Conference organizer: Hudson MOURA
SFU downtown Vancouver campus
8:30 am—6:00 pm, March 12th, 2009
Room 1600
Free admission
Abstracts
The Fragmented Frame: the Poetics of the Split-Screen
The split-screen has a long yet relatively under-theorized place in the history of the moving image. Salt finds examples as early as 1901 – including several instances of the use of the split-screen to simultaneously represent two sides of a telephone call. Gance used the split-screen spectacularly in the closing sequence to his masterpiece, Napoleon. The use of this technique has never disappeared, but despite a brief explosion in the late sixties and early seventies, it has generally remained a minor trope in the poetics of the moving image. However, it is more in evidence in a range of contemporary films, sometimes as a tour-de-force (Timecode, The Tracey Fragments), but more commonly integrated and subordinated within the overall single-screen aesthetic.
This resurgence of the split-screen is supported by ongoing cultural changes in the production, distribution and reception of the moving image. The computer desktop, electronic games, television news, print comics and graphic novels have accustomed us to reading the many-windowed visual screen. Contemporary domestic media technologies privilege the pleasure of complex moving image narratives and visual constructions. Larger high-definition video screens provide the visual arena for the display of multiple images, and ever-increasing home playback options support the repeated viewing of more intricately faceted storylines and imagery.
Some contemporary media theorists recognize the potential of this form of cinematic expression. Manovich argues that the twentieth century moving image devalued what he calls “spatial montage” but that the digital imperatives of this century – both technical and cultural – are favorable to a more spatialized aesthetic that includes the split-screen. Spielman maintains that the digital moving image uniquely privileges the collaged and the spatial. Willis notes that contemporary filmmakers such as Greenaway and Figgis use digital capabilities to break what Greenaway calls “the tyranny of the frame” and make expressive use of a multi-windowed cinematic environment.
However, there is little theoretical work on the poetics or cinematic design of the split-screen. This paper argues for a robust approach to the deconstruction and analysis of split-screen sequences. This approach examines the phenomenon at three levels: the narrative, the structural and the graphic. This three-level analysis is applied in a close-reading of Jewison’s Thomas Crown Affair (1968) and against contemporary examples such as Rules of Attraction (2002), Conversations with Other Women (2005) and the television series 24.
Jim BIZZOCCHI is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University. Jim teaches Game Design, Interactive Narrative, and Video Production. His research interests include the emergent aesthetics of digital video experience, the design of interactive narrative, and the development of educational games and simulations. He has presented and published widely in a variety of academic conferences, journals and books. Jim is an experienced educational technologist, and is a past-president of the Canadian Association for Distance Education. Finally, Jim is a practicing video artist, producing original video works that complement his scholarly writing.
Everything new is old again: Potlatch as an intermedial, intercultural Kwakwakwakw event.
Drawing on Chapple and Kattenbelt’s concept of intermediality as “a space where the boundaries soften and we are in-between and within a mixing of space, media and realities (2006),” I offer an ethnographic analysis by way of a “thick description” of a contemporary Kwakwakwakw potlatch. A potlatch is a time and place specific event that is simultaneously theatre (scripted songs, music and speeches are enacted by people wearing appropriate regalia, and choreographed dances are performed according to rules and aesthetic conventions in the specialized building of a Big House); and performance (while marked events, potlatches are shaped by and reciprocally shape the social relations/performances of everyday life beyond the event, and improvisations demanded by the living politics of affective relations sometimes uphold and sometimes subvert the letter of scripted laws); and film set where recordings that will circulate among local households, and museums, film festivals, universities and cultural centres around the world are made by Kwakwakwakw and non-Kwakwakwakw professionals and amateurs. Diverse audiences constituted by local people including performers when they are not “on stage”, members of the Kwakwakwakw diaspora, and invited and uninvited strangers, witness/watch/participate/feast/interpret/contest. Locating a contemporary potlatch within a historical context I argue that Kwakwakwakw have incorporated new media to serve old ends since colonization of the northwest coast of British Columbia began in the late 18th century. By tracing the social/political life of diverse media (face-to-face communication, witnessed live performance, photography, film and video) engaged in a contemporary potlatch, I propose that the Kwakwakwakw story offers insights into the creative potential of spaces in between, and into possibilities of resistance and survival through dark times.
