgraduates, autodidacts and range of academic outsiders. So perhaps it is the 21st Century that is becoming Deleuzian.

Rather than the impossible presentation of Deleuze’s work in its entirety, this seminar will give a sketch of its take-ups at various times and in various contexts and focus on its use value for media and cultural research. It will suggest some useful paths into Deleuze’s work via key interviews and short texts as well as suggestions for further reading, and especially deal with those aspects of his work which engage directly or indirectly with questions of media and culture, culminating in an opening to his work on cinema.



External Speaker: Dr Andy Robinson

(Host: Dr Phoebe Moore-Carter)



Dr. Andrew Robinson is a critical theorist and activist working on a range of topics around social movements, radical theory, oppressive discourse, global power-structures and everyday life. He is co-author of Power, Conflict and Resistance in the Contemporary World, which applies Deleuzian theory to the analysis of social movement networks, reactive networks and the world-system. He has two dozen published articles and papers including “Symptoms of a New Politics: Networks, Minoritarianism and the Social Symptom in Zizek, Deleuze and Guattari”, “Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Spivak and the Subaltern”, and pieces on Gramsci, Zizek, Laclau, Virilio, Negri, Sartre, post-left anarchy, global justice, the Zapatistas, anarchist theories of war, social movements in Manipur, revolutionary subjectivity, US foreign policy, and global exclusion.



Time and Dialogism in Deleuzian Theory

This paper will examine the Deleuzian theory of time, developed in Deleuze’s books on Bergson and Cinema, with a focus on the themes of dialogue and the Event. It will begin by summarising Deleuze’s concepts of past, present and future. It will explain how each perspective is differentiated as a sensorimotor zone constructed through attention to life, providing a particular zone of resonance unique to each person. It will also explain how Deleuze proposes to understand possibilities for dialogue between such zones through the Bergsonian idea of intuition. It will also discuss how the event is seen to interrupt monological sequences of time. Finally, it will explore the idea of “absolute deterritorialisation” and the relevance of Deleuze’s theory of time for social transformation.

Tuesday 18 October 2011

Salford MMP Graduate Programme talk: "Preserving a History of the Future"

19 October: 4.15 - 5.30:      Adelphi House, 2nd Floor Lecture Theatre


Dr Toni Sant

Dr Toni Sant is Director of Research at the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media in Scarborough. He has also lectured about performance and new media at New York University and the University of Malta. For more see http://www.tonisant.com

Preserving a History of the Future:
Archiving the Avant-Garde in a Digital Environment at Franklin Furnace
Established since 1976, Franklin Furnace is a renowned New York-based arts
organization whose mission is to preserve, document, and present works of
avant-garde art by emerging artists - particularly those whose works may be
vulnerable due to institutional neglect or politically unpopular content.
Drawing on his book Franklin Furnace & the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: A
History of the Future (Intellect, 2010), Toni Sant discusses how new
technology raises new issues in regard to preservation and archiving for
Franklin Furnace. Aside from the issues that arise during the creation and
primary dissemination of works on the Internet, long-term distribution
arrangements and digital-rights management are relevant for making the art and its documentation available on demand as part of a long-term plan for
preservation and dissemination. Identifying the best preservation strategies
is the first step, but there are also intellectual-property matters to
consider. Such issues have become major concerns for Franklin Furnace since
the late 1990s and it has not only braced itself to tackle them but also
pushed itself into the frontline of finding solutions for them, along with
others who have similar concerns.

Monday 17 October 2011

Manchester Film Co-operative screening (18/October)

Screening of a mini programme of Polish experimental animations at Manchester Film Cooperative, Kings Arms, Tuesday 18/10 at 19.45, details below.
It is only part of the programme which also includes some short films about protest and surveillance, details here:
Replika, 1975 (8.45): A day in the life of a School Courtyard in 8 minutes, a different mode of social surveillance
New Book, 1975 (10.15): The frame is broken into nine screens to tell the everyday tale of a neighbourhood, again a reimagining of the possibilities of surveillance, this time in terms of fiction
Blok, 1982 (8.48): Using a combinaiton of photographic and animation tehcniques, the strange and vibrant life of an apartment block is dissected in a kind of homage to Hitchcock's Rear Window
Beach, 1964 (7.33): Two mischevous miniature drawn sailor figures wreak havoc on a Polish beach before returning to their owners/dreamers
Death x 5, 2002 (3.40): a whimisical parade of creatures set out on a seemingly endless journey.....

The Electrification of Salford II

Sways Records Present:

THE ELECTRIFICATION OF SALFORD II:

The Louche FC / Post War Glamour Girls / Victories at Se

THE ELECTRIFICATION OF SALFORD II - Saturday 22 October 2011 at the glorious Kings Arms in Salford (10 mins walk from Manchester Cathedral).

With fuzzy reverbists THE LOUCHE FC, the warm brooding yarbols of Leeds band POST WAR GLAMOUR GIRLS and stars of Underachievers; VICTORIES AT SEA.


