Abstracts and Bios

Rosemary Alexander-Jones, Age versus Beauty: Conservation Considerations for Filming in Heritage Properties 

The attraction of filming in heritage properties to borrow a historic space to enrich a diegesis has been a staple of historic and heritage filmmaking since the 1920s with Mary Pickford’s Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924, Marshall Neilan). Filming often provides substantial fees which can be much needed for the longevity of a site and brings its imagery to a wider audience. Unfortunately, the aspect that attracts filmmakers to showcase heritage properties is their age, which often means fragility. There have been many articles about the conservation issues caused by filming at heritage properties throughout the world and this paper continues the work in this field by drawing on new research from the last two years. Filming in heritage properties is increasing, which means more possible conservation issues. These historic spaces, although versatile, are irreplaceable, meaning that the film industry has a responsibility of safe practice in these spaces, especially if they want to continue using them. This paper draws from twenty interviews with managers and owners in the heritage sector in England and Wales and considers conservation procedures before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing from managers at the National Trust, English Heritage and owners at privately owned sites, this paper is a fresh examination of how sites and filmmakers have adapted to filming in historic spaces. This paper considers whether the fees and increased recognition from filming justifies the current system and what the future may be for this relationship. 

Rosemary Alexander-Jones is a teaching fellow at Warwick University where she convenes and co-ordinates the Inquiry Research Skills modules for the International Foundation Programme. Her research focusses on filming at heritage sites, and she recently passed her viva at the University of York for her thesis ‘The Impact of Filming on Heritage Locations in England’. She is also an accomplished filmmaker and her short films have been showcased at the 360° Film Festival and the Jane Austen Film Festival. Her previous video-essay ‘Chatsworth: The Permanent Pemberley’ can be found on the Association of Adaptation Studies’ YouTube channel.

Hannah Andrews, (Un)Sustainable Satire: Spitting Image in the eras of Thatcher and Johnson 

Spitting Image (1984-96) qualifies as a British television institution. It translated the grotesque 3D caricatures of Peter Fluck and Roger Law into satirical television puppetry, presenting a weekly lampoon of the powerful and famous of the 1980s and 1990s. It was produced in a period of intense change for the UK TV industry, where the old duopoly of power and control by the BBC and ITV franchises was challenged by start-up independent companies making television in new ways. Spitting Image Ltd was one such company, working in partnership with ITV company Central to make the series a flagship programme for the Midlands franchisee in the 1980s. The programme’s financial, environmental, and, from the perspective of those who made it, emotional, costs were enormous. Yet it sustained 18 series, several specials, international franchises and a significant amount of programme merchandise, expanding the show from 30 minutes on a Sunday night to a significant brand. 

The 2020 reboot of Spitting Image attempted to capitalise on this brand recognition – and nostalgia for a popular TV comedy – as part of the launch of Britbox, an SVOD for British content spearheaded by ITV. It acted as flagship content for the SVOD with the aim of driving up subscriptions to the service. The political context seemed right for a satirical series, with international figures such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson good subjects for caricature. Nevertheless, Spitting Image was cancelled after just two series. It was, as it turned out, unsustainable in the industrial context of the 2020s. 

This paper will compare the industrial positioning, production and broadcast/distribution of these two series. It will use data from interviews with production personnel, archival research and content analysis to explore how the series lasted as long as it did in the 20th Century, yet foundered in the 21st. It will examine the distinctions in these political and industrial contexts to attempt to figure out what constitutes sustainable, and unsustainable, TV satire. 

Hannah Andrews is Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of Lincoln. Her research focuses primarily on British cinema and television aesthetics and industries, and intermedial relationships between television and other cultural forms. She is the author of Television and British Cinema (2014) and Biographical Television Drama (2021), and her work has been published in journals such as Screen, Critical Studies in Television and Adaptation. This paper is being presented as part of the British Academy/Leverhulme project Televisual Caricature.  

Silvia Angeli, An Ode to Impermanence: Alice Rohrwacher’s Quattro strade (Four Roads, 2020) 

This talk focuses on Alice Rohrwacher’s Quattro strade (Four Roads, 2020), an eight-minute short shot on expired film stock during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and set in the director’s home in the Umbrian countryside. The short could not be further away from the sensationalistic tones which dominated the news in the months preceding its release: against the proliferation of shocking and dramatic images, Rohrwacher’s cine-eye offers a recording of unglamourous, mundane moments. By directing our gaze to linger on small details, she proposes a different hierarchy of visibility, one that prioritises the inconspicuous and unobtrusive. As such, Quattro Strade is an ode to the beauty of impermanence. Expired stock is already partially corrupted and deteriorated: it is rotting. There is a clear critique, then, firmly embedded in the (deceptively) soft tones of the short of the goal-obsessed attitude typical of contemporary society. If the pandemic has indeed unequivocally uncovered the inherent fragilities of our current systems and the limits of a neoliberalism-driven focus on hyperproductivity, Rohrwacher’s short is similarly blunt in its message. It issues a clear invitation to acknowledge – particularly in a culture that has become increasingly obsessed with performance (but also data and metrics, quantification, impact and legacy-making) – that not everything is meant to (or for that matter should) last and that acts of creativity are not necessarily designed to survive the immediate sense of joy and fulfilment they produce. 

Silvia Angeli is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on film-philosophy, the portrayal of grief and mourning in film, and coming-of-age narratives. She is especially interested in how adolescents relate to (and resist) institutional power. She has published peer-reviewed articles on the work of European and North American filmmakers, including Kenneth Lonergan, Sarah Polley, Marco Bellocchio, and Denis Côté, and is currently working on a monograph on Alice Rohrwacher. She has served as creative consultant on Terrence Malick's forthcoming The Way of the Wind. 

Helen Kennedy and Natalie Wreyford, Motherhood, television work and the crisis in care  

The COVID pandemic forced an acceleration of the adoption of certain kinds of flexible working (home-working and flexible hours in particular) but been combined with enormous challenges that fall disproportionately on women (childcare and increased share of domestic labour). How television and other creative industries recover in the post-crisis period thus carries both major opportunity and major risk for its impacts on gendered outcomes within television work: on the one hand, the opportunity to institutionalise family-friendly modes of work that reduce gendered inequalities (Hupkau and Petrongolo 2021); and on the other, risk that existing patterns of inequality based upon the unequal distribution of unpaid socially reproductive labour will be further entrenched.  

This paper is based upon a survey of mothers working in television carried out in March 2021 and follow-up interviews. Findings show the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on the ability of mothers to work, and the negative impact on mental health and well-being. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates the additional burden of women’s caring responsibilities and intersection with demographic, spatial and structural inequalities, and in doing so raises further questions about how these pressures might be ameliorated in the post-Covid workplace. We argue that the relative (in)compatibility of television labour with unpaid, socially reproductive labour is an expression of both the erosion of the ‘social contract’ and the gendered dimensions of unequal labour relations in the creative industries. The result is a silencing of the voice of mothers within UK TV.   

Helen Kennedy is Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Nottingham.   

Natalie Wreyford is Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London.   

Jane Batkin, A Child in the Archives: Metaphor, Sustainability and the Question of Truth/Fiction within Live Action and Animated Screened Childhoods 

Childhood through time has been constantly theorized, dissected, contested and preserved. Childhood addresses the past, present and future; children are “living messages we send to a time we will not see” (Postman, 1994). The space childhood occupies is enthralling because of its ambiguity and its otherness; despite this world being inaccessible to adults, it has nonetheless been captured and preserved on screen. This reveals something of the status of childhood (as a powerful metaphor of nostalgia/futurism, for example) and the “emotional charge” of the child’s image (Holland, 2004). Film archives enable the child to be preserved as part of cinema and tv heritage, performing itself within a loop that speaks to the past and future. Helena Hörnfeldt, however, argues that in the archives “children’s voices are partially silent and invisible” (2020), as mere projections created by adults, and present what adults perceive to be childhood. In that case, is the archive child actually a false child? 

This paper will explore questions of preservation and sustainability of live action and animated childhoods in the archives and will focus on the secret space of childhood and its capture on screen. To what extent can film archives offer recollections of childhood that are tangible, sustainable, valuable and ‘real’ and how and why is childhood imprinted within these memory collections? 

Jane Batkin is an Associate Professor and animation tutor at the University of Lincoln, specialising in animated childhoods, worlds and identities. Her monograph Identity in Animation was published in 2017 and her chapters feature in edited collections including Toy Story: How Pixar reinvented the Animated Feature (2018), Aardman Animation: Beyond Stop Motion (2020), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives in Production, Reception and Legacy (2021), Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio Laika’s Stop Motion Witchcraft (2021), and the forthcoming book Animated Mischief – Essays on Subversiveness in Cartoons since 1987. She is currently working on a monograph on animated childhood. 

Louis Bayman, Memories of the future: Spencer (2021), history and multiple temporality 

This proposal elaborates an aesthetic register that has become so common as to be ubiquitous: that of ‘memories of the future’. A memory of the future is a present from which any sense of futurity is accessible only by recourse to ideas of a past. In order to move forward, there must be a move backwards. The ubiquity of this register may have many causes, including the temporalities of finance capital and the “End" of History, the Anthropocene and the endless “post-“s that describe modern thought. Through discussion of Spencer (2021) I seek to examine the aesthetic nature of this relationship of the present to the future. 

Taking place between Christmas Eve dinner and Boxing Day lunch, Spencer presents the antagonism between the Royal Family and the Princess of Wales as a dramatic conflict of discordant temporalities. The Royals live by regularity while Diana is disruption, they tradition and she change, they permanence and she the Fleeting. Through these conflicting temporalities the film achieves a sensuous intensity, as it also suggests two incompatible forms of existence. 

First of all then, this essay seeks to reconsider the aesthetic pleasures offered by multiple temporalities, which is broadened into an understanding of a clash between heritage and retro and between history and memory. Secondly, it looks at the consequences for our prevailing concepts of history, which no longer seem to be governed by faith in progress. Finally, it asks what this might mean for our collective orientation towards the future. Spencer’s 1992 setting depicts the Princess of Wales as the future and the Royal Family as the past. Its intimations of the end of the monarchy and even of history remain unfulfilled expectations, while Diana’s eventual demise orientates the action towards a future now tragically passed. As such, its multiple temporalities express an intense involvement in time that lacks a direction through it; that is, is emblematic of a more general contemporary predicament. 

Louis Bayman is associate professor in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Southampton. He is co-editing with Timotheus Vermeulen a special edition of the journal Philosophy of History on the subject “Memories of the future: post-historical temporalities in contemporary film and television”. He is preparing a monograph on temporality in contemporary film, focusing on the notion of a crisis of a normative temporality. 

Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon, Filmmaking for Change 

In the academic year 2021/22 the teaching team on the BA Film and Television Production at the University of Greenwich brought online a new third year optional module called ‘Filmmaking for Change: Contemporary Approaches to Digital Activism’. The teaching team who initiated and wrote this module, including the presenter (Lee-Jane) and Chair of this panel (Chris), were intending for students to study, not only historical approaches to art activism but also the ways in which social action filmmaking might form the bedrock for part of their future practice, and careers.   

Unfortunately, that vision was not shared by colleagues and the first iteration of the module ended up adopting neoliberal practices, treating “activist” campaigns devised by the students as Silicone Valley start-ups. The second iteration, delivered by Lee-Jane herself, departed significantly from this approach, embedding principles of radical hope (Gannon, 2018) and group consciousness development (Fisher, 2020 – via Lukacs and Hartstock). However, while the first iteration of the module befuddled the students in approaching new and unfamiliar tech terms, the second was met with a large amount of apathy from the cohort, making it impossible to generate the momentum necessary to produce radical films for change. Reflecting on these two approaches, this presentation asks what, if any, other methods are available to educators who seek to encourage this sort of work in new and emerging filmmaking talent.    

Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon has taught at university level for over 20 years and enjoys teaching at the intersection of theory and practice. She has made funded short films that have received international Festival recognition. The End and Back Again was funded by the UK Film Council and was selected for prestigious film festivals around the world. Shopping for One, made in collaboration with Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School, was selected for Aesthetica Short Film Festival. She recently collaborated with The Nightwood Society, a Portland (Oregon, US) based collective of female foodies and artists. She is working on a new practice-based research project with a drama short at its centre called About The Night.  

Susan Berridge, Shweta Ghosh, Mette Hjort, Tanya Horeck and Leshu Torchin, ROUNDTABLE: Cultures of Care: Changing Media Practice 

In The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, the Care Collective note that even as “we are hearing much more about care in these unsettling days, carelessness continues to reign.”  This is certainly the case in the media industries where “carelessness” seems baked into the practice. The myth of the reckless auteur uses artistry and acclaim to justify abuse. Brutal production schedules challenge the inclusion of caregivers and people with disabilities. Media industries, from practice to technologies, have been complicit in the exacerbation of the climate catastrophe. And despite repeated promises and reports, racial and ethnic diversity remain low behind the camera.   