Dara CULHANE, Associate Professor of Anthropology, received her B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology in 1985 and her Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1994 from Simon Fraser University. Her work has concentrated on historical and contemporary relations between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian Nation State; politics of indigenous women’s health; collaborative research methodologies; and urban studies. From 1992-1994 Dr. Culhane served as Deputy Director of Social and Cultural Research for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.
Facebook City
A wealth of recent scholarship is devoted to social networking sites (sns) as mediated publics (Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B., 2007), and online environments as architecture (Mitchell, 1995; Beckmann, 1998; Adams, 1997; Kwinter, 1996). Yet connecting facebook—the sixth-most visited global internet site—with urban patterns, built environments, and networked publics—sites, spaces, places—has been less theorized. The proposed analysis will begin by engaging with some of the above-mentioned theoretical framings (and come back to others, throughout the course of the discussion). I shall then propose a framework for conceiving of facebook, specifically, as a virtual metropolis: an autonomous city-state, a semi-permeable and protected hierarchical network of citizens and technologies, an elaborate online trailer park, with neighbourhoods, gated communities, places and non-places, archives, and nighttime economies, town halls, malls—and with intricate lattices of circulation, transportation and navigation forming and reforming as connective tissue. As Paul C. Adams notes: “… metaphor does not contain meaning; it provides a starting point for the construction of meaning” (1997, 156). By applying the city-ness metaphor to facebook, I intend not to propose a constrictive or totalizing model; rather, I aim to bring facebook’s current critical positioning forward from being confined within discourses of identity politics, power relations, and subject-formation. We may then invite its topographical rethinking as a self-contained yet morphological region, a built environment transposed upon—in addition to shadowing—the physical domain, existing within a networked and mobile society, housing collective, urban pockets of linked populations, and enabling new forms of social agency.
Ryan DIDUCK is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University. He attained his MA in film studies, as well as a BFA with great distinction at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. His current research investigates advertising across emerging, networked and mobile media.
Multi-Screen Narrative in The Tracey Fragments
In cinema, particularly in films adapted from novels, the challenge of depicting subjectivity has been daunting. Traditional techniques such as narration, flashbacks, dream/fantasy sequences and point-of-view cinematography have been augmented by increasingly sophisticated digital sound and image technologies, but the depiction of interior mental states in a sensation-based medium remains a difficult and often awkward task in comparison to the abstract and fluent language of the novelist.
In Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments (2007), first-person narrative is expressed through multiple images which can simultaneously show the character’s past, present, and future as well as nightmares and fantasies, all on screen at the same time in a constantly changing mosaic. The film is based on Maureen Medved’s fragmentary and highly subjective novel, narrated by a fifteen-year-old girl, which was also adapted as a graphic novel. McDonald’s choice to translate the novel’s stream-of-consciousness style into a barrage of simultaneous images gives it a unique ability to express the racing, unreliable mind of its teenaged narrator.
I will describe how Eisenstein’s concept of spatial montage, as articulated in the extreme form of The Tracey Fragments, expresses the phenomenology of ‘being-in-the-world. ’ Lev Manovich says of multi-screen imagery, “Time becomes spatialized, distributed over the surface of the screen. In spatial montage, nothing is potentially forgotten, nothing is erased.” (The Language of New Media, 272). Further, according to Deleuze, sensation “has no sides at all, it is both [subject and object] indissolubly…at the same time I become in sensation and something arrives through sensation, one through the other, one in the other.” In its best moments, The Tracey Fragments represents this becoming in sensation simultaneously for both its fictional central character and for the viewer of the film.
Patricia GRUBEN, Filmmaker, Associate Professor of Film at the School for the Contemporary Arts and Director of Praxis Centre for Screenwriters. Has written and directed several experimental narrative shorts, two dramatic features and a feature-length documentary, which have been screened internationally in cinemas, on television, and at numerous festivals. Also works as a script consultant and screenwriter, and has published several articles and book chapters on Canadian filmmakers, screenplay structure, and adaptation. She is Director of the SFU Field School in Art & Culture of Contemporary India.
