The Inequality, Culture and Difference research seminar series presents: Imperialism at Sea: the spatial login of empire aboard the nineteenth-century colonial steamship Dr Jonathan Stafford Wednesday 15th November, 1-2pm, MAE101 – all welcome!

ABSTRACT: In 1842, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, or P&O, inaugurated the first regular steamship service to India and the Far East via Egypt. Using texts produced by the passengers who undertook the voyage East on what became known as the Overland Route, this paper will explore the colonial steamer as a distinctive cultural sphere, considering the spatial and social practices which developed aboard ship while in transit. Scrutinising the colonial steamship affords the opportunity to investigate a space which was neither imperial centre nor periphery, but which in acting as a link between the two, set up a transient microcosm. These ships can be seen as exemplary environments of nineteenth-century imperialism, both negotiating global space and also simultaneously refiguring imperial social practices in their own space.

The Inequality, Culture and Difference research seminar series presents… Holby City saved my life! Or, what happens when you show two older women falling in love on Tuesday night television. Dr Georgina Turner, University of Liverpool 11 December 1-2pm, MAE101 – all welcome!

Abstract: This paper looks at viewers’ responses to the romance between two older women on the BBC medical drama Holby City. In the context of a continuing lack of representation of (older) women-loving women, viewers of all ages describe a transformative experience, with an emphasis on positive mental health outcomes – yet older women also orient to something implicitly problematic about this being the case. This is premised, I suggest, in the foregrounding of youth and adolescence in academic and public discussions of sexual self-realisation and the role of the media. The findings of the research trouble these prevailing assumptions and demonstrate the need to take account of the experiences of older viewers, and of network television even in the queer(er) digital market.

Dr Georgina Turner is a Lecturer in Media at the University of  Liverpool, with research interests in critical approaches to media discourse, the discursive construction of (collective) identity, gender and sexuality, and innovative research  methods.

The Inequality, Culture and Difference research seminar series presents:

Hollywood Trade: Midnight Cowboy and Underground Cinema

Dr Gary Needham, University of Liverpool

Wednesday 15^th November, 1-2pm MAE101 – all welcome!

ABSTRACT: Nearly all accounts of the Hollywood Renaissance (1967-1975) champion the influence of European Cinema and many of the critical discourse around key film such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate draw from such comparisons between anti-classicism and European art cinema. This paper instead, argues, that an over-emphasis on European cinema neglects to account for an influence closer to Hollywood in the American Underground cinema. More than any other film from the Renaissance canon, Midnight Cowboy’s subject matter appears to invoke the underground through the figure of the male hustler and a key scene, an ‘underground party’ that evokes Andy Warhol Factory. As a matter of fact, the film’s production reached out to Warhol to assist with the ‘party scene’. However, Warhol’s perception was that Midnight Cowboy tried to co-opt underground cinema practices to the extent that he felt hustled by Hollywood.  The paper closes with a discussion of Andy Warhol’s Flesh, a film Warhol put into production at the same time as Midnight Cowboy with a view to presenting the underground (or avant-garde) ‘point-of-view’.

BIO: Gary Needham is senior lecturer in film and media at The University of Liverpool. He is the author of Brokeback Mountain (EUP 2010) and the co-editor of Asian Cinemas (EUP 2006), Queer TV (Routledge 2009), and Warhol in Ten Takes (BFI 2013). He is the co-editor of the book series American Indies (EUP) and Hollywood Centenary (Routledge). He is currently working on a book on Warhol’s cinema and Edie Sedgwick (Bloomsbury) and a collection titled Screening American Cinema (Routledge).

MOJO Rising

Catherine Adams reports from “News : Rewired”, the latest digital journalism conference on how Mobile Journalism and Virtual Reality are set to dominate our news. 

Security was paramount at the gleaming, corporate headquarters of MSN in Cardinal Place, central London – even going to the Ladies required a secret code. A murmuration of delegates from across the UK news industry attended presentations on live news, social storytelling, smartwatches and more. As well as staff from BBC, Reuters and the Guardian, representatives flocked to the July 16^th event from digital-native operators such as Google, reported.ly and Mashable

Among some notable international speakers were the founder of Smart Film School, Robb Montgomery, who exclusively teaches mobile journalism (MOJO) http://bit.ly/1OrUi1R and Patricia O'Callaghan, a TV journalist with RTE, who showed reports shot and edited on her iPhone for broadcast, using apps such as Filmicpro, Pinnacle Studio, Storehouse, PicPlayPost and Adobe Voice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baCXHiVtxT4&feature=youtu.be

The star turn was online news guru Emily Bell, ex-Guardian, director of Tow Centre at Columbia University, who stressed that the social media desk is now firmly fixed at the centre of news organisations. She explained how mobile alerts are breaking news, social media is the new “content management system,” (ie, where you publish stuff) while “ye olde” website is the archive. This, she warned, means publishers are potentially handing control to the 24-year-old engineer tweaking an algorithm. 