THE LOUCHE FC

http://www.swaysrecords.com/thelouchefc
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Louche-FC/132086990163171

“Live performances from Manchester band The Louche FC can be a beguiling, sometimes disorientating, experience. A guitar three-piece who cite the influence of such music terrorists as Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, theirs is a noise-rock assault which proudly turns up the amplifiers and threatens audiences with full-on sensory overload.” David Sue, City Life


POST WAR GLAMOUR GIRLS

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Post-War-Glamour-Girls/104775019554843
http://postwarglamourgirls.bandcamp.com/

Amazing live band from Leeds. The Penines will be no obstacle for these malchicks. Promoting their new single on tour. Listen to it!

"Spitting Pearls" by Post War Glamour Girls will be released on Monday 10th October on Sturdy Records on download and limited edition 7", along with double A-side single "Ode to Harry Dean".

VICTORIES AT SEA

Stormed Underachievers before Summer, it was inevitable then surely that they were gonna leave their sunnier Midland climes and come back up north to wow us once more. Have to be seen.

http://victoriesatsea.co.uk/
http://www.lostlostlost.com/2011/07/victories-at-sea-swim.html

We also have DJ Emmy the Greater for the night
You get all of this for £3.

All are welcome.

The address is Kings Arms, 11 Bloom Street in Salford. It's about 10 minutes walk up Chapel Street from Manchester Cathedral (think Oyster Bar or the big wheel). Googlemap it.

***KINGS ARMS - AS FEATURED IN CHANNEL 4's FRESH MEAT***

The One Show -- call for participants

Get involved as BBC’s The One Show films ‘Limelight’ art installation at MediaCityUK


Date: Today (Monday 17 October)

Time: 6.30pm onwards

Location: The piazza, MediaCityUK


Details: The One Show is planning to come along and film its presenter and members of the public interacting with Sans Facon’s ‘Limelight’ art installation at the MediaCityUK piazza this evening.

The University has commissioned the artwork as part of its MediaCityUK celebrations – for more information go to:


We’re looking for as many people as possible to try out the installation for themselves from 6.30pm and maybe even feature in The One Show’s report, so if you can spare a few minutes this evening please come along to the piazza and look out for the theatre spotlights!

Cofilmic Comedy Film Festival

Manchester Comedy Store on Monday 31st October and Tuesday 1st November tickets/info

Cofilmic Comedy Film Festival is a brand new event designed to give budding TV and film hopefuls a leg up into the comedy industry.

The festival will run from 31st October to 1st November 2011, and will offer those hoping to break into comedy film and television production - including actors, writers, comedians, producers and directors - the chance to submit a short film to a leading panel of judges, and will also include a programme of panel discussions and workshops from industry experts.

Cofilmic is the brainchild of Manchester businesswoman Janet Harrison who, after producing her first comedy short film in 2010, would like to progress onto making comedy features, as well as providing people in a similar position to herself support to progress up the comedy film ladder.

The event will be held at The Comedy Store in Deansgate, Manchester, which will also be the venue for an awards ceremony on the evening of the 1st November to celebrate the films selected by the judges:

The judges so far include:

Charlie Hanson, BAFTA winning producer whose recent credits include Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's TV series Extras, as well as their film Cemetery Junction
Jon Mountague, BBC Comedy North executive producer
Leslee Udwin, East is East and recently-released sequel West is West producer
Don Ward, founder of The Comedy Store
Lindsay Hughes, Executive Producer and Head of Talent, Baby Cow
Andy Baker, Managing director of global filmmakers community Mofilm
Henry Normal, co-founder of Baby Cow

For full information and a programme of events visit www.cofilmic.co.uk or grab your tickets from here.

Sunday 16 October 2011

MMU Media Department Reading Group, 2011-12.

From Dr Felicity Colman:

This group is primarily directed to postgraduate (PhD level and above, although may be of interest for some MA level) researchers.

The focus is on practice as research, and the articulation and theorization of the image (still and moving), modes of perception, experience, history, subjectivity, technologies, etc. This year's reading group really starts with the basics of 20thC theory, as well as incorporating some more recent developments such as the new materialisms movement, and next year will aim to build on these ideas. I've also devised the reading list (will circulate the full list at the group) according to current research interests and requests of media postgrads - who are looking at issues such as aesthetics, subjectivity, phenomenology, history, technology. I aim to ask in some guest leaders of the discussion, depending on the research topic, and provide space at the end of the term next year for participants to present on their own work. List and dates below.

Please email me (f.colman@mmu.ac.uk) to indicate your attendance/interest, and I will email you back the reading/s in electronic form. I can also make available some printed versions if you advise me in advance. Feel free to drop in on the topic of your interest, although there are some cumulative pathways here, there are no attendance registers required.

Week 1 will set up the group and I will address the reading, so do feel welcome to come along even if you have no time to complete it.
In the coming weeks however, the group will get much further if you complete the reading before coming along for discussion.


---------

Media Department Reading Group 2011-2012

Postgraduate theory focus group for practitioners and theorists.