Capturing Transnationality and Transculturality: A Case Study of Experimental Film
Japan is occasionally portrayed as a mono-ethnic, mono-lingual nation by filmmakers and researchers. Conveying such image and message to the audience is, what Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997) calls, “mode of address”. Ellsworth indicates the interaction between address and response is crucial for the creation of the bilateral relationship between filmmakers/researchers and their audience and for the emergence of alternative views.
Applying Ellsworth’s concept, I seek to examine transnationality and transculturality seen in The Fourth Dimension (2001) created by a post-colonial thinker and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha. This “experimental” film on Japan and its culture demonstrates how First/Third Worlds and East/West are intricately intermingled and coexist beyond dichotomies and boundaries. Moreover, it complicates the relationship between filmmaker, filmed subject, and viewer as well as the notion of space and time, from the perspective of the storyteller as a traveler and global/transnational citizen. How do national, cultural, and ethnic borders shift and become blurred in Trinh’s film? How does the fact that the film has been screened mainly in North America deconstruct and reconfigure the cultural borders between the United States, Canada, and Japan? What kind of alternative perspective resisting the conventional notion of territoriality is emerging? Incorporating a projection of an experimental video (5 min.) produced by the researcher herself as a global/transnational citizen educated in Japan, the United States, and Canada, this proposed presentation will contribute to better understanding of what it means to go global/transnational, in other words, transgress national, cultural, and ethnic borders.
Hiroko HARA is currently pursuing her PhD studies in Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include global citizenship, postcolonial theory, film and video production, visual culture, and media education. Hiroko is an experimental filmmaker and has produced films and videos screened at conferences and film festivals in Canada and the United States.
How Jack Bauer and El Cid Pulled the Philosopher’s Beard: Real Time and the Rules of Aristotelian Unity
No wonder Henry VI struck the continental cognoscenti as culturally barbaric. Not only did William Shakespeare treat the Maid of Orleans like a Satanic whore who deserved everything she got; he allowed months, and even years, to elapse before the story ended. Thus, when Pierre Corneille chose to extend the “running of time” of Le Cid to 30 hours (in order to allow his hero to fight a fatal duel with his fiancėe’s father, defeat the Moors who unexpectedly arrive to besiege his city, escape the death penalty and romantically reconcile with his beloved), even this relatively minor breach of the Aristotelian Rules of Unity produced one of the most vehement polemics of the seventeenth century. Every season of the twenty-first century TV series 24, conversely, takes exactly 1,440 minutes of real time to unfold. Of course, thanks to the mixed blessings of modern technology, people can travel a lot farther in a day than they could 2,500 years ago, and wreak far more havoc…especially if the laws of probability are cast in abeyance. Ironically, both these cultural manifestation serve to underline just how artificial the great Athenian’s prescriptions really were. They also underline their peculiar attractiveness, even in a digital age that has long since absorbed the rules of Elizabethan drama, the nineteenth century novel, the comic strip, the video game and other narrative forms into its arsenal of narrative strategies. Comparing Versailles’ apprehension of El Cid to Hollywood’s depiction of a contemporary secret agent (who simultaneously embodies the worst fears of left and right wing American viewers) is one way of exploring how much things have changed over the past two and a half millennia, and how much they have remained the same.
Mark HARRIS has taught in the Film Studies Department at the University of British Columbia since receiving his doctorate in Comparative Literature in the late 1990s, and continue to publish widely, in both academic and journalistic circles.