Efforts are being made to transform the media production environment. While there have long been those in the industry tasked with care, from trade unions to Animal Wranglers, roles like Intimacy Coordinators, Sustainability Coordinators, Covid Compliance Officers, Accessibility Coordinators and Diversity Readers are emerging to implement the findings of reports and to transform policies into practice.   

In this roundtable, the panelists present on and discuss these emerging practices with attention to the voices of those working on the ground. What do these transformations look like and are they working? Can “care” provide a lens for interpretation of this work? Although “care” and “carelessness” are tricky terms, risking neutralization for their implications of mere concern or accidental neglect, these are rendered productive within their definitions of practice, protocol, and provision. At the same time, this is a category of work that is more applauded than materially recognized through empowerment and pay. Are these actions care washing, or can they lead to change, and if so, how?    

Susan Berridge is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on gender inequalities on and offscreen in the film and television industries. She is currently working on a British Academy funded study of intimacy coordination in contemporary television with Tanya Horeck, and a Royal Society of Edinburgh funded project on the networks of care mobilised by creative hubs in response to Covid-19 (with Katherine Champion and Maria Velez-Serna).   

Shweta Ghosh is a documentary filmmaker and Lecturer in Screen Practices and Industries at the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading. Her filmmaking and research focus on the onscreen representation and offscreen participation of diverse communities in film/making. Shweta’s practice-based doctoral project We Make Film explored ableism, filmmaking and creative expression in urban India and identified accessible pathways towards a more inclusive and equitable future for the creative industries.  

Mette Hjort is Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Lincoln and Chair Professor of Humanities at the Hong Kong Baptist University. A member of Hunter Vaughan and Pietari Kaapa’s Global Green Media Production Network (UKRI), Mette is concerned with sustainable practices as a form of care. She has mapped such practices through practitioner interviews with filmmakers linked to FilmLab Palestine, FilmLab Zanzibar, and the alternative film school, IMAGINE, in Burkina Faso. Mette is the Co-I on the EduHK-funded project, The Comparative Cultures of Care.  

Tanya Horeck is Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film and Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era. She is currently working on a British Academy funded study (with Susan Berridge) on sex, consent, and intimacy coordination in the TV industry.   

Leshu Torchin is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet and other publications that outline the uses of film and media in making social change—on and off the screen. She is launching a project on the cultures of care, which focuses on emerging roles that seek to transform the media industries’ production cultures.   

Alberto Berzosa, Traces of Portuguese ecologism around the carnations  

The first edition of the “Festival Internacional do filme agricola e de temática rural de Santarém” took place in 1971 and, until the end of the 80's, it was a space where a large number of films related to the countryside in a wide range of themes and styles could be shown, from technical documentaries on farming techniques, to ethnographic documentaries or feature films about life in the country. In its first decade, the festival accompanied Portuguese history through its transition from the longest dictatorship in Europe to the democratic system currently in force through the 1974 Revolution, a period in which economic, demographic and industrial tensions derived from the need to bring Portugal into line with European developmentalist standards intensified in a short period of time, which, in parallel, and in response, accelerated the emergence of the Portuguese environmental movement. Through the films shown in the Festival, the debates and conferences held, and the specialized literature in magazines such as Celulóide, Panorámica or Cinema Novo, the Santarém Festival is a privileged space to track the emergence of political ecologism in Portugal. The concern for environmental pollution was already present in the editions held during the dictatorship but, after the Carnation Revolution, the festival opened its doors to discussions on the revolutionary potential of the Agrarian Reform, had as its chronicler the main reference of environmentalism at the time, Afonso Cautela, published a manual on political ecology, and even modified its name to include an explicit reference to environmentalism towards the end of the 1970s. Beyond specific films or prominent authors, the “Festival Internacional do filme agricola e de temática rural de Santarém” is the most important hub in cultural terms for understanding the relationship between the evolution of environmentalist politics and the evolution of ecological imaginaries in Portugal before, during and after the Revolution.  

Alberto Berzosa holds an European PhD in Art History and Theory. He is the author of books such as Cine y sexopolítica (2020) and Cámara en mano contra el franquismo (2009). He has curated exhibitions in museums and art centers such as La Casa Encendida, MACBA and IVAM. His research explores the space where contemporary art, Film studies, political archives and curatorship intersect. He is based in Madrid and works as a member of the research project "Fossil Aesthetics" of the National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and takes part of the Management Committee of the Cost Action TRACTS. 

Carolyn Birdsall and Joanne Garde-Hansen, A Dutchman and an Englishman walk into Flood History: New Readings of Broadcast Archives for Transnational Futures 

In recent years, scholars have increasingly sought to expand beyond national frameworks in broadcast history and attend to the various transnational flows, cooperations and entanglements in media production (Fickers & Johnson 2013; Hilmes 2017; Hilgert, Cronqvist & Chignell 2020). Despite this growing attention to the transnational, we find that major events in broadcast history continue to be persistently narrated as discrete sites of national experience.

In response, this collaborative paper tests the hypothesis that broadcast histories since the 1953 flood disaster have been researched in ways that miss the evidence of transnational co-operation and representation of extreme weather trauma and resilience shared between England and the Netherlands. Archived correspondence between BBC and Dutch broadcasters helps to intervene in nationally-framed accounts of natural disaster, highlighting cooperation, shared experience of and development of radio and televisual knowledge about how to cover disasters for broadcast media. This intervention seeks to bring in a strong environmental history perspective to this case, which has been framed by previous scholarship in terms of (national) media representations of disaster. For the analysis, we will be drawing on the BBC television drama film London is Drowning (1981) and can make this available as a link in the conference programme.

Carolyn Birdsall is Associate Professor of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam, where she is affiliated with the Television and Cross-Media team. She has published on radio and television history, along with media and memory, heritage and the built environment. She is director of the ASCA Cities Project, and is currently leading an NWO-funded project TRACE (Tracking Radio Archival Collections in Europe, 1930-1960), which examines how European radio recordings were archived, circulated and re-used in the context of war and reconstruction. Her latest book, Radiophilia, will be released with Bloomsbury in 2023. 

Joanne Garde-Hansen is Professor in Culture, Media and Communication at the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, Warwick University, where she co-founded the Centre for Television Histories. She has published widely on media and memory, television, archives, and water memories and heritage. Among other projects, she is currently involved in cross-disciplinary research on the relationship between culture and water, rivers, flooding and drought, and is on the management committee of the COST: Action - Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change (2021-2025) focusing on Transformations of the Environment. 

Joseph Bitney, Surveillance Cinema, The Future, and The Interior 

It is a truism of surveillance studies—and futuristic thinking broadly—that the difference between public and private space has today become increasingly blurred, and that in the future surveillance practices will bring about the end of any interior/exterior distinction. In a 2002 interview, for instance, Steven Spielberg declared, ‘what little privacy we have now will be completely evaporated in twenty or thirty years because technology will be able to see through walls, through rooftops . . . into the sanctuary of our families.’ Yet in Spielberg’s own Minority Report, this is not what we see: the film begins with the interior in crisis but ends not with its final destruction but its restoration. My paper examines this recurring contradiction in surveillance fiction, looking at how these models of the future, despite their apparent dystopian pessimism, cannot fully commit to the collapse of public and private space that they ostensibly think is inevitable. Films like 1984 and Minority Report, I will show, actually rely on a very particular conception of “the interior” as theorised by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project. In pointing out the persistence of this fantasy of the interior, I reflect on the ways in which fictional simulations are often at odds with our own theoretical predictions, and how the inability to move beyond these outmoded concepts in fiction hinders our thinking both about sustainable democratic futures and about the dangers of the actual surveillance we all live under today. 

Joseph Bitney is University Assistant Professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he is also a Fellow of Selwyn College. His research focuses on classical Hollywood cinema, film criticism and theory, and the modern novel, and he is currently writing a book on melodrama and the commodity form. His recent article ‘Rethinking the Family Melodrama: Thomas Elsaesser, Mildred Pierce and the business of family’ appears in Screen. 

Anna Blackwell and Lucinda Hobbs, (Ir)/responsible adaptation: editing, designing and building a genetic edition for the Transforming Middlemarch project  

Kyle Meikle wonders ‘who better than adaptations scholars to retrieve, record, and recast the [….] material shifts between medium’?  He continues, an ‘intermaterial approach to the adaptive process’ would find scholars ‘traipsing from text to text with trowels in hand’ in order to recover ‘raw materials and artifacts’ (2013: 181). But how does one best carry out this kind of archaeological work and, in a way which produces a meaningful digital scholarly resource and is respectful and responsible in its management of both data and archival assets?   

This paper will reflect on the challenges of decision-timing and creative compromise which are inevitable in the process of producing a digital edition. How, for instance, the DMU team’s chief guiding principle was to create through XML coding of the three main texts and surrounding editorial matter (according to the TEI standard), an edition that would be comparative, accessible and long-lasting to preserve both the digital versions of the texts and our scholarship. This often led to challenging decisions regarding the aesthetics of the edition, but also to a dynamic process of evolution in its look, feel and functionality, in response to user feedback groups and peer reviews. The paper will also account for the level and types of curation which the edition delivers. In doing so, we will discuss our ambition to not only excavate hitherto unexplored aspects of the 1994 Middlemarch adaptation but — to return to Meikle’s metaphor — give our users the tools to do their own digging.   

Anna Blackwell is an Assistant Professor in Drama at the University of Nottingham, where she teaches on contemporary Shakespearean performance. When she is not involved in the AHRC-funded Transforming Middlemarch project as a Co-investigator, Anna’s research focuses on the adaptation of literary cultures and bookishness.  

Lucinda Hobbs is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University, Leicester and a member of the team who have researched, developed and produced a Digital Genetic Edition of Andrew Davies’s 1994 BBC Middlemarch adaptation for the AHRC-funded ‘Transforming Middlemarch’ project. This followed a PhD from De Montfort University titled ‘Adapting the Role of M in the James Bond Franchise’ (2019) from which is published a chapter, ‘The Evolution of M in the Latest Bond Franchise Instalments: Skyfall and Spectre’, in James Bond Uncovered (ed. Strong, Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). Her MA in Adaptations studies (2013) centred on ‘Race and Prejudice’ with a dissertation on ‘Whiteness as Blackness in adaptations of Moby Dick’.  

Lucy Bolton, The Difficulty of Thinking Perpetually on Oneself: Iris Murdoch’s Existentialism on show in French Exit   

In the film French Exit, directed by Azazel Jacobs from 2020, the widowed Frances Price is confronted by the fact that she has none of her inheritance left. Frances is flummoxed because, as she tells her family accountant, she had planned to die before the money ran out. French Exit flirts with existentialism. By moving to Paris from New York, and indulging in café culture and Parisian society, Frances’s dead pan desire to bring life to an end seems to be grounded in an attitude that nothing really matters. As she says to her son, “oh to be young-ish, and in love-ish”. Her disdain for the meaning of life is palpable. And yet, try as she might, people keep invading her solipsism. In keeping with Iris Murdoch’s take on Sartre, Frances discovers that it is not easy to be a person thinking perpetually of themselves. For Murdoch, we are situated and embedded in relation to others, and she understands Sartre’s existentialism as picturing “the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts” (Idea of Perfection, p. 321). This paper will analyse Frances Price in light of Murdochian existentialism, as a person trying to be as solitary and self-determinative as she believes she can be, yet attracting care, friendship, and a network of challenges which demand she realises her choices affect others. In this way, the film is more in keeping with a view of human life as interconnected and benevolent than meaningless and individualistic.   

Lucy Bolton is Reader in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, where she teaches and researches film and philosophy and film stardom. She has published widely in these fields, and is currently working on a monograph on philosophy and film stardom combined. She is the co-editor of Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure, and the author of Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch, and Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema, and Thinking Women.  

Olivia Booker, Margaret Tait’s Film Poems as a Model for Ecological Filmmaking Practice 

Thinking ecologically frequently requires moving beyond human-centred measures of time and space and reorienting towards geologic or microscopic scales, often simultaneously. Using scale as a helpful concept for connecting film poetry and environmental thinking, this paper asks, how might employing elements of poetry within film guide viewers towards an ecological mindset? 

Through examining the filmmaking practice of Scottish filmmaker, writer, and poet, Margaret Tait, and focusing on intersections between poetry and ecology found in her films, I acknowledge the pluralistic nature of eco-aesthetics outlined by David Ingram and build on Scott MacDonald’s argument for reframing a viewer’s perception through structural techniques. I draw on anthropologist Anna Tsing’s project, Feral Atlas, as a theoretical model for ecological thinking, comparing elements of its structure to aspects of Tait’s process. 