Postgraduates, supervisors, staff all welcome.

Facilitated by: Felicity Colman f.colman@mmu.ac.uk
Please contact to indicate your interest in attending / presenting on a topic / suggesting further reading / suggesting a guest speaker.

Schedule 2011-2012
Righton Building - upstairs Room 113d
4-6pm Wednesdays

Please note that the topics and readings for this season have been chosen in response to some of the broader research areas of current postgraduates. In the following year, another set of topics will be broached, in response to requests, such as anthropology, immigration, racism, technology, etc. All suggestions for future topics/readings welcome.


19 Oct 1a: Critical Discourse and Research [Foucault and self-reflexive practices, Bergson and Intuition as Method]

[no group on the 26 Oct]
[not the 2 nov]

9 Nov 2a: Phenomenology AND Perception [Bergson, Deleuze]

[not the 16 Nov]
[not the 23]

30 Nov 2b: Phenomenology[Husserl, Merleau-Ponty]

7 Dec 3a. Subjectivity & Method (Bergson ‘Method in Philosophy’]
14 Dec 3b. Subjectivity & History [Hegel; post-Lacanian Guattari]
21 Dec 3c. Subjectivity & Gender [Bennet, Kristeva, Butler]

11 Jan 3d Gender & New Materialisms [Grosz
18 Jan 4a. Semiology [ de Saussure, Derrida]
25 Jan 4b. trans-semiotics [Frege, Peirce, Deleuze & Guattari]

1 Feb 5a. Aesthetics [Kant; Whitehead]

8 Feb 5b. Aesthetics [Ranciere]

[not 15 Feb]
22 Feb 6a Time [Heidegger, Ricoeur]


29 Feb 6b Duration [Bergson, +]
7 March 7a Technology [Stiegler, Zielinski]
14 March 8a Media Archaeologies [Huhtamo, Parikka]

21 March 1b. Critical Discourse and Research - presentations
28 March 1c. Critical Discourse and Research - presentations



Readings:
1a: Critical Discourse and Research
Barrett, E. 2007. ‘Foucault’s “What is an Author”: Towards a Critical Discourse of Practice as Research”. In Bolt, B. and Barrett, E., Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. London & New York: I.B.Tauris: 135-146.

Deleuze, G. ‘Intuition as Method’. In Bergsonism. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (trans.). New York: Zone: 13-35.


2a: Phenomenology AND Perception
Bergson, Henri. [1896] 1994. ‘Chapter 1: Of the Selection of Images for Conscious Presentation. What our body Means and Does’. In Matter and Memory, N.M. Paul & W.S. Palmer (trans.). New York: Zone Books: 17-76; 251.

Lawlor, Leonard. 2003. ‘The Concept of the Image: Phenomenology’. In Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics. London & New York: Continuum: 3-26; 129-130.


2b Phenomenology of Perception

Merleau-Ponty, M. 1989. ‘Preface’ and ‘The “Sensation” as a Unit of Experience’. In Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. C. Smith (trans.). London: Routledge: vii-xxi; 3-12.

Martin Jay secondary reading.

3a. Subjectivity, Materialism & Method

Bennett, J. 2010. ‘A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism’. In D. Coole and S. Frost (eds.) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham & London: Duke University Press: 47 – 65.


3b. Subjectivity & History
Guattari, F. ([1977 & 1980] 1984. ‘Causality, Subjectivity and History’. In Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. R. Sheed (trans.) [a selection of essays from Psychanalyse et tranversalité and the two French versions (each different) of La revolution moleculaire] New York: Penguin: 175-207.


3c. Subjectivity & Gender

Sanford, Stella. 2010. Plato and Sex. Cambridge: Polity.

Kristeva, Julia. 1981. 'Women's Time'. Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1. (Autumn): 13-35.

Grosz, Elizabeth. 2010. 'Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom'. In D. Coole and S. Frost (eds.) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham & London: Duke University Press: 139-157.

full list to be circulated. Please email me to indicate your interest, thanks.

Dr Felicity J Colman

Saturday 15 October 2011

Thursday 13 October 2011

MMU Human Sciences Seminars

All meetings begin at 5 pm

Room 3.03
Sandra Burslem Building
Lower Ormond St.
Manchester
M15 6HB


20th Oct.                      The Contradiction of Sovereignty
                                    Neal Curtis (University of Nottingham)

10th Nov.                     Bergson and Cinema :the physics of perception
                                    Felicity Colman (Manchester Metropolitan University)
                                   
17th Nov.                     Performing Lyotard
                                    Christopher Bamford (Leeds Metropolitan University)

24th Nov.                     Kant, Deleuze, and the difference of being and thought
                                    Beth Lord (University of Dundee)

For further information or the inclusion of your name on the mailing list please contact:
Henry Somers-Hall, Manchester Metropolitan University
Dept. of History, Politics and Philosophy, Geoffrey Manton Building
Manchester, M15 6LL
0161 247 3030
h.somers-hall@mmu.ac.uk