Gender and the Advent of Remediated Dating
Working within a framework that understands dating as a gendered and (re)mediated phenomenon, whether ‘offline’ or ‘on,’ this analysis looks to the ways urban professionals in Vancouver practice online dating as both an everyday activity and an engagement with practices of identification and subjectification. By employing three of the four universal laws of media propounded by Marshall McLuhan, I descriptively illustrate how online dating remediates and remixes gender and practices of relationship formation by and through the medium of the Internet. I use only three of the four laws because it is my firm contention that online dating has not obsolesced any form of conventional or traditional dating practices. Rather, I take this as the first indication and evidence that online dating is not, and can never be, an entirely new and different means of relationship formation, human interaction, or intimate engagement. I further buttress this contention by suggesting that practices of online dating: 1) enhance relationships of power through the primacy of the visual in online potential date and mate selection and the (almost) inevitable face-to-face interaction that it is succeeded by; 2) retrieves gendered stereotypes and the norms and patterns of behaviour reminiscent of more conventional forms of dating; and 3) can and does subvert these gendered power relations by producing inverted and shifted gendered patterns and practices of dating. By arguing that online dating is a different, that is, remediated, but not entirely ‘new,’ form of dating which continues to be thoroughly embedded in gendered norms, I hope to meld new media and social/feminist theory to answer the question of what difference ‘difference’ makes in intimate relationship formation by and through the Internet.
Jacqueline Schoemaker HOLMES is a PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Sociology. Her dissertation work involves an investigation into the online dating practices of Vancouver’s professionals. This eight-month ethnographic study centers on the concept of remediated dating, which highlights the gendered and technologically-mediated nature of contemporary human lives and identities.
Queer Asia On Screen
This presentation explores elements of intermediality in the cinemas of “Queer Asia,” the designation of which is itself an inter-cultural phenomenon that results from both the development of new media technology and the globalization of queer sexual cultures. I will discuss three points of intersection between cinema and new media in the Queer Asian context: (1) active forms of queer spectatorship facilitated by the internet, (2) digital production and the D.I.Y ethos, and (3) new media as a cinematic theme.
Helen Hok-Sze LEUNG, assistant professor at Department of Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on queer theory; cultural and literary theory; gender and sexuality in Hong Kong cinema and culture.
Mystical mirror images in Persian painting and interactive media
“Know the world is a mirror from head to foot / In every atom are a hundred blazing suns,” the fourteenth-century Shaykh Mahmud Shabistani wrote. An immersive illusion that satisfies the senses, and yet draws the beholder into an awareness of the “metadata” that created the illusion: that is Persian painting of the sixteenth century; and it also characterizes digital fictions of our time. Intriguing mirroring occurs between Sixteenth-century Sufi and Illuminationist thought and modern philosophy, in ways that shed light on these art forms: for example, Al-Suhrawardi’s conception of the universe as a flow of light is strikingly similar to that of Henri Bergson. This talk will explore a few of these parallel mirror images.
Laura U. MARKS is the Dena Wosk University Professor in Art and Culture Studies in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2002) and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002), and has curated programs of film, video, and new media for venues around the world. Dr. Marks is currently researching an Islamic genealogy of new media art, as well as contemporary cinema in the Arab world; a book prospectively titled Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art is forthcoming from MIT Press.
Screen people (working progress—video)
How much are people mediating their daily experience? Are we living a new conception of the city technologically saturated and mediated? How can we film these invisible and virtual connections?
Hudson MOURA received a Ph.D. in film studies and comparative literature at the Université de Montréal and he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in intercultural cinema at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. He is sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia and has been teaching at Simon Fraser University since 2006 in film studies and art and culture. He is visiting professor at the graduate program in Communication, Culture and Arts at University of Algarve, Portugal. He taught at the Université de Montréal and university colleges in Brazil. He is a videomaker and editor of the e-journal Intermídias (www.intermidias.com), which publishes articles on culture and media. Dr. Moura has had many refereed articles published in Canadian, Brazilian, French, Mexican and Portuguese publications. He is the guest editor of a special issue focusing on contemporary Brazilian cinema for the Université de Montréal’s journal Cinémas. Currently his research focuses on screen culture, subtitles, global art, intercultural documentary and emergent cinemas.
