Documentary in artistic practice: accented essays from Turkey

Online talk via Teams, 1 December Wednesday, 14:00-15:00 (link)

Documentary and art are seemingly two words in conflict with one another: the former implies a kind of documentation that encloses an objective record of the real world while the latter is defined and evaluated by subjectivity and creativity. Nonetheless – as Grierson’s famous definition of documentary also suggests – subjectivity and creativity are two concepts that inevitably become significant during the documentary filmmaking process as they can produce and/or prevent conventions, possibilities and limitations in a film’s narrative. Moreover, the historical collaboration between documentary filmmakers and visual artists is an indication of the range of forms documentary can take.

As part of the Centre's research seminar series, Elif Akçalı's paper will look at the use of documentary filmmaking in artistic practices in Turkey, especially focusing on those contemporary works that adopt a first-person, subjective viewpoint, made by artists in transition. Akçalı's case studies are Didem Pekün’s Of Dice and Men (2016), Şener Özmen’s How to tell of peace to a living dove? (2015) and Aykan Safoğlu’s Off-white Tulips (2013), which she categorizes as accented essays. Akçalı will analyze the aesthetics of these three works especially in terms of how the subjective viewpoint in their narratives shape our understanding of the social and cultural context, which was largely shaped by the political events during the period in which they were made. The accented first-person address in these works, along with other stylistic choices prone to essayistic documentary filmmaking that they pursue, allow them to enjoy a multiplicity of meanings, raising personal questions that become relevant for collective issues of identity, belonging, culture, history and memory.

Dr. Elif Akçalı completed her PhD in Media Arts in 2014 at Royal Holloway, University of London, and she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Radio, TV and Cinema Department, Kadir Has University (Istanbul, Turkey) since 2015. She teaches the practice of film editing as well as a variety of theoretical courses in screen studies within the undergraduate and graduate programmes at Khas. Her works have appeared in a variety of journals including Critical Arts, Journal of Film and Video and [in]Transition. Her research interests include film style and aesthetics, documentary and essay film, gender and audiovisual production, and videographic film studies. Currently she is leading a two-year research project funded by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) titled “Women on Screen and Behind the Camera: A Contemporary Outlook of Representation and Labor of Women in Film and TV Industries in Turkey (2017-2021).”

Documenting Art and Performance: Embodied Knowledge, Virtuality & the Archive

The Asian Art and Performance Consortium (AAPC) of the Academy of Fine Arts (KuvA) and the Finnish Theatre Academy (TeaK) of the University of the Arts Helsinki jointly hosted a symposium focused on documenting and archiving Asian and trans-cultural performance and fine arts. This is the third and final symposium organized under the Shifting Dialogues - Asian Performance and Fine Arts research project, funded by the Academy of Finland in 2011-2014.

Issues raised at the symposium included embodied, iconographic and electronic transfer of performance traditions in Asia related to live performance and traditional pedagogies. These include the use of moving image, photography, web-based presence and new media, historical and theoretical writings, the construction of archives, museums and libraries.

Cuneyt Cakirlar, in his paper “Mediation of Document: Ethnographic Turns and Art as Methodological Object in Critical Humanities”, examined relations of ethnography, contemporary art practice, globalisation and scalar geopolitics with particular reference to a selection of artists including Kutlug Ataman, Ming Wong, Akram Zaatari, Slavs & Tatars. Concentrating on these artists’ engagement with ethnography, Cuneyt’s paper analyzed a selection of videos and gave an account of different scalar aspects of their artworks as well as the ways in which conceptual art-objects bear the potential of forming transient archives in academia to exemplify critical methodologies of ‘dealing with data’. Rather than addressing scale as a differential concept, this paper aimed to demonstrate the ways in which these artworks produce self-scaling, self-regioning subjects that unsettle the hierarchical constructions of scale and facilitate a critique of the scalar normativity within the global art world’s documentary regionalisms and internationalisms.

The aesthetics of film and video: the legacy of some early industrial factors

TV is the New Cinema: Exploring the Erosion of Boundaries between two Media

Thursday 22 May 2014 12.30-7.30 pm David Woods will be presenting a paper on the one-day symposium “TV is the New Cinema” organised by the Department of Communication and Media, University of Liverpool and the Department of Film Studies, Liverpool John Moores University. The increasing erosion of boundaries between film and television is a phenomenon increasingly discussed among scholars, critics and other stakeholders. Publications such as the New Yorker (January 2012) and Sight and Sound (September 2013) have explored the matter in special dossiers. Filmmakers have increasingly been working across the two media (eg. David Fincher and Netflix’s House of Cards; Greg Motolla and HBO’s The Newsroom), while others seem to have found a more or less permanent home on television than cinema (Frank Darabont and AMC’s The Walking Dead) or even to pronounce an early retirement from cinema in order to work exclusively for television (Steven Soderbergh). Furthermore, year’s end Top Ten lists have started including television series, with episodes of Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire making some of the 2013 lists next to Academy Award nominated films such as Nebraska and The Wolf of Wall Street. Even major film festivals premiere episodes from television series (two episodes from House of Cards were offered a special screening at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival).  Successful television shows are now habitually adapted for the cinema and become entry points to huge franchises (Sex and the City), while television producers are invited to direct and produce major film properties such as Star Trek (J.J Abrams) and Avengers Assemble (Josh Whedon). What do all these developments mean for the current state of the two media? Is the future of film and television intertwined? Is medium specificity not important anymore as a defining characteristic of each medium? To what extent can we still talk about film and television as different media industries? What is the impact of recent developments on the aesthetics associated with each medium? In what ways has the history of each medium influenced their current state? What is the role of the global entertainment conglomerates that control both film and television in this convergence between the two media? TV is the New Cinema will explore these and a host of other questions, with a view to bring together film and television scholars to discuss the ways in which research and knowledge from both fields can help us understand the present and the future of these media.

Woods’ paper examines an aspect of the historical and industrial grounding of the technologies of cinema and television. It argues that a key aspect of their strikingly different looks can be attributed to the different temporal resolution of the two formats, and that the reasons for this difference can be accounted for in terms of the technological strategies the two industries developed historically to minimise the use of expensive resources specific to their medium. The cultural complexities of the aesthetics associated with cinema and film were well demonstrated by the release of The Hobbit in high framerate in 2012, and the paper briefly outlines some implications of the often highly charged popular responses which this provoked.

For the event details: http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/LSS/127881.htm