Throughout Tait’s body of work, an ecological process of filmmaking emerges, where consistent themes mirror and embody the values and perspectives of ecological thought, echoing the structure of the life cycle of growing plants. These include her advocacy for the incomplete and iterative, her insistence on close observation of details, and the cyclical structure of her films. Through close readings of her short films, Garden Pieces (1998) and Orquil Burn (1955), as well as some of Tait’s poetry and writing, I draw attention to the ecological rhythms found in her work and suggest that Tait’s use of the film poem functions as a unique form of ecocinema that can facilitiate the expression of abstract ways of experiencing one’s environment. 

Olivia Booker is a filmmaker and researcher from North Carolina. She is currently pursuing a practice-led PhD in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews focusing on ecocinema practice. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Davidson College and an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University. Her films have been screened at various international festivals and online publications including Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, AFI Docs, River Run Film Festival and Reel South PBS among others. 

Mark Bould, Marjorie Prime: labour and technology, memory and loss in the Anthropocene  

Marjorie Prime (2017) is one of a number of recent sf films, including Transfer (2010), Robot & Frank (2012), Her (2013) and Get Out (2017), concerned with technologies of care for the elderly, the diffabled, the socially isolated – and rich white folks. Adapted from Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer-nominated 2015 play, it is as close as an sf movie can get to Ghosh’s ‘serious literary novel’ incapable of dealing with climate change. Relentlessly centripetal, it takes place within the isolated Long Island home of a conventionally dysfunctional bourgeois family, trapped within the event horizon of their shared history, suppressed memories and festering discontents. Although the film includes two young women of colour working as carers, it cannot think about these connections to the world outside its white suburban bubble – and indeed displaces these two carers through its focus on a new technology. The Primes combine a holographic projection of a deceased loved one with an AI capable of learning to become increasingly close copies of the deceased loved ones. The elderly Marjorie, her memory starting to fail, has Walter Prime, based on her long-dead husband; when Marjorie dies, her daughter Tess, has Marjorie Prime; and when Tess dies, her husband John, has Tess Prime. However, just as glimpses of low-waged affective labour let slip the repressions upon which class and racial privilege are built, so an uncanny (and seemingly accidental) meteorological phenomenon during the film’s coda lets slip the climate catastrophe such privilege produces but cannot bring itself to face.  

Mark Bould is Professor of Film and Literature at UWE Bristol and co-chair of the BAFTSS Science Fiction and Fantasy SIG. A recipient of the SFRA’s Lifetime Achievement Award and IAFA’s Distinguished Scholarship Award, he is founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television journal and Studies in Global Science Fiction monograph series. His most recent books are M. John Harrison: Critical Essays (2019) and The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021). He is currently writing Climate Monsters, Carbon Monsters.  

Andrés Buesa, Moving to Stay Still: The Child, Mobility and Environmental Change 

In recent years, concerns about displacement caused by environmental damage have become widespread in discourses around the environment (McLeman and Gemenne 2020). Yet, a recent turn within migration studies (Baldwin and Bettini 2017; Boas et al. 2022) warns of the potential dangers of framing migration as an outcome of environmental change, inasmuch as it ignores the multiplicity of possible mobilities (beyond uni-directional, cross-bordering migration), it obscures their embeddedness in pre-existing power structures (i.e., colonial legacies), and it presents migrants as passive victims. Following this critical strand, this paper explores films’ ability to offer alternative constructions of the relationship between mobility and environmental degradation that incorporate the multi-faceted, relational nature of (im)mobilities. It focuses on the potential of child figures, as they roam around freely, to subvert normative understandings of rootedness as passive stasis and of migration as an active adaptation to environmental change. Looking at films that depict children uprooted by environmentally-related phenomena—flooding in Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin 2012), rural gentrification in The Wonders (Rohrwacher 2014), and unsustainable waste disposal in Costa Brava, Lebanon (Akl 2021), for example—this paper argues that the cinematic child is used to explore micro-mobilities as a dynamic strategy to remain in place. Rather than moving away as a form of survival, children operate a process of “re-emplacement”, by which they “become mobile in order to counter anticipated displacement” (Farbotko 2022). In the process, the cinematic child emerges as a site for negotiating the role of mobility in a more sustainable future.

Andrés Buesa is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. He holds an MA in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick. His PhD thesis explores the uses of the cinematic child, in 21st century world cinema, as a vehicle for discourses on contemporary mobility. His other research interests include film aesthetics, the representation of cities and landscapes in contemporary film, and Spanish and Latin American cinemas. His work has been published on the international journals Atlantis (2022) and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas (2023; forthcoming). 

Zoë Viney Burgess, Towards the next century of amateur film archives: writing ourselves into history 

As Film Curator at Wessex Film and Sound Archive, I have long been conscious of the wealth of film material from the early years of amateur filmmaking the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and how unfavourably this compares with a decreasing quantity of amateur material produced from the 1970s onwards. There is a sense that the uptick in technological accessibility corresponds with a decline in items accessioned into the archive – as if the saturation of participatory technologies somehow diluted the desire to capture and most importantly, archive these many records. Contemporary collecting is hampered by a scarcity of resources; be it staff time, shelf space, digital storage facilities and the associated costs as well as by the sheer abundance of material that is produced everyday by all of us. How can we ensure the 2020s are represented in the archive of the future? Can we take steps now, as individuals and as archives to ensure we write ourselves into history? 

Zoë Viney Burgess is Curator of Film at WFSA and is also a Postgraduate Researcher in Film at University of Southampton. Zoë’s research seeks to explore gender and class in the amateur film collection of WFSA between the years of 1920-1950. WFSA is a  regional repository for historic film and sound items from Hampshire, Isle of  Wight, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Buckinghamshire and holds over 38,000 items.  Of this number exist some 12,000 cinefilms. Zoë seeks to explore how issues of  visibility, attribution, and representation impact on our understanding of this  regional collection and how this can serve to contribute to a wider view of amateur  filmmaking in the UK. Zoë has a background in historic textiles and dress and in  particular the interaction between gender, socio-economics and lived experience, as depicted in amateur film.  

Paolo Carelli and Anna Sfardini, Italian Unscripted TV Goes Sustainable: Issues and Practices of Green Representation in Contemporary Television  

In the last decades, the relationship between audiovisual media products and places has increasingly grown and has widely investigated, focusing on the way territories were represented and consequent touristic impact. Within this context, sustainability has imposed as a relevant aspect for media studies through different perspectives, such as production practices (i.e. the adoption of “green protocols”), economic and social benefits for territories, and growing attention for green, environmental and sustainable topics within plots and narration mechanisms. This last point of view is particularly crucial to highlight how sustainability falls into audiovisual representation.   

Drawing on continuous research carried out by CeRTA (Research Centre on Television and Audiovisual Media) on the use of territories in audiovisual products and their function in a promotional and touristic perspective, our paper will focus on the role of Italian media production in defining some key traits of sustainability; in particular, we will consider unscripted TV programs as a specific and less investigated mode of narration and representation of sustainability. Based prevailingly on real settings, unscripted programs are privileged objects to observe and analyze how a new kind of sensibility for sustainable issues could help to spread and stimulate practices and acceptance in this field.   

Focusing on a sample of reality-shows, cooking shows and other entertainment sub-genres, we will try to define some trajectories of an Italian way to sustainability in television and audiovisual representation.   

Paolo Carelli is Assistant Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan and Brescia, where he teaches Media Theory and Broadcasting History and Languages. He is Senior Researcher at Ce.R.T.A. (Research Centre on Television and Audiovisual Products) and didactic coordinator of Master “Fare TV. Gestione, Sviluppo, Comunicazione”.   

Anna Sfardini is Assistant Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan) where she teaches “Intercultural Communication” and “Research Methods on Media Production and Consumption.” She is Senior Researcher at Ce.R.T.A. (Centre of Research on Television and Audivisual Products), and didactic director of the Master “Fare Tv. Gestione, Sviluppo Comunicazione.” She is the author of several papers and books including Reality Tv (Unicopli, Milano 2009), La tv delle donne. Brand, programmi e pubblici, Milano, Unicopli 2015, with C. Penati),  La politica pop (Il Mulino, Bologna 2009 with G. Mazzoleni), La televisione. Modelli teorici e percorsi di analisi (Carocci, Roma, 2017, with M. Scaglioni).  

Hande Çayır , ‘You can see the cracks underneath the wallpaper’*: The ethical use of film within institutions and the possibility of (mis)representing people diagnosed with ‘mental illness’ 

Films commissioned by institutions pose both opportunities and challenges. According to Iain Sinclair, there is ‘one simple rule: anything that can be commissioned is not worth making’ (1997: 21). The purpose of this paper is to generate debates that arise when co-producing films within institutions with people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar, or psychosis. In what ways can equal agency be granted to these voices? How can collaboration be achieved without performing tick-box exercises? What can researchers/co-producers do to protect their mental health while working in the mental health field within institutions to sustain their work? How can mainstream cinema’s production of knowledge of ‘mental illness’ (Screening Madness Film Report 2009: 2) be rewritten through first-person narratives? The response I aim to provide to survivors’ needs incorporates personalisation (Beresford 2014), not knowingness (Cage 1967: 69), rights-based actions (Beresford & Russo 2022), attentive listening (Harpin 2018: 41), and constructive dialogue. I contend that the practice-based approach is necessary to reflect psychological landscapes because sound and images have the power to communicate what words cannot (Lambert 2013: 63). By prioritising ethical (Nichols 2016), experimental (Rees 2011), participatory (Rouch 2003) modes of filmmaking, this project seeks to stimulate conversations, exchange feedback, ‘be with’ survivors (Frank 1995: 144) and explore the potential of film. 

Hande Çayır is a second-year PhD student in the Film and Television Department at the University of Warwick. A major focus of her current work involves co-producing films with people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar, or psychosis in order to propagate survivors’ agency, authorship and ownership. Her latest book, Documentary as Autoethnography: A Case Study Based on the Changing Surnames of Women, was published in 2020 by Vernon Press. Her short films have been screened in international and academic settings. Her research interests include experimental cinema, first-person film, gender studies, mad studies and social change. 

Laura Cesaro, Greening Film Festival: the Italian Circuit  

Sustainability is developing as a new horizon for the film festival circuit (Monani, 2017). Not so young is the debate concerning practices, which has started on two different issues. On the one hand, the trend for festival communities to be sustainable events (from the recycling of materials to the reduction of carbon emissions, above all to mobility, merchandising and even food sustainability; dimensions - the latter - mostly connected to cine-tourist practices). On the other hand, film festivals constitute a space of discursive elaboration that has developed debates through an ecocritical imaginary (Vaughan 2019; Starosielski & Walker 2016).   

Starting from these premises, the proposal intends to advance a historical investigation of the practices and policies of the dialogue between these two aspects in the Italian context. The intervention will highlight how CinemAmbiente, active since 1998 and a founding member of the Film Green Network, is only the first one of the Italian festivals active in the international dialogue. Next up, we will analyze the "Guida Festival Green" (2022), a protocol that fully envisages the involvement of the whole Italian festival dimension in European green programming.  

Laura Cesaro is a research fellow at the University of Padua (Italy). Her research interests concern film festival studies and the relationship between cinema and territory. In collaboration with the CineLands research project, her focus of the investigation is the visual perspectives related to mapping the territory, including the design of didactic and educational models.  

Amy C. Chambers, The interface at the end of the world: posthuman care, mental health and memory in Aniara (2018)  

Aniara (2018) imagines an Earth-less future with a colony of humans lost in space after their Mars relocation ship (the Aniara) is thrown off course. Despite the epic SF set-up, what makes Aniara particularly effective is its focus on individual and collective mental health and the ship’s MIMA: an artificially intelligent (AI) immersive virtual reality (VR) experience that uses human memories to simulate the now-extinct natural world. Introduced as a reassuring display of technical prowess, MIMA becomes addictive as users become dependent on its somnolent effects that allow them to escape reality and return to nature. But there is no escape from their self-sustaining spaceship. Early MIMA experiences immerse users into pre-programmed nature documentary-like landscapes, but the increasingly distressed users infect MIMA with their memories of hellish eco-catastrophe. MIMA becomes emotionally overwhelmed by the needs and past in/actions of users and chooses to self-destruct.   

Through this AI ‘character’, Aniara considers the nature of reciprocal care in posthuman futures beyond mechanical and digital maintenance. MIMA was engineered to feel and respond to users, but no consideration is made as to how this AI might process the pain of experiencing the end of the world it was designed to protect (if only virtually). MIMA is repurposed by users to provide comfort as they are confronted by their own cosmic obsolescence. In part, the humans’ descent into mental disorder is caused by their failure to care for and consider MIMA as more than an interface to the world they failed to save.    

Amy C. Chambers is a science and screen media studies scholar at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research examines the intersection of entertainment media and the public understanding of science. Recent publications explore medical history and horror in The Exorcist (1973); the science fiction (SF) films of religious icon Charlton Heston; the mediation of women’s scientific expertise in mass media; socio-technoscientific imaginaries and SF literature; and women-directed horror and SF cinema.  