Gaming that Feels Real: Indexicality in Alternate Reality Games
Alternate Reality Games (ARG) characteristically blur the line between simulation and reality. While traditional games have demarcated boundaries, what Huizinga (1950) calls the “magic circle,” and video games are marked by their obligation to screens, ARGs are conducted through the use of everyday media without an explicit interface or markedness. ARG-pioneer Jane McGonigal (2003) refers to this as the game’s “immersive aesthetic.” Gamers are addressed through their everyday media networks with messages, puzzles and artifacts that uphold the verisimilitude. Without an explicit label, the game is played everywhere and anywhere at anytime. The genre blends the performative with the narrative and the ludic.
Whereas the audience’s traditional fascination with the television text lies in its iconicity, that is, its likeness to the reality it portrays, Fernando Andacht comparatively demonstrates how the reality television audience’s intrigue with the text lies in the indexical relationship generated by the portrayed self-reflexivity. He argues how the screen’s predominant iconic logic is ambivalent about the realness, or ‘facticity,’ of the object it refers to. A punning the role iconicity plays in creating sex appeal, Andacht has termed the index appeal the audience fascination with the contiguous relationship reality television offers. Similarly, this presentation will argue how ARGs’ realist aesthetic and hard-core gamers’ fascination of the genre is dependent on the game’s index appeal.
Steve PAYETTE is a MA student in Media Studies at the University of Ottawa. His current research interest converges on social media and indexicality.
Immersive Advertising, Mash-ups and Children’s Participatory Culture
Young people across the developed world are growing up in increasingly participatory cultures. Such environments are dominated by multimodal screens that allow users greater opportunity to transform their personal reactions to the images, sounds, and narratives of consumer-media culture into forms of social interaction. Of course what young people do with mass media culture is rarely revolutionary or shockingly new. And yet, in many ways it has never been easier for adolescents to produce their own cultural expressions, to use the images, sounds and texts from consumer-media culture to produce new representations. As a result, children and youth now seem to have increasing opportunity to alternate between and even remix their roles as media consumers and producers.
In interesting ways, these developments have been felt acutely in the field of youth marketing (Grimes and Shade, 2005; Buckingham, 2007; Zwick et al, 2008). In this paper I examine the development of video mash-up programs as part of the commercial websites of both public and private children’s and youth’s broadcasters. As used here, mash-ups are typically short videos or collages produced by editing together (or remixing) video and audio resources that were made for another purpose. I concentrate on mash-ups because they are really only one example of the immersive advertising techniques commercial broadcasters are using today in order to attract and hold on to adolescents’ attention. What makes mash-ups especially interesting, however, is that they represent a particular regime of visibility, a way of governing (in Foucault’s sense) children and youth conduct in a manner ideally suited to a culture of participation. To make this clear, I examine the role of mash-ups on CBC’s website for kids as well as CBC’s web resources directed at older youth. I situate these strategies in relation to other immersive advertising practices and suggest how the development of such practices structures young people’s agency in a participatory culture.
Stuart POYNTZ, assistant Professor at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. His research and teach interests include: children, media and digital culture; history of media literacy; theories of the public sphere; critical pedagogy; film and historical representation.
The Perceptual Capacities of Cameras and Other Ocular Devices in Seven Silent Films by Alfred Hitchcock, E. A. Dupont, and F. W. Murnau
Working together at Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft (Ufa), Berlin, in 1924-1925, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) and Ewald André Dupont (1891-1956) came under the influence of F. W. Murnau (1888-1931) and other young German and Austro-Hungarian directors, such as Fritz Lang. At Ufa Hitchcock directed his first feature film, The Pleasure Garden, which premiered in Munich on November 3, 1925, and Dupont, who had already directed twenty-four series and feature films in Germany, 1918-1925, directed Varieté, released November 16, 1925 in Berlin. Both filmmakers became skilled in the aesthetics and cinematography of expressionism, notably as exploited in the ocular properties of the camera and the concomitant perceptual capacities of visual reproduction and visual reception. After leaving Germany, Hitchcock and Dupont discovered the freedom to experiment further with these ocular properties at British International Pictures, at Elstree, Hertfordshire, England, with its new accent on a trans-national style. At BIP Dupont made five films, 1926-1931, Hitchcock fourteen films, 1927-1932. This paper examines the surface logistics of visual reproduction and reception with reference to the movie camera and other ocular devices in Dupont’s Varieté (1925), Moulin Rouge (1928), and Piccadilly (1929), Hitchcock’s The Pleasure Garden (1925) and Easy Virtue (1928), and F. W. Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann (1924) and Sunrise (1927), and proposes the origin of intermediality in the self-reflexive camera and the insert title of silent film and the origin of trans-national screen culture in the transition from silent to sound film.
