11 Jun 2013 5:00pm - 7:00pm CRASSH, Seminar room SG1, Ground Floor

Description

Alison Fornell (MPhil Candidate, Screen Media and Cultures, University of Cambridge)
Loving Television Theory, Investigating the Scandinavian Crime Series “The Bridge”

 

 

and

Professor Amelie Hastie (Prof of English and Film and Media Studies, Amherst College)
Loving Film Theory, Experiencing Audiard's “Rust and Bone”
 

Abstracts

Alison Fornell.

In her talk, “Loving Television Theory, Investigating the Scandinavian Crime Series The Bridge” Alison Fornell will engage with questions of the body and televisuality. What can the body tell us about television? And television the body? She explores these questions through an analysis of the Swedish-Danish co-produced crime thriller The Bridge which leads us to not only think about right versus wrong, as many crime thrillers do, but to also consider the ways television works in the world and on one’s very sense of self.

In discussing The Bridge, the body, and televisuality, she will also consider the ways we might think both critically and compassionately about an object of study. Television, something so close to so many, something so ubiquitous and formative, is both a compelling object of consciousness and an all-encompassing aspect of everyday life. Can we love television theory, just as we love television? In this way, Alison Fornell’s talk will both address crucial questions in Television Studies as well as introduce Amelie Hastie—as scholar and teacher.

 

Prof Amelie Hastie

 

We have a word for an obsessive love of film – cinephilia – which seems to move in and out of relevance (or fashion) in film studies. But how do we describe a love of film theory itself? What is the relevance of love not just for the object of our study but also for a means of thinking about it? And how might this love help to order a structure of knowledge? With these questions as provocations and motivations, Amelie Hastie’s talk will consider the cinephilic drive in particular theoretical writings as a foundation for imagining both a conceptual and a historiographical ordering of film theory.

In doing so, she will also move to an analysis of Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012) spurred on by theoretical writings that are centered around the spectator's affective experience of film. Her analysis will be grounded in the provocation that Rust and Bone's insistence on intimate gestures — made via close-ups, slow motion, quick flashes of movement — is the visual manifestation of emotional experience. As such, of course, it evokes that experience in us. But its mode of leading us into states of feeling is a challenge more than it is a “manipulation.” It demands something of us — to experience multi-directional movement rather than the linear pull of narrative or seemingly straight-forward emotion. Such “multi-directional movement” might be that, too, of a re-imagining of the history and structure of film theory.

 

Open to all.  No registration required.

Part of the Cambridge Screen Media Group seminar series.
For more information about the group, please visit the link on the right hand side of this page.

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