James Chapman, The Patient Who Refused to Die: The economic and fiscal sustainability of the British film production industry 

Histories of the British film production sector tend to present it as a narrative of almost perpetual crisis: certain historical moments – the near-collapse of British domestic production in the mid-1920s, the withdrawal of City money following the bankruptcy of Twickenham Studios in 1937, the massive losses sustained by the major production groups in the late 1940s, the drastic curtailment of US finance in 1969, and the withdrawal of government support for the industry in 1985 – were all seen by some contemporaries as existential crises that threatened the future of the industry. And yet the British film industry would always recover and find a way of sustaining itself – until the next crisis. Charles Oakley compared the industry to a patient who stubbornly refused to die: “It has been virtually written off several times. But the industry’s recuperative powers asserted themselves. Something stirred, somewhere, somehow, and there it was once more” (Where We Came in: Seventy Years of the British Film Industry). 

This paper will interrogate the narrative of crisis by considering two related questions. 1. Were there historically specific conditions for each of the major crises that have hit the British production sector? And 2. Were there underlying structural factors common to all those crises? I will argue that the industry’s historic difficulties were largely the outcome of the same issues – the equation between the availability of capital and the size of the domestic market – and that it was not until the late 1980s that a recalibration of the economic and cultural ambitions of British producers helped to create the circumstances in which a more sustainable long-term financing model could emerge. 

James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. His recent publications on British cinema and television include The Money Behind the Screen: A History of British Film Finance, 1945-1985 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Dr. No: The First James Bond Film (Columbia University Press, 2022) and Contemporary British Television Drama (Bloomsbury, 2020) 

Llewella Chapman, The early Tomb Raider franchise: Videogames, preservation, ethics and the archive   

Tomb Raider has received little attention from media historians, and scholarly publications tend to focus on the overly-sexualised marketing of the lead female protagonist, Lara Croft, who is commonly assumed to be ‘designed and written by and planned and conceived by a guy written for guys’ (Roberta Williams, 1998). In part, this is owing to a lack of materials related to this franchise that are available in archives and repositories, however a small amount paper documents have been donated to Association M05.com in Paris, including scripts and notes. Separately, Tomb Raider fans, particularly Ash Kapriélov (Tomb of Ash) and Alex (CoreDesign.com), have worked to preserve documentation, interviews, marketing and magazine scans relating to the videogames, providing digital and freely-accessible online resources. Therefore, this paper will first analyse the Tomb Raider videogames through the lens of empirical research, including interviews and papers accessed from the Association M05 archive, Tomb of Ash and CoreDesign.com. Second, it will highlight how media historians can contribute to the understanding of game development through reviewing archive materials more generally and how these materials can and need to be preserved and sustained in the future.    

Llewella Chapman is a visiting scholar in the School of History at the University of East Anglia. A media historian, her research interests include British cinema, gender, costume, videogames and archives. She is the author of Fashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender and Identity in the World of 007 (Bloomsbury, 2022) and a BFI Film Classic on From Russia With Love (Bloomsbury/BFI, 2022). She has been contracted to write her next monograph on Costume and British Cinema: Labour, Agency and Creativity, 1900 – 1985. Her article based on researching Vicky Arnold, Heather Stevens and their contribution to the early Tomb Raider franchise is to be published in Feminist Media Studies.   

Diane Charlesworth, Unpacking discourses of “care” and “sustainability” in the UK children’s television ecology and television policy. A case study of Channel 5’s pre-school brand Milkshake’s series: The World According to Grandpa (2020 - present) and Go Green with the Grimwades (2020 – present). 

UK children’s television has been in a state of constant flux as a result of global competition from the mid-1990s, with the arrival of largely US children’s providers, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network (1993) and Disney (1995) via satellite and cable, leading to the UK communications regulator, OFCOM, designating the situation as one of crisis, in its report The Future of Children’s Television (2007). Since 2007, the competition for child audiences’ attention has intensified, with increasing pressure from alternative SVoD suppliers and producers (Netflix, Disney +, Amazon Prime), social media platforms, and transmedial content. In this landscape, for key parts of the time between 2007 and today, the BBC has been the main producer and commissioner of domestically originated content, sometimes anticipating and, at other times, following key trends in the development and housing of its children’s offer. During this time, the question discussed by children’s media lobbyists, regulators and policy makers, has been in how far it is sustainable for the BBC and the commercial public service broadcasters, (notably ITV and Channel 5), to operate in this market and still maintain the commitment to providing content that speaks to a British child’s experiences (in all its diversity, complexity and nuance), and that makes a key contribution to the economic health and creative vibrancy of a UK independent production sector. The Young Audience Content Fund (YACF), launched in 2019 and administered by the British Film Institute, was a response to this question – a source of funding that was to provide support to a wider constituency of producers and reinvigorate the distribution and exhibition space provided by the PSBs for this material. 

This paper discusses this and looks specifically at the example of Channel 5 which has demonstrated a consistent commitment to pre-school content via its brand Milkshake! since the mid-2000s. Until recently, emphasis was laid on high-end, co-produced, locomotive animation series (see Fanthome, 2006; Steemers, 2010). I analyse the impact of the YACF on Channel 5’s decision to develop live action/live action & animation hybrid content for the Milkshake! slate. Two recent Milkshake! series, The World According to Grandpa (Channel 5: 2020 - present) and Go Green with the Grimwades (Channel 5: 2020 - present) that have come out of this scheme, are analysed to discuss how these evidence YACF-intended goals of building a sustainable UK TV production ecology and speaking to UK children's experience, whilst dealing with global topics of inter-generational communication and learning (see Holdsworth & Lury, 2016) and environmental responsibility. 

Diane Charlesworth is a Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Cultural Studies at the University of Lincoln. Her research and teaching interests are star and celebrity studies, intersectional politics on screen, children's film and television, and screen histories and historiographies. She has published in Celebrity Studies and Critical Studies in Television, contributed a chapter on Kirsty Allsopp on C4 in the edited work, Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture (2017), and one on Marguerite Patten’s television work for BBC women’s post WWII daytime programming in the 2022 collection Food and Cooking on Early Television in Europe: Impact on post-war food ways (Ana Tomic, ed.). She is currently working on an article about post WWII BBC children’s television. 

Mrunal Chavda, Mind the Himalayan Gap: does the brutal gender imbalance in the Gujarati Cinema reflect Gujarati society? 

This paper investigates gender equality as one of the SDGs in the context of Gujarati cinema, a constituent part of Indian Cinema. Gujarati Cinema, or Dhollywood, has not been the subject of much academic research (Nagada, 1993; Dwyer, 2006; Ganger, 2013; Kotak, 2018; Jambhekar, 2017). These films produced in the regional language have struggled to attract audiences in its history of 75 years. Gujarati cinema has risen in recent years; however, Gujarati cinema has a track record of gender inequality in terms of leadership positions. This paper examines factors affecting gender equality in directorial or leadership positions in Gujarati cinema. The paper employed qualitative and quantitative methods to understand gender inequality and then cross-examined it with the official cinematic policy of the Government of Gujarat. The paper discusses how Gujarati Cinema suffers greatly from this gender inequality and the failure of the state to address this concern might lead to the unsustainability of Gujarati cinema a long-term impact. Finally, the paper recommends solutions and challenges in achieving gender equality in Gujarati cinema (or similar cinemas worldwide with gender disparity) 

Mrunal Chavda is an Assistant Professor in Humanities and Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Management Raipur. He holds a Ph.D. in Drama from the University of Exeter (United Kingdom). He has also held the Post Doctoral Research Fellowship (Sociolinguistics) at the University of Cape Town (South Africa). He is an Associate Fellow at Higher Education Academy (London). He has presented his research papers at several reputed national and international conferences, including the Association of Business Communication, the South Asian Literary Association, the International Federation for Theatre Research, and the International Congress of Linguistics. 

Malcolm Cook, Full Circle: Useful Animation, Petroleum Extraction, and Research-Led Teaching  

This paper will examine the symbiotic relationship between animation and petroleum industries. In common with other forms of ‘useful cinema’ (Acland and Wasson 2011), animation has distinctively shaped the ways petroleum has been exploited and imagined, and the animation industry has been complicit with the social and environmental impact of oil extraction and usage. While the points raised are applicable to a wide range of ‘petrocinema’ (Dahlquist and Vonderau, 2021) this discussion will use a case study of the 1953 film Full Circle made by the W.M. Larkins studio for BP.  

While ostensibly made by a British studio for a British company, Full Circle is indicative of the complex international and transnational nature of petromodernity. Under production between 1951 and 1953, the film underwent considerable changes that reflect the political upheaval in Iran in this period as the oil industry was nationalised, with many ramifications for energy production and international relations. A unique insight into the animation process and the involvement of oil executives and the British government is provided through archival materials from the BP Archive.  

This paper will conclude by reflecting on the incorporation of such historical research into present-day teaching of film and media to decentre the curriculum away from the dominant narrative feature film. It will examine the deeply embedded (post)colonial contexts of extractive industries and their use of film, as well as raising awareness of the implications of this among a new generation of learners.  

Malcolm Cook is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Southampton. He co-edited (with Kirsten Moana Thompson) the collection Animation and Advertising and contributed a chapter on Disney and the promotion of automobiles, oil, and road building. The collection received an Honourable Mention for Best Edited Collection in the BAFTSS Awards 2021 and was runner up in the 2021 McLaren/Evelyn Award for Best Scholarly Book in Animation from the Society for Animation Studies (SAS). His monograph Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens was published in 2018 and was runner-up in the 2019 SAS McLaren/Lambart award.  

Louise Coopey, Spinoffs and Prequels: The Sustainability of the Game of Thrones (2011-2019) Storyworld  

Broadcast in 207 territories and watched by millions around the world, Game of Thrones (2011-2019) is one of television’s most popular adaptations. Based on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels (1996-present), the show introduced its rich and complex storyworld to a new audience. It is one of many adaptations that have successfully navigated the jump from literature to television, but the desire of Martin and US network HBO to capitalise on that success and build a franchise asks new questions of the viability of the expansion of fantasy storyworlds. As such, although there is excellent research into reader/audience engagement with the show (Barker et al., 2021), the potential sustainability of the appeal of the storyworld over the long term also merits attention.   

As of June 2022, there are seven Game of Thrones spinoffs in various stages of development and production, all of which focus on an element of Martin’s fantasy storyworld or characters. With this in mind and using the Game of Thrones storyworld as a case study, I will explore the issues raised pertaining to the sustainability of the text. I will ask whether the popularity of the storyworld is capable of sustaining multiple spinoffs/prequels and how further adaptation impinges on broader systems of visual culture. Although planned spinoffs provide an opportunity to expand on certain narratives and develop characters, I interrogate fidelity to established canon and audience fatigue as factors that can limit the extent of expansion of fantasy storyworlds.    

Louise Coopey is a PhD researcher in film and television at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the visual representation of the 21st century Other in complex television, exploring how identity manifests within character development arcs through the layered complexity of HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019). Louise’s chapter entitled ‘Sexual Violence and Smallfolk’ was recently published in the volume The Forgotten Victims of Sexual Violence in Film, Television and New Media, edited by Stephanie Patrick and Mythili Rajiva (2022). She has also written a chapter on the show’s Epic 9s episodes for Manchester University Press’ forthcoming Moments of Television series.  

Charlotte Crofts, “Beautiful Possibility”: Green Filmmaking Pedagogy, Climate Content and Radical Optimism  

Whilst best known for their sustainable production tools, such as the carbon footprint calculator, BAFTA-led albert also calls on the film and TV industry to think about their carbon “brainprint” (Towe et al), promoting tools “to help creatives to make content that supports the transition to a sustainable future” (‘Editorial’). At COP26 albert convened the Climate Content Pledge which was signed by a dozen of the UK’s biggest broadcasters, pledging to “use their content to educate audiences about the climate crisis” (Yossman).   

Given that the psychology of climate anxiety acts against us taking action when we are faced with the “brutal truth”, albert suggests a tactic of “beautiful possibility” to spur action (Planet Placement). As Nicky Williams suggests, “While the last few years have seen an increase in climate coverage ... it’s all too often landed in the ‘unwelcome lesson’ space. A lecture we didn’t sign up for, often delivered by an exhausting zealot” (Williams). Science communication recognises the power of climate storytelling as Michela Cortese points out: “Through enjoyment, transportation and identification, fictional films have the potential to engage the audience and trigger emotions that can lead to action and behavioural change”. As Mark Bould implores: “Is there no room for the symbolic? The oblique? The estranged?” (4).  

This paper explores both the challenges and opportunities for emergent filmmakers developing their practice beyond natural history and didactic content directly ‘about’ the climate crisis. It argues that being part of the albert education partnership offers the pedagogic potential to shape the future of the industry in radically optimistic ways.   