Ongoing issues such as how to verify User Generated Content and how to protect sources threaded through the conference. Publishers are learning new ways of coding content so that text and photos cannot be cut and pasted and randomly shared with others. Other speakers identified the urgent need to educate the public on what risks they’re taking using Twitter etc. Media students should be made aware that if they geotag their pics, it gives their location away to anyone.

There was a smattering of marketing. Tom Quast and Nils Kaehler of Creative Vikings demonstrated smart watches, “the most personalised tech so far,” which the New York Times are experimenting with to publish ‘one sentence stories’. Wearing one of these £500 devices as “an extension of yourself”, you are never separated from the net - as whoever you’re with will be acutely aware, whenever it ‘taps’ you on the wrist with a “micro-interaction” to let you know your team’s scored a goal.

Virtual Reality is the next “hottest thing”, according to Dan Pacheco on a videolink from Syracuse University. He claimed that transporting viewers to the scene of a story in graphic 3D would explode as a way to experience news. Although he admitted “huge potential for misperception.” Ed Miller, from Immersiv.ly came up with the extraordinary (and unsourced) statistic that VR would rise by 13 000% in the next few years. The FT has already created a VR version of stock charts which you can ‘ski’ down. In the future, your avatar could ‘meet’ and ‘chat’ with avatars of people involved in the news. Reddit could be a series of virtual rooms. Anyway, the race is on to beat the launch date of The Oculus Rift headset in January.

Should we be immersing people in the news? Will MOJO put yet more highly-skilled news professionals out of jobs? Do we want to be jacked up to social media during our most intimate moments?

In spite of the huge implications of these latest developments in digital news, there seemed to be little or no opportunity to debate or discuss such things at News : Rewired, leaving participants feeling rather limp.

You can check out the next News:Rewired events here https://www.newsrewired.com/

Losing Mothers: Queer Allure of Julianne Moore

Cüneyt Çakırlar presented an audiovisual essay on the star-image of Julianne Moore at the symposium Performing Stardom: New Methods in Critical Star Studies, which took place at the University of Kent (29 May 2015). The symposium was hosted by NoRMMA (Network of Research: Movies, Magazines, Audiences) and focused on way to explore film studies research through nontraditional approaches. Examples included: performance, video essays, interpretative dance, creative fiction/non-fiction, poetry, music, and any kind of multimedia project. Through this symposium, the team explored the connections between scholarship and fandom, research and creativity, the benefits and disadvantages of exploring an (audio)visual art through (audio)visual means, and the development of the innovative and ever-emerging field of practice as research. 

Çakırlar's response to the event took the form of an audiovisual essay. Çakırlar's videographic analysis reflected on the queer potentialities of Julianne Moore’s on-screen star image that comes to repeatedly reveal her presence as an unconventional, if not failed, maternal embodiment. The essay focused on the ways in which Moore’s body-image has frequently become an object of (i) (queer) cinematic pastiche, (ii) an ambivalent transgressive sexuality, and most significantly, (iii) an uncanny erotic of motherhood. Çakirlar's piece is currently under review for intransition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies.    

World Cinema and the Essay Film

Cüneyt Çakırlar presented a paper (with Elif Akçalı, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey) on Werner Herzog's film-making at the international conference World Cinema and the Essay Film, at University of Reading (30 April - 2 May). The paper, titled ""A Form of Proto-Cinema": Aesthetics of Werner Herzog's Documentary Essayism", explored potentials and paradoxes of interpretation in Herzog’s recent documentary practice. Capitalizing upon the various aspects of “the aesthetic” embedded in his filmmaking (from the on-screen presentation of the subjects’ urge to create and re-invent to the fimmaker’s performative address at his “documentary” aesthetic), the project aims to discuss the ways in which Herzog turns his documentary material into a series of artful acts and “proto-cinema” gestures. What makes this transformation possible especially in the  documentaries Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) is the filmmaker’s persistent interventions both as director and participant observer in the pro-filmic events as well as his highly stylised additions to the narratives during post-production including his editing decisions, use of sound and voice-over narration.  The subject matters that these documentaries originally deal with multiply and turn into remote questions both voiced by the filmmaker’s on- and off-screen comments, and implied through his filmmaking aesthetics.  Rather than reinforcing a documentary truth claim, Herzog’s subjective interventions in each film create an alternate narrative prone to essay-films, which run next to these otherwise participatory documentaries. The continuous juxtaposition between Herzog’s subjectivity and the films’ photographed, quasi-objective realities including the people and the landscapes creates an ambiguity in defining certain moments from these films as they fluctuate between fiction and non-fiction, real and represented, and natural and artificial. Focusing on his engagement with film form, style, and the recurring themes of ecstasy, spirituality, scientific reason, and the indifference of nature, we would like to address wider methodological implications in Herzog’s practice.