Filming Transnational Interiors

27 Sep 2012 - 29 Sep 2012

All day

Arts Picturehouse Cinema and Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College, Cambridge

Description

Description

Conveners

Axel Bangert (Dept. of German and Dutch / Homerton College)

Isabelle McNeill (Dept. of French / Trinity Hall)

Andrew Webber (Dept. of German and Dutch / Churchill College)

Emma Wilson (Dept. of French / Corpus Christi College)

Registration

Registration for this event is now closed.

Fees:

Full fee: £50.00 (including coffee/tea and lunch)
Student fee: £25.00 (including coffee/tea and lunch)

Please note that the fee does not include the screening of In Vanda’s Room on Thursday 27th September. Tickets for the film screening need to be booked directly via the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.

Conference summary

This conference seeks to explore the representation and conceptualization of interior space in cinema, in the context of the transnational relations and identities that inform both spaces and the films that project them. The conference will examine the idea that the intimate architectures of homes and dwelling places, whether of a transitory or more rooted nature, both shape and are shaped by the identities of those that inhabit them.

Presenting his films at the conference will be the highly-acclaimed Portuguese director Pedro Costa, who, in films such as In Vanda’s Room (2000), takes us into dark, squalid rooms of immigrants in the slums of Lisbon. The austere beauty of his films navigates between intimacy and distance. A major concern of the conference will be the co-extensiveness – or otherwise – of interior scenes and psychic interiority.

However, the interior will be seen not as a purely discrete or withdrawn ‘personal’ domain, but as informed and sometimes disrupted by the political experience of space at large. In crossing intimate thresholds, what do films reveal about those wider, geopolitical boundaries and transnational forces that inevitably come to bear upon our private existences?

Please note that those wishing to attend the screening of In Vanda’s Room on Thursday 27th September should purchase tickets directly from the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse. Booking in advance is recommended.