Charlotte Crofts is Associate Professor of Filmmaking at UWE Bristol where she teaches on the BA (Hons) Filmmaking and leads the albert Education Partnership, delivering the ‘Applied Skills for a Sustainable Screen Industry’ module which is required for the assessment of the Professional Practice modules. 

Marco Cucco and Federica d’Urso, Defining Models of Public Strategy to Implement Eco-sustainable Behaviors  in Audiovisual Production: The Italian Case Study  

In Europe, audiovisual production is intensively regulated and supported by public policies. This set up allows European, national, and local policymakers to influence and guide film companies’ behavior. The adoption of green protocols during the production stage comes directly from this policy-driven European model in the audiovisual industry.  

As regards the implementation of sustainable practices in the audiovisual industry, Italy is playing a pioneering role: more and more Italian funding schemes for audiovisual production rewards companies who respect green protocols recognized by the State. In this framework, Italian Regions are the real key frontrunners. Thank to work undertaken by their local film commissions, Italian Regions are carrying on research, introducing new eco-sustainable practices, and training professional. During the shooting stage, local, national, and foreign companies are invited to respect their protocols, stimulating in this way a dissemination process among audiovisual professionals.   

The paper investigates the bottom-up action undertaken by Italian local governments and film commissions for influencing and changing the audiovisual industry working process. Combining desk research (policy analysis) and interviews, our investigation aims at improving scholarship about media industry and policy thanks to a case study (Italy) which could play a leading role at the European level in the next few years. At the same time, it invites to consider sustainability as new pillar to be included in these consolidated research areas.     

Marco Cucco is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna (Italy), and Head of the postgraduate Master in Film and Audiovisual Management. He received his PhD in Communication at the University of Lugano (Switzerland). His research interests concern mainly film industry and cultural policy. He wrote papers published by international journals like Studies in European Cinema, Film Studies, Journal of Transcultural Communication, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, European Journal of Communication and Media, Culture & Society, and three books. He is currently vice-chair of the Film Studies Section of ECREA.  

Federica D’Urso is PhD student at La Sapienza University. Since 2005 she has been a media analyst, specialized in the study of audiovisual markets. She is a consultant for public and private organizations in writing legislation and policies for cinema and television. From 2017 to 2021 she was an adjunct professor of Cinema and TV Economics at La Sapienza.   

Jill Daniels, If Not Now: Where There is Power There is Resistance 

In this presentation I discuss my short essay film, If Not Now which explores the assertion that in opposition to notions of waste, and dispersal, there is a grand circularity, of nothing ever, ever going away; that resistance to nationalism in the past may be a catalyst for resistance today. Following Michel Foucault’s argument that “Where there is power, there is resistance” and Stephen Muecke’s argument that resistance may not mean a constant ‘standing firm’; there may also be interruptions. The film is located in Brick Lane in London’s East End; home to successive immigrant communities, Huguenot weavers, Jews, Bengalis; today it is semi-gentrified with hipster clothes shops, street food, beigel bakeries, Indian restaurants and sari shops. My authorial self is represented as a political resister whose Lithuanian Jewish greatgreat grandmother died in Brick Lane and continues to haunt my present. Avery Gordon’s view of haunting is as a struggle against the reduction of individuals “to a sequence of instantaneous experiences that leave no trace”, or whose trace (as dust) is hated as irrational, superfluous and ‘overtaken’. In 1978 Bengali workers in Brick Lane, organised the first black strike in England in protest against racist attacks and murder; but the fascist National Front, continued to carry out marches and attacks. The police protected the National Front. In If Not Now I experiment with hybrid filmic strategies of realist archive footage and a fictionalised evocation of the past; witness voice-overs, slow-motion, long takes, stills and moving image, fragments of interrupted narrative, tactical argument and  disconnected sound creates a poetic montage to bring the past into the present. 

Jill Daniels is an award-winning essay filmmaker and scholar. Her practice explores memory, history, place and autobiography. Her monograph, Memory, Place and Autobiography: Experiments in Documentary Filmmaking was published in 2019. She is co-editor of Truth, Dare or Promise: Art and Documentary Revisited (2013) and vice chair of the editorial board of the Journal Media Practice & Education. Her most recent essay film Resisters premiered in Chennai, India in 2022 and her journal article The Way of the Bricoleuse: Experiments in Documentary Filmmaking was published in 2022. She is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of East London. She is convenor of the BAFTSS Essay Film Special Interest Group. 

Finn Daniels-Yeomans, Researcher Positionality and the Quiet Non-Certitude of Rosine Mbakam  

Responding to resurgent imperatives to decolonise Screen Studies research and methods, this paper investigates my position as a White/British/Male scholar working with decolonising and African documentary texts and contexts, and considers the methodological implications that arise with the process of positioning oneself in film-based research. Building on existing scholarship in this area (Dovey 2019; Mistry and Bischoff 2022), I consider the notions of ‘slow reading’ (Cavell 2005), ‘reverse tutelage’ (Gopal 2019) and ‘adjacency’ (Campt 2019) as examples of methodological principles that have guided my attempts to negotiate the tenuous epistemic footing from which I research African cinematic contexts. I develop these lines of enquiry alongside the films and collaborative filmmaking philosophy of Cameroonian-born documentarist Rosine Mbakam, with reference to the quietly experimental Delphine’s Prayers (Cameroon/Belgium, 2021). Paying attention to her ethics of duration and deep listening, willed circumvention of directorial authority, tendency to lay bare the difficulties of narration and embracement of non-certainty (Oloukoï 2022), I broach Mbakam’s praxis as a generative conceptual apparatus from which to develop methods of film interpretation and analysis sensitive to the tenuous dimensions of my position. Where the primary objective of this paper is to flesh out a researcher disposition informed by Mbakam’s filmmaking approach, a secondary concern is to demonstrate the salience of African and decolonial cinematic practices and cultures for the present and future of Screen Studies research and methods.   

Finn Daniels-Yeoman has recently finished his doctoral studies at Glasgow University’s Film & Television Studies department. Titled "Documentary and Decolonisation: Postcolonial Non-fiction Film from the African Continent", his thesis examined the (de)colonial history and politics of documentary on continental Africa, and is broadly concerned with rethinking documentary from decolonial and Afrocentric frameworks. He has taught at the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian, interned at the journal Screen, curated events for numerous festivals (Africa in Motion Film Festival, Document Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival) and has been published in Studies in Documentary Film, Media Theory, Media Education Journal and herri. He is currently based in Brighton preparing his first monograph.  

Jane Dawson, Beyond Carbon Reduction: Ethics, crew and natural history filmmaking futures  

Natural history filmmaking constitutes the UK’s highest polluting screen genre, with 60 per cent of carbon emissions resulting from the transportation of crew and equipment to international filming locations (Albert 2020). As scientific evidence and public awareness around climate destruction grows, the industry is rethinking the role of in-country crew and sharing ideas around more ‘sustainable’ practice (BBC Climate Creatives 2022, Wildscreen 2022).   

Harnessing current workforce studies (Newsinger and Eikhof 2020, Nwonka 2019, Ozimek 2020, Presence et al 2021), the paper will offer a decolonial reading of the international filmmaking production cycle before analysing examples of alternative practice and the position of inclusive ethics in the sector’s narrative to these developments (FF:W 2020; Spicer et al 2022; Williamson et al 2021). Benefiting from insight gained through collaboration with FF:W (Filmmakers for Future Wildlife) – an international industry network focused on sustainable practice – the paper will examine whether the “heterotopic” nature of the natural history field presents obstacles to forging more inclusive and environmentally sustaining filmmaking futures (Chris 2006; Foucault 1986). The paper will conclude by exploring the value of an experientially focused co-creation documentary film as an interruptive tool of “constructive” reparation to amplify the marginalised voice during this significant moment of change (Táíwò 2022: 74).  

Jane Dawson is an AHRC (SWWDTP) PhD researcher at UWE Bristol conducting research into anti-extractive international documentary production with a focus on the UK’s natural history film sector. Jane’s research draws on her background as a creative practitioner. Recent work includes No California (2021), a co-created documentary exploring regional labour ethics and representations of coast in the UK screen sector.  

MaoHui Deng, How Useful are Dementia-Friendly Screenings?   

This presentation examines the ways in which dementia-friendly screenings have been facilitated and discussed in the UK. The argument that I will put forward is threefold. First, dementia-friendly screenings can be understood as a form of caring cinema that pays close attention to the ways in which people who live with dementia and their carers can be more relationally embedded within their communities and environments. Second, drawing from Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson’s work on “useful cinema” (cinema that is used to maintain the longevity of institutions), we can also understand dementia-friendly screenings as a form of exhibition practice that furthers David Cameron’s Big Society agenda, where money is cut from healthcare services and caring responsibilities are pushed onto the individuals. Third, complementing the above claims, I argue that the films curated by dementia-friendly screenings thus far are largely catered to an imagined white audience, and are rooted in discourses of nostalgia and reminiscence – in turn, dementia-friendly screenings in the UK, in its current state of existence, can also be understood as furthering the coloniality of dementia discourses, where the experiences of white people living with dementia are epistemologically privileged over non-white/non-western demographics.   

MaoHui Deng is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Ageing, Dementia and Time in Film: Temporal Performances (2023, Edinburgh University Press), which puts forward the first sustained analysis of films about dementia from a temporal viewpoint. He has also published chapters on films about dementia in The Routledge Companion to European Cinema (Routledge), Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care (Routledge), and The Politics of Dementia (De Gruyter). 

Michelle Devereaux The Woman Who Left: Nomadland, Moral Perfectionism, and the ‘Unknown Woman’ of Neoliberalism  

In Contesting Tears, the late philosopher and film theorist Stanley Cavell examines the ‘melodramas of the unknown woman’, films from the classical Hollywood era featuring women protagonists who are either born or marry into the upper echelons of society. These ‘unknown’ women ultimately reject their lives of ‘second-rate sadness’ (1997: 127) via their rejection of the men at their centre. For Cavell, Stella Dallas, Charlotte Vale et al mostly succeed in their pursuit of a moral perfectionist existence, embarking on a journey of self-transformation and continual improvement as they strive to care less about their place in society and more about their place in the world.   

How might neoliberalism, that nefarious spirit of late-capitalist globalization, have transformed Cavell’s unknown woman in our own era? Like the films Cavell discusses, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland considers a woman who decides to remain ‘unknown’ and embark on a moral-perfectionist path out of an ethical obligation to herself. But Fern (Frances McDormand) lives her perfectionist aspirations on the economic and social margins. After a lifetime of gendered care work and wifely devotion, she is forced to navigate a new existence of low-wage, itinerant work while living in her van. Because of, not despite of, her social abjection, Fern does not just reject one villainous male sceptic, as the other unknown women do; she tries to turn her back on the neoliberal ideal itself. While she is only ever partially successful, the ethics of her quest lie in her ongoing attempts to realise it.  

Michelle Devereaux is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in film and television at the University of Warwick. She received her PhD in film studies from the University of Edinburgh, and her monograph, The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American Independent Film, was published in 2019 by Edinburgh University Press. Recently she has written about Prevenge and maternal scepticism for a special dossier on Cavell in Screen and has contributed chapters on The Beguiled for the Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola and the Netflix series Russian Doll for Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind (University of Exeter Press, forthcoming 2023).   

Iain Donald, Account, Accuracy, and Authenticity: A Framework for Analysing Historical Narrative in Games  

Games with historical settings continue to inspire game designers and find critical and commercial success. They provide a platform to engage large audiences in events, stories, and perspectives of history through means of nuanced interaction, high-fidelity graphics, and sophisticated narrative design. Yet, there is a growing, critical concern surrounding the portrayal of historical narratives in interactive media, and the impact that poorly-conceived depictions of history can have on the audiences who choose to play such games. A factor of this critique is the lack of tools and methods to analyse the “historiography” of existing games as seen in other forms of media and text. The “3A Framework” (3AF), is a theoretical and conceptual model for analysing games-as-text from the perspective of historical narrative. 3AF considers the objective game features that appear within the game and game narrative (Account); current critical perspective on historical narrative and detail related to the game’s content (Accuracy); and what the comparison between the game’s account and the identified historical discourse contributes to the historical perspective (Authenticity). The framework has been applied to Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), Valiant Hearts: The Great War (2014), and We. The Revolution (Polyslash 2019) and encourages practitioners engaged in historical narrative – historians, educators, game developers, media analysts – to approach game-based reflections of history through the lens of players. Considering how game aesthetics and simulations inform players’ understanding of historical narratives, particularly where the player’s initial understanding of history is limited, and the consequential impact this has on their perspective.  