Paul Matthew ST. PIERRE is the Acting Director and associate professor of World Literature. His specializations include postcolonial literature; World Literature and Orature in English: Indigenous, Canadian, West Indian, African, New Zealand, Australian, Indian, British; critical theory; narratology; metafiction; biosemiotics; film studies and performance studies. He is the author of A Portrait of the Artist as Australian: L’Oeuvre Bizarre de Barry Humphries (2004), Song and Sketch Transcripts of British Music Hall Performers Elsie and Doris Waters (2003), and Music Hall Mimesis in British Film, 1895 – 1960 (Farleigh Dickinson UP, forthcoming 2009).
Screen culture, intermediality and interculturality in Eden Robinson’s Blood Sports.
Eden Robinson’s novel is influenced by video, film, television and video-game and consequently suggests the existence of a screen culture society. It employs narrative techniques that evoke these forms of media, exemplifying Irena Rajewsky’s conception of intermedial referencing. The section entitled ‘Jag’ uses a screenplay format to illustrate the contents of home videos taken by the character Jeremy. ‘Roll’ resembles participation in the violent and unfamiliar world of a video-game as it is written in the second person perspective—‘you’ assume the viewpoint of the character Tom, alone, lost and suffering from amnesia in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Robinson also utilises vernacular language and mass culture intertexts, lending her complexly structured novel accessibility and blurring distinctions between literary and popular culture.
Moreover, Robinson’s character Jeremy portrays the problems of confusing reality and virtuality. Jeremy manipulates and tortures acquaintances as though he were a Hollywood gangster. He creates a series of gruesome home videos, compulsively filming his harrowing effect on the lives of those close to him. Throughout the novel there is a tension between the violence and confusion that result from Jeremy’s psychosis and the playful celebration of screen culture that is a consequence of Robinson’s multimedia interests.
Does Robinson echo the warnings of Baudrillard by illustrating the worst eventualities of hyperreality? Or does she celebrate the creative possibilities of bridging diverse media, defying categorisation in this respect as well cultural classification—Robinson is Haisla/Heiltsuk yet refuses to be limited to writing about native experience. Thus her work might be considered to be intercultural as well as intermedial. I explore these issues, relating them to the broad idea of a screen society and to the particular location featured in the novel, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.
Rachel WALLS is a second year doctoral candidate at the American and Canadian Studies Department at the University of Nottingham, U.K. Her research explores voyeurism and surveillance in representations of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She is currently enjoying a month long research trip to Vancouver with the assistance of the Universitas 21 organisation which links the University of Nottingham and the English department at the University of British Columbia.
Related Posts: Screen Culture Conference – Schedule, Call for Papers,Screen Culture Database
Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Films Stills that were taken between 1977 and 1980 are a series of black and white staged film stills portraying female roles in mainstream cinema and film noir. Featuring a blonde actress’s film career in these stills, Sherman devises a collection of femme fatales, cute girls next door, housewives and other clichés. Using methods such as masquerade and self-reflexivity Sherman tackles patriarchal representations of women via two different, but major conduits: the movies and model photography. The complexity lies behind her use of narrative as well since these film stills are worth over a thousand words in what she is saying about society’s view of the female gender in popular culture. 
Stefan Römer’s documentary, Conceptual Paradise (2006), proposes a visual essay to its viewers which ‘cites’ theories and insights from several renowned artists from the past six decades concerning conceptual art. He goes as far as to use different methods of displaying their interviews like filming a small television showing an interview and also applying a small camera on another artist providing a picture-in-picture interview.