Iain Donald is a Lecturer in the School of Computing, Engineering & the Built Environment at Edinburgh Napier University. Iain gained his PhD in the field of History, an MSc in Information Systems and worked in the Games Industry prior to joining academia in 2010. His recent work examines the intersection of games, digital media and history with a focus on commemoration and memorialisation. Using game design and technology to explore collective and communal memory in communities impacted by war, the veterans who fought in them, and to consider how we represent conflict in virtual worlds.  

Becky Ellis, A League of One’s Own: Abbi Jacobson the new queer pioneer  

 The concept of auteur has long since been associated with the so-called ‘master’minds of (to name a few) Hitchcock, Nolan, Tarantino, Anderson – the list goes on. Whilst queer auteur recognition is minimal, this is still associated with the male queer voices of, for example, Todd Haynes & John Waters. This paper looks to reposition queer women at the centre of the canon.  The paper will focus on the work of Abbi Jacobson as a queer screen voice. As creator, writer, producer and star of Broad City and A League of Their Own, Jacobson is a visionary and creator, changing the face of queer representation on screen and speaking to queer female audiences in ways that are completely new. Jacobson recently accepted the Human Rights ‘National Visibility Award’ for the show and upon acceptance stated ‘We made this show for you, for us, for our communities. For every person that has ever lived outside the boring box of normalcy. You don’t just deserve to be seen. You deserve to lead, to be the center of the storyline.’ This paper will argue for the visibility of female queer pioneers to be seen and celebrated.  

Becky Ellis: I am the leader of BA (HONS) Film & TV at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint Davids and employed by the British Film Institute Education team on a freelance basis.  My main research interests surround issues of representation and spectatorship across the realms of both illustration and film. The promotion and creation of positive female & LGBTQ+ imagery has always been central to my practice as an artist and film lecturer and is something I have explored consistently within my research. I wish to illuminate the histories, lives and legacies of forgotten and marginalised women and groups by using the mediums of illustration and film. I have spoken as an advocate for gender equality at Film- and Media-themed events, hosting gender-themed panel events at festivals including Underwire Film Festival, Birds Eye View Film Festival, the London Comedy Film Festival and the British Film Institute Film and Media Conference. 

Miguel Errazu, Mining Sites and Contact Cinemas: reanimating the Miner’s Film Workshop of Telamayu (Bolivia, 1983)  

In the Autumn of 1983, a Super-8 film workshop was held with the mining communities of Telamayu (department of Potosí, Bolivia). The workshop, that lasted three months, was organized on the basis of a complex agreement between the three agents: the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (a strong Miner’s Union with revolutionary positions), the mining state company Corporación Minera de Bolivia (COMIBOL); and the Ateliers Varan, a French association funded in 1981 by Jean Rouch that aimed at using light cinema technologies for radical pedagogical projects in cooperation with institutions from third world countries. Despite the cultural and political importance of this experience, the twelve films made during the workshop have remained unseen and unnoticed at the Varan offices and the INA, until recently. With this presentation, I draw upon the concept of “contact zone”, coined by anthropologist Marie Luise Pratt, to reflect on the complex political, aesthetic, ideological, technological and environmental dimensions of these films, that I considered privileged examples of a “contact cinema”. Diverse and competing agendas were at stake and clashed in this workshop: struggles on the right of communication of the miners, that were eager to take over control of the means of production to counter paternalistic renditions of their struggles from urban white allies; the somewhat indifferent position of the state regarding the cultural projects of miner’s Unions—that in fact were to be dismantled soon after, when the neoliberal policies of Paz Estenssoro wiped out the COMIBOL and the miner’s political organizations in 1985—and the ‘ngoization’ of radical cinema’s third worldism in projects of cooperation, media transference, and advisory and consultancy services, in which light media and specially Super-8 played an instrumental role. These films, taken away from their doers and forgotten in the Varan offices of Paris, might serve to reflect on the varied cultural dimensions of extraction and the North-South distribution of knowledge and resources, but also stand as powerful examples of a mining culture in Bolivia that refused orthodox Marxist frameworks and show an enduring resistance to the ideologies of developmentalism.  

Miguel Errazu holds a European PhD in Audiovisual Communication from the Complutense University of Madrid and is an SNI 1 Researcher of the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico. His work explores the various cultural and technological histories of counter-hegemonic cinemas of the 20th century, with a special focus on Mexico and Latin America. He has just co-edited, together with Alberto Berzosa, the monograph "Súper 8 contra el grano", in Secuencias. Revista de historia del cine, no. 55 (2022). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher "María Zambrano" at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.  

Victor Fan, The Way It Is: Buddhist Ecological Thinking on Power and Knowledge  

In the debate on the relationship between metadata and governmentality and between governmentality and the cinematic apparatus, there are two common underlying assumptions. First, ecological thinking, especially those frameworks borrowed from the Global South, is often regarded as an antidote to the Enlightenment project. Nonetheless, as many scholars have pointed out, since the 1950s, ecological thinking, including concepts from Buddhism, have been coopted by governments and corporations to build the foundation of neoliberalism. Second, with the collapse of the difference between individual and mass and between production and consumption, the gap between power and knowledge is also assumed to be dismantled. In my presentation, I will conduct a comparative study of ecological thinkings in Euro-America and China and examine how they have been instrumentalized under “algorithmic governmentality” to produce very similar societies of control. I will pay special attention to how China’s recent policy of “ecocivilization” comes together with its governmental infrastructure. The conundrum of a society of control is that there seems to be no way out of an ecology in which all attempts to think, rebel, and recreate have been either preempted or reabsorbed. I propose that Buddhism as a philosophy, with its axiom of dependent originations, propounds an ecological thinking that is logically incompatible with algorithmic governmentality. It also offers scholars a different understanding of how the dispositif operates and what role the cinema plays in the larger technicosocial ensemble.

Victor Fan is Reader in Film and Media Philosophy, King’s College London and a film festival consultant. He is the author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media (Edinburg University Press, 2019), and Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). His articles appeared in journals including Camera Obscura, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screen, and Film History.  

Richard Farmer, ‘Bridal outfits from the heart of filmland’: Clothes rationing, wartime film production and Gainsborough Pictures’ Studio Hire Service    

This paper explores the Studio Hire Service, a wardrobe ‘pooling’ scheme set up at Gainsborough Pictures’ Shepherd’s Bush film studio following the introduction of clothes rationing in 1941. The Service allowed producers to hire rather than purchase costumes for use in their films, thereby reducing the amount of fabric used on making new outfits and allowing each producer’s limited allocation of clothing coupons to be used on only the most important or unusual costumes. Vital to the production sector in wartime Britain, the Studio Hire Service also played a notable role outside the film industry, loaning outfits – including those worn by major female stars in films such as Love Story (1944) and Waterloo Road (1945) – to women for them to use as wedding dresses. In the last years of the war and the early years of the peace, hundreds (and possibly even thousands) of British brides got married wearing a Gainsborough dress. The important contribution that costume made to contemporary enjoyment of many of Gainsborough Pictures’ most famous films has been noted by scholars; this paper shows that some of these same costumes were also reused outside the studio so as to play an important part in the real-world experiences of many ordinary Britons, offering access to a glamourous bridal outfit in a period of widespread sartorial scarcity and providing another example of the way in which the bond between the picturegoer and the cinema extends beyond the auditorium.   

Richard Farmer is a Research Associate at the University of Bristol, working on the AHRC-funded project STUDIOTEC: Infrastructure, Culture, Innovation in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, 1930-60. He has published widely on British film and popular culture and is the author of The food companions: cinema and consumption in wartime Britain (2011) and Cinemas and cinemagoing in wartime Britain: the utility dream palace (2016), and co-author – with Laura Mayne, Duncan Petrie and Melanie Williams – of Transformation and tradition in 1960s British cinema (2018).   

James Fenwick, Sustaining a load of rubbish or: How I learned to stop worrying and recycle archival ephemera in the Stanley Kubrick Archive  

The Stanley Kubrick Archive is approximately 800 linear metres of shelving in size and consists of hundreds of boxes and thousands of pieces of paper. User statistics show that researchers favour material that is directly concerned with the life and work of Kubrick: correspondence, scripts, costumes, props, and so on. But the Stanley Kubrick Archive is filled with material that could be considered rubbish – ephemera that was never meant to be preserved, but which has ended up in storage in the archive strongroom at the University of the Arts London. Ephemera are transient items that were never intended to be retained and preserved. As such, this kind of material in the Stanley Kubrick Archive—which makes up a large bulk of its structure—is out of place, out of time, and potentially out of use. This paper is based on ongoing research in which the Stanley Kubrick Archive is approached as a subject not source. The focus is on that material in the Stanley Kubrick Archive that has no obvious immediate use to researchers—the ephemera—to consider how it is contained in the archive, its status as rubbish, and in what ways it can be recycled by researchers to give it new meaning and purpose. The paper will feature relevant case studies, including one about the archive’s graveyard of unused stationery, such as the rows and rows of empty boxes, to think through the purpose and sustainability of preserving such material.  

James Fenwick is senior lecturer in the Department of Media Arts and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick Produces (2020) and Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry (2021), editor of Understanding Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (2018) and co-editor of Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films (2020). He has written numerous book chapters and journal articles on the life and work of Stanley Kubrick. His forthcoming book on which this BAFTSS paper is based is titled Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive.  

Karianne Fiorini and Gianmarco Torri, A (possible) handbook for the creative re-use of home movies 

Re-framing home movies is a networking, educational, training and production  project launched in 2016 and drawing on the convergence of interests and  objectives shared by Italian film professionals and archives - Cineteca Sarda  (Cagliari), Superottimisti (Torino), Cinescatti (Bergamo) – all devoted decades to the preservation and valorisation of the home movie and amateur film  heritage. The project was carefully designed to promote a conscious and creative  re-use of home movie collections by a new wave of artists dealing with archival material. The presentation will focus on the details of the training path,  highlighting the main ideas in the background of the curatorial process, and  illustrating the outlines of the creative works developed by the participant artists  along the three editions of the project. We conceive the Re-framing home movies  project as a conceptual and practical toolbox and a (possible) handbook for artists  and archivists for the creative presentation and re-use of the home movie heritage.  

Karianne Fiorini is an independent home movie archivist and curator. Since 2003,  she has run different home movie projects and has been a frequent contributor to  international conferences and symposia, while publishing numerous articles and  essays about home movies and amateur films. Co-curator of the educational project  Re-framing home movies (since 2016), she is also the co-founder and President of  the homonymous Italian association. She co-curated the Home Movie Day and  Night: The 24-Hour Marathon, the International Media Mixer projects, and an  archival web-documentary series focusing on eleven home movie collections  published on the Italian Ancestor Web Portal. As the manager of film collections and cataloguing (2003-2015), she was also one of the founders of the first Italian Home Movie Archive (Bologna). 

Gianmarco Torri is a film curator working in the field of documentary and  experimental cinema, home movies and amateur films and their intersections. In  2021 he curated the e-book Open Access Cinema – Re-thinking Film Curatorship  in the Digital Space. Since 2016, he is co-curator of the networking and  educational project Re-framing home movies, and a founder of the homonymous  Italian association. Since 2015 he has been a member of the Scientific Committee of the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema in Pesaro, where he has been developing and curating different festival sections and film programmes. Of note,  Gianmarco has acted between 2003-2014 as the co-founder and co-curator of the first Italian Home Movie Archive (Bologna). 

Cristina Formenti, Towards the Eco-documentary of the Future: Carbon: The Unauthorised Biography (2021) and the Route to Eco-sustainable Documentary Filmmaking  

The increasingly negative consequences of ongoing climate changes and the acquired awareness of the substantial environmental footprint of media productions have determined a flourishing of the so-called “eco-docs”, that is documentaries focusing on environmental issues (Hughes 2014; Duvall 2017). Yet, if looked at in the ecomaterialist perspective theorized by Hunter Vaughan (2019), eco-docs’ productions are often responsible for a nonnegligible carbon footprint (see Formenti 2022).   

According to the March 2020 report Green Matters. Environmental Sustainability and Film Production the implementation of existing protocols allows audiovisual productions to reduce their carbon footprint only by up to 20% prior to incurring in factors beyond their control. Yet, the makers of the eco-doc Carbon: The Unauthorised Biography (2021, dir. Daniella Ortega and Niobe Thompson) managed to drastically cut their emissions. In particular, although forced by Covid-19-related restrictions, they managed to significantly reduce their travel-related footprint– which usually makes up the highest portion of the overall emission of an eco-doc –, while still tackling their subject matter from a global perspective.  

Putting into dialogue documentary, ecomedia and production studies, in this paper I will address the exemplary case of Carbon from an ecomaterialist perspective to show that, as far as documentaries are concerned, it is possible to break down the ceiling identified in the Green Matters report. Only, to do so, the best practices suggested by available protocols must be supplemented with an environmentally thought-out employment of the technologies and modes of representation and production that are part of the contemporary documentary filmmaking landscape.

Cristina Formenti is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Udine, where she is undertaking the research project For an Environmentally Sustainable Documentary. She is the author of Il mockumentary: la fiction si maschera da documentario (Mimesis 2013) and The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution (Bloomsbury 2022) as well as the editor of two collections: one on actress Mariangela Melato and one on Valentina Cortese. She serves on the board of the Society for Animation Studies, is co-editor of the journal Animation Studies and series co-editor of the series Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers published by Bloomsbury.  

Gregory Frame, Fight the Future?: The Purge franchise as warning  

Encompassing five films and a television series since 2013, The Purge has provided a sustained critique of US politics and society during a period of economic stagnation, resurgent white supremacy and rising authoritarianism. The series has provided arguably one of the most transparent interrogations of neoliberalism and its outcomes in popular cinema, critiquing the proliferation of private gated communities that separate rich from poor, the deliberate production of economic precarity to ensure a compliant inertia from the majority of the population, and the idea that to require state support to survive in the neoliberal economy is to render oneself surplus to requirements, and therefore disposable. More than this, however, it has explored concepts that remain largely the obsession of academics and theoreticians: the notion that neoliberal policies have created, according to Wendy Brown, ‘an abject, unemancipatory, and anti-egalitarian subjective orientation amongst a significant swathe of the American populace … available to political tyranny or authoritarianism’ (2006: 703). The danger of this became more obvious to many on January 6, 2021, and the unexpected success of the Democrats in the mid-term elections in November 2022 suggest these lessons are beginning to be learned (though arguably too late). This paper will demonstrate how The Purge sounded the alarm long before and argue that, if we are to resist the encroachment of anti-democratic authoritarianism in our politics we could to worse than to heed the warnings presented by popular, dystopian fiction.    

Gregory Frame is Teaching Associate in Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. This paper forms part of his investigation of American film and television after the 2008 financial crisis (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic). He has published widely on the politics of American film and television in Journal of American Studies, Journal of Popular Film and Television, New Review of Film and Television Studies and several edited collections, including Screening the Crisis (edited by Juan A. Tarancón and Hilaria Loyo, Bloomsbury, 2022). He is author of The American President in Film and Television: Myth, Politics and Representation (2014).  

Maryam Ghorbankarimi, Sustainable Strategies: Showcasing Middle Eastern content to world audiences  

Films from the MENA region have been shown in the UK for many years now in a variety of settings.  Often under the banner of ‘World Cinema’, many of these films have been showcased in film festivals and specially curated programmes, but some have also seen general cinematic releases, were shown on broadcast television, or distributed on DVD. In recent years, with the rise of streaming platforms and a transforming media landscape, the volume of films from the MENA area on UK screens has increased and different formats, such as TV dramas, are entering the market. At the same time, recent years have seen political turbulence across the region which has affected and informed, in different ways, both film production and its world-wide distribution and exhibition.    

We held a roundtable in summer 2022 at Lancaster, bringing several stake holders (distributors, programmers, and academics) together to open a conversation about the challenges and opportunities afforded by the new media and political landscapes, for the distribution, exhibition, and reception of films from the MENA area in the UK. Combining some of the key discussion points from the event and our conversations with early career filmmakers whose films are made available on video on demand platforms, I would like to share some of findings to the film community at this year’s conference. While we believe this topic requires more in-depth research, these early findings are a great indication of where the industry is heading and how we as film scholars can feedback to the industry. By feeding back we envision to offer a sustainable strategy for bringing content from the region to UK audiences.   

Maryam Ghorbankarimi is a filmmaker and film scholar. Her research is focused on representation women both in front of and behind the camera. Her first book entitled A Colourful Presence; The Evolution of Women’s Representation in Iranian Cinema (2015) was published in 2015. Her current research is on transnational cinemas and cultures, specifically the representation of gender and sexuality in Iranian cinema. Her second book, the edited volume on seminal Iranian female filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad, ReFocus: The Works of Rakhshan Banietemad  was published in spring 2021 (Edinburgh University Press).  

Tasos Giapoutzis, Student Film Festival: A sustainable project 

There has been increased attention to environmental sustainability in film production and exhibition recently. Due to the climate crisis several film studios and cinemas across the world as well as institutions that support local film production have been making efforts to engage with environment-friendly practices in all stages of production and exhibition. Academic institutions in UK (and worldwide) have been making efforts to raise awareness on sustainable living across the student community while also integrating equally sustainable practices within the curriculum. In academic year 2022-23 students at University of Essex will co-organise and produce a local 3-day student film festival in a sustainable manner, following sustainable practices towards the environment as well as the local communities near Colchester campus. This paper discusses and reflects on the processes followed by students while developing their festival, the challenges they have faced in their attempts to organise such a festival within academia and the potential routes of improvement for the future.  Regardless of the intentions, students are faced with issues that relate to financial limitations and lack of appropriate infrastructure. Reflections on those areas will provide new understandings that will contribute to the standardisation of environment-friendly and sustainable practices within academia and the film festival industry, while also cultivating a generation of young film professionals that possesses the knowledge and appropriate mindset in the fight against the climate crisis.  

Tasos Giapoutzis is a filmmaker and Lecturer in Film at the University of Essex. His interests as a researcher and filmmaker lie in the exploration of the filmmaking process, aesthetics of film and its multifaceted spatiotemporal features. More specifically, Tasos is interested in interactions between film and memory, nostalgia, place and displacement. Tasos is an alumnus of Go Short Talent Campus in Nijmegen, Talent Development Campus in Cork as well as Reykjavik Talent Lab. Films he directed have participated at more than 100 film festivals worldwide. The documentary Quiet Life (2019) premiered at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival and got published at the Journal of Anthropological Films (JAF). 

Rachel Gough, A Force of Nature: Film Production as Environmental Threat on Skellig Michael 

In 2014, Skellig Michael, an island off the coast of Co. Kerry in Ireland, rose to international prominence as a major setting in Disney’s Star Wars franchise. The UNESCO world heritage site is an area of vital ecological importance as well as being archaeologically and culturally significant as an early Christian monastic settlement. In the wake of the island’s appearance in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the subsequent influx of tourists to the site has proven to be a point of contention nationally. The increased visitor numbers have uplifted certain areas of the local economy, but have endangered the island’s wildlife populations. Recent research carried out by a state body suggests far-reaching and long-term negative impacts on the island’s culture and environment, should the association with the Star Wars franchise persist. Despite this, the films and their associated tourism have been widely endorsed by the Irish government as providing a vital economic boost to historically marginalised rural areas. This paper presents a dedicated study into the ecological and cultural impact of Skellig Michael’s deterioration as a result of film tourism. It will discuss the projected impact of this incident on Irish media production and drawing on Donna Haraway’s theory of the Chthulucene, will attempt to lay out a roadmap for collaborative, community and ecologically engaged filmmaking and tourism models, which allows local cultures and ecosystem’s to thrive whilst championing meaningful cultural production. 

Rachel Gough is a PhD researcher at the Department of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork. Her current research focuses on representations of rural Ireland’s ecologies in film, television and video games. Her other research interests include the folk horror genre, representations of gender, history and postcolonialism. She is a published short fiction writer and was recently awarded the Editor’s Choice award by the National Flash Fiction Anthology. 

Tamsin Graves, Prioritising the marginalised voice: Sustainable storytelling in the abandoned spaces of Gatlif’s Indignados (2012)  

This paper proposes that Gatlif’s method of foregrounding issues of marginality represents a sustainable approach to storytelling. Focussing on Indignados (2012), which depicts European protests that took place during the global 2011 Occupy movement, the paper will consider how the film weaves together multiple strands of discourse. The film presents a fictional narrative set against the backdrop of real protests, uses a variety of languages including Wolof, French, Greek, and Spanish; and includes dance-as-storytelling (e.g Flamenco) in addition to the spoken word. At times Indignados depicts the Occupy movement in the form of mass protest, however the film also highlights more personal, individual narratives, driven by antecedents to the movement itself, for example of the homeless in Paris, and of detained migrants in Greece.   

The representation of space and place is critical to the articulation of narratives in Gatlif’s film. In order to offer a sustainable form of storytelling, the film repurposes sites of hostility such as border spaces and urban peripheries, relics of boom and bust cycles such as disused factories, and the ghost towns of Spain, and reclaims them as discursive spaces. Gatlif’s repurposing of space shifts otherwise unheard voices from the periphery to the centre, imbuing the non-place with new meaning and providing space for stories to unfold without being drowned out by dominant voices. By choosing to locate narratives within otherwise empty and abandoned locations, the film offers an alternative to mainstream depictions of the Occupy movement and opens out the possibilities for multiple voices to be heard, to evolve and to endure.  

Tamsin Graves: I am a final year PhD candidate at the University of Exeter researching the heteroglossia in the films of Tony Gatlif, supervised by Will Higbee and Fiona Handyside. I have published chapters entitled ‘Heteroglossia in the musical number: Song, Music Performance, and Marginalized identity in Tony Gatlif’s Swing (2000)’ in the edited collection Musicals at the Margins: Genre, Boundaries, Canons (Lobalzo Wright, J and Shearer, M: 2021) and ‘Identity and belonging in the bordered spaces of Gatlif’s Indignados (2012) and Geronimo (2014)’ in The Routledge Companion to European Cinema (Gábor Gergely and Susan Hayward: 2021). I have presented on themes such as transnational cinema and border crossing at various post-graduate conferences, and am currently teaching on the Introduction to Film and Contemporary French Cinema modules at Exeter University.  

Alyssa Grossman, Transcending Domestic Ethnography: Haptic Remediations of a Family Archive 

In this paper I discuss my ongoing work with a collection of 16mm home movie  footage that was shot in the 1920s and ‘30s by a family of Eastern European Jewish  immigrants in the US. The footage was taken by my great-grandfather’s brother, an  amateur filmmaker who owned a Cine-Kodak, one of the first commercially  available film cameras. Returning to this material nearly one century after it was first captured, I am repurposing and re-editing it into a new film. As a visual  anthropologist who has been researching social and material processes of memory,  I approach this archive not just as a source of information about my ancestors’ relationships and life histories, but primarily as a framework for intervening with  the material in new ways, for instigating new practices of remembrance in the present. I am particularly drawn to the haptic and sensory images in the footage,  which I am intercutting with contemporary audio and video recordings of other  relatives’ reminiscences about the family’s past. Through my own remediations of  the material, I aim to create a new audio-visual platform for the existence of  multiple, inconclusive, contradictory recollections, and for conveying the  fragmented and elusive qualities inherent to the remembrance process itself.  Investigating the entangled relationship between domestic archives, personal  memory and collective history, the project raises questions about how the camera  can function as a powerful tool to evoke embodied and affective memories through the rupture and juxtaposition of archival and present-day filmic spaces.  

Alyssa Grossman is a social and visual anthropologist whose research explores issues of cultural memory, critical heritage, material, and visual culture, ethnographic filmmaking, and the intersections between anthropology and contemporary art. Her work involves creative and experimental approaches to research, often incorporating audio-visual, trans-disciplinary, and artistic methodologies. She has conducted fieldwork in Romania, Sweden, and the US, investigating everyday objects, landscapes, images, and discourses of memorialization, amateur filmmaking, and family remembrance work, and decolonizing practices of classification in ethnographic museums and archives. She is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. 

Özlem Güçlü, Devouring Gaze of Bluefish: Subordination of Animal Life in The Sustainability Discourse 

This paper focuses on the documentary Bluefish (Dir. Mert Gökalp, 2017), which is devoted to the conservation of bluefish population facing the danger of extinction in Marmara Sea. Even though the documentary addresses ecological ethics for biodiversity and aims at contributing to the cause of preservation of bluefish population, it avoids animal ethics perspective and defend “respectful use”. In this respect, it serves to reproduce human exceptionalism in favour of its sustainability discourse. In this paper, the subordination of animal life in the sustainability discourse wherein fish life is rendered as natural resource will be discussed, drawing upon the association of eating and cinematic gaze that is introduced in Anat Pick’s inspiring piece ‘Vegan Cinema’ (2018). Following in Pick’s concept of “devouring gaze” (2018), the formal and narrative choices of the film will be analysed in order to reveal and expose the representational and discursive hierarchy between human and animal lives. 

Özlem Güçlü is an Assistant Professor at the Sociology Department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, where she teaches courses on film and media. Güçlü received her MA degree from Central European University, Department of Gender Studies and her PhD degree from SOAS, University of London, Centre for Media and Film Studies. Her main research interests are gender and sexuality in cinema, Turkish cinema, and cinematic animals. Amongst her other publications, she is the author of Female Silences, Turkey's Crises: Gender, Nation and Past in the New Cinema of Turkey (2016), co-author of Mustang: Translating Willful Youth (2022), and co-editor of Queer Tahayyül [Queer Imagination] (2013). 

Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz, The Uses of Documentary and Based-on-a-True-Story Format 

This paper argues that film criticism, especially the various uses of documentary and based-on-a-true-story formats in cultural analysis, largely contributed to the development of certain influential theories around identity and subjectivity. Despite the recurrent appearance of documentaries and hybrid film formats (semi-fiction, autobiography, true-story) in some of the key texts in critical theory about gender, identity, representation and subjectivity, the impact of screen representation in many critical theorists’ works in the larger arena of Cultural Studies has not necessarily attracted much attention. One of the few examples of such an attention is the Film Thinks series published by Bloomsbury. As part of this series, we find investigations on how cinema has been a theoretical tool for specific philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell and Roland Barthes. Inspired by this approach, my current writing considers Judith Butler’s work around identity as a case study. Situating the role of screen representation within Butler’s writings, I discuss how the medium seems to serve as a methodology for Butler to investigate in what ways social norms naturalise certain identity categories and exclude others. There is an underlying question I would like to ask here: Considering the role of documentary and based-on-a-true-story films in Butler (and the influence of their theories in the development of queer theory), can we talk about the overarching function of screen representation in Humanities at large as a research method?

Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz: I am currently an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (Level 1) at University College Dublin. I received my doctoral degree in Film Studies in 2021 from the University of Galway where I also tutored and lectured in the field of film studies, moving image and digital media throughout my PhD (2017-2021). I presented and published on the interactions of queer theory, subcultures and film studies in a number of venues, most recently in Jump Cut, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, CineJ Cinema Journal, Punk and Post-Punk Journal and acted as a series editor of the research cluster “MOVE: Subcultures, Movements, Aesthetics” on ASAP/Journal. My monograph Judith Butler and Film: Gender, Cinematic Limits and Embodied Experience is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. 

Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz, Rebecca Harrison, Christa VanRaalte, Phil Mathews, Agnieszka Piotrowska, Neil Percival, ROUNDTABLE: Ethics and Praxis – Sustainable Futures 

This roundtable will focus on workplaces and the ethics of praxis. It will consider matters such as workplace bullying, gender-based violence, the ethics of filmmaking, and the value of inclusive practice and pedagogy. 

Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz: I am currently an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (Level 1) at University College Dublin. I received my doctoral degree in Film Studies in 2021 from the University of Galway where I also tutored and lectured in the field of film studies, moving image and digital media throughout my PhD (2017-2021). I presented and published on the interactions of queer theory, subcultures and film studies in a number of venues, most recently in Jump Cut, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, CineJ Cinema Journal, Punk and Post-Punk Journal and acted as a series editor of the research cluster “MOVE: Subcultures, Movements, Aesthetics” on ASAP/Journal. My monograph Judith Butler and Film: Gender, Cinematic Limits and Embodied Experience is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. 

Rebecca Harrison is a feminist film historian and film critic based at The Open University, where she is Lecturer in Film & Media. She has written about reimagining film canon in the age of #MeToo (‘Fuck the Canon,’ 2018), reported on industry responses to gender-based violence for Sight & Sound, and interrogated how survivors are positioned in the academy for MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. In 2021, she organised a workshop series that aimed to prevent campus GBV. She has discussed the problem in international news media, consulted on GBV issues for UCU, and continues to call for change.  

Christa van Raalte is Associate Professor of Film and Television at Bournemouth University. Her research interests include constructions of gender in action cinema, narrative strategies in complex TV, and working conditions in the film and television industries. She has recently published articles on these topics in journals including the New Review for Film and Television Studies, the Journal of Popular Film and Television and Media industries, as well as a number of book chapters and industry reports.   

Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award-winning BBC trained -filmmaker and a theorist. She is a Reader in Film at SODA, Manchester School of Art,, and a Visiting Professor in Film at the University of Gdansk, Poland.  She is the Former Head of the School for Film, Media and the Performing Arts at the UCA, UK  She was the Director of the global network ‘s conference Visible Evidence held  in the summer of 2022 at the University of Gdansk.  Piotrowska has written extensively on psychoanalysis and cinema and is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film (2014, Routledge.)  Its Second Edition in will be published in 2023.   

Phil Mathews is postgraduate framework leader and deputy head of department for media production at Bournemouth University. Mathews gained his practice-based doctorate in screenwriting in 2018 and prior to this wrote for film and television, and co-wrote the BAFTA nominated short ‘Soft’, 2006. Mathews’ research interests cover decolonisation, creative collaboration, romance genre, screenwriting practice and theory. Recent conference papers include: Motivation and character arcs. A truly global approach or the pervasiveness of a western narrative hegemony? SRN 2022.  Decolonising production practices, NAHEMI 2022.   

Martin Hall, Form Meets Message: Documentary Style and Social Justice in Agnes Varda’s Feature Work  

From her very first feature Varda was celebrated for her ‘combination of documentary simplicity and modern stylisation’ (qtd in Conway, 2015: 3). This paper seeks to explore the way in which Varda’s films use documentary sensibilities to deliver messages of social justice. Whilst it is in documentaries, the form characterised as ‘the flagship for a cinema of social engagement and distinctive vision’ (Nichols, 2017) that lessons of social justice are most readily perceived, feature cinema it must be said, has a similar yet often overlooked potential.   

Where La Pointe Courte (1955) evokes the observational work of Neorealism and Vagabond (1985) interrogates socio-economic critique, it has been said of The Gleaners and I (2000) that ‘weird and amusing moments morph into Varda’s tone, which is whimsical. Never in anger or revolt, and perhaps only once seriously advocational’ (Harrow, 2020: 72). Varda’s ability is to wield both the documentarian and feature language and to deliver a singular voice which eschews ‘tired tropes from the tradition of politically critical documentaries’ (Conway: 76); a voice which produces work with a naturalist structure highlighting Varda’s didactic style which lends itself to messages of social justice.   

Martin Hall is the Course Leader for the Film Studies and Media & Communication BA programmes and the Film and Screen Studies MA at York St John University. He is the Co-Leader of the ‘Cinema and Social Justice Project’ and the Principal Investigator on a UKRI and SIGN funded Socio-Economic Injustice Film Curation project. Since completing his PhD in the field of 1960s British and European Art cinema he has published on the works of François Truffaut, Ray Bradbury, Roman Polanski, Tony Richardson, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Elaine May and Woody Allen.  

Eleanor Halsall, Experimenting in colour: The film studio as laboratory in Germany  

Germany’s turn to sound film had not followed a smooth transition and, with this in mind, Ufa’s board began early plans to achieve excellence in colour film development as a matter of national pride. Planning Ufa’s first colour feature film, Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten, 1941 (Women are Better Diplomats) involved negotiations with Agfa and Afifa; the former as part of a cooperation pact, the latter to ensure the laboratory could handle colour processing of Agfa’s Pantachrom film satisfactorily. In order to guarantee correct sound recording, a parallel version was filmed in black and white. Alexander von Lagorio, a practitioner-inventor who already held several patents in the field was chosen as the cinematographer. Shooting began in July 1939 but constant technical modifications demanded by Babelsberg’s own colour specialists required numerous re-takes and additional shooting days before the film could be screened in October 1941. This led to complications with the availability of the stars, Marika Rökk and Willy Fritsch, as well as director Georg Jacoby. Contracts were extended and one-off fees proffered to keep the project afloat. Although projected costs rose from 1.45 million Reichmarks to 3.8 million, the film’s significance for the regime ensured that it received priority. This paper explores the film’s status as an object of experimentation and technological refinement and considers how this affected cast and crew when the studio became a laboratory.  

Eleanor Halsall is a Research Associate at the University of Southampton researching German film studios as part of the STUDIOTEC project. She completed her PhD at SOAS on Indo-German film relations and the founding of the Bombay Talkies in 1934. She has contributed chapters for The German Cinema Book, (2020); The Bombay Talkies Limited: Akteure – deutsche Einflüsse – kulturhistorischer Kontext, (2021); and An Unseen History of Indian Cinema (publication due 2023). Her current research interests include women in German film studios, with particular focus on the role of the studio secretary and the impact of employment laws on the studio system.  

Janet Harbord, Sustainability-Neurodiversity-Cinema  

The concept of ‘disability gain’ originates in the collection of essays Deaf Gain, edited by Dirkson, Bauman and Murray, and subtitled Raising the Stake for Human Diversity (2014). The introduction presents a persuasive argument that deafness brings perceptual opportunities and advantages over hearing culture, guarding against the perils of monocultural vulnerability. Clearly the argument runs parallel to the environmental advocacy of biodiversity, with both articulations concluding with the same call for heterogeneity or manifoldness. The question I wish to ask in this forum is whether cinema can be said to support neurodiversity, or whether cinema takes the form of neurotypical apprehension. This question is asked of the Hungarian film On Body and Soul (Ildikó Enyedi, 2017), a film whose main character is an autistic woman negotiating a diegetic world of a slaughterhouse, off-set by an involuted oneiric world where species meet.   

Janet Harbord is Professor of Film at Queen Mary University of London. She is currently co-lead of the collaborative research project Autism through Cinema, and is the author of Film Cultures (Sage, 2002), The Evolution of Film (Polity, 2007), Chris Marker: La Jetée (Afterall MIT, 2009), Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Autism and the Empathy Epidemic (forthcoming Bloomsbury Medical Humanities, 2024). 

Robert Hardcastle and Andrew Vallance, Questions of imagination and process: The potential of film practice pedagogy to challenge existing modes of production in the context of the climate emergency 

It is now accepted that current film production practices are unsustainable and new formulations need to be found that address the climate crisis. The issue’s primary reporting is concerned with industrial film productions, which is undoubtedly important, but this top down approach needs to be balanced with more inclu- sive and imbedded solutions. Therefore, a pedagogic perspective, which considers whether learning initiatives can influence production methods, is timely. This arti- cle proposes that through this engagement alternative practices can be developed.  

Robert Hardcastle is Senior Lecturer in Film Production at Arts University Bournemouth. His practice-based interdisciplinary research is about devising creative methodologies to explore the role of sound in the creation of place and identities, and to provide new perspectives by re-imagining and re-enacting silenced or missing voices. Robert has worked as a sound designer and re-recording mixer, most recently on television documentary films.  

Andrew Vallance is MA Film Practice course leader and associate professor at Arts University Bournemouth. He is also an artist, curator and writer. He co-founded Contact with Simon Payne and together they have developed numerous projects initially Assembly: A Survey of Recent British Artists’ Film and Video, 2008-13 (Tate Britain) and most recently the publication Film Talks: 15 Conversations on Experimental Cinema (Contact, 2021).  

Rebecca Harrison and Syuhaida Mohamed Yunus, Metals, Mouldings, and Trash Compactors: Artoo Detoo and the Environmental Impact of Star Wars  

Whether sharing messages in A New Hope (1977), or supplying data to the Resistance in The Force Awakens (2015), plucky droid Artoo Detoo helped save many fictional worlds from colonial exploitation in the Star Wars movies. However, while the effects of his on-screen actions are discussed widely in discourse about the franchise, Artoo’s material impacts on our planet warrant closer examination. For every version of the iconic silver-blue droid – including a 1980 metal prop and a computer-generated asset from 2002 – has made its mark on the environment by way of mining for metal components, reliance on the petrochemical industries, waste products, and energy-intensive storage facilities.   

Consequently, this paper responds to the conference call to consider sustainability in screen production by asking three main questions. What materials and manufacturing techniques did practitioners use to make different versions of Artoo Detoo? How can comparing the environmental impacts of analogue and digital practices help filmmakers work more sustainably? And why does historical data matter?  

In answering these questions, our presentation draws on scholarship (Bozak, 2012; Vaughan, 2019; McWhirter, 2022), archival sources, filmmaker interviews, and life-cycle assessments of Artoo assets created with sustainability consultants at BAFTA albert. We argue that interdisciplinary research into historic filmmaking practices is crucial to how scholars and practitioners understand the industry’s environmental impacts to date. Moreover, by interrogating assumptions about the green credentials of analogue and digital techniques, we propose that academics can better support eco-friendly filmmaking in future.   

Rebecca Harrison is a feminist film historian and film critic based at The Open University, where she is Lecturer in Film & Media. Her research explores the systems of power and networks of resistance that inform how media are designed, made, used, and understood by different groups of people. She has published two books (From Steam to Screen, 2018; BFI Film Classics: The Empire Strikes Back, 2020) and numerous scholarly and public-facing articles. She is leading the AHRC-funded Environmental Impact of Filmmaking Project, which investigates the lifecycles of props and costumes made for the Star Wars franchise.   

Syuhaida Mohamed Yunus is Research Associate on The Environmental Impact of Filmmaking (EIF) project at The Open University. She is an Environmental Scientist specialising in the application of analytical chemistry and the impacts of pharmaceutical waste in the environment and on human health, and her research appears in publications including Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and Atmospheric Environment. She has consulted for a range of academic and industry partners, and provides the EIF project with lifecycle assessments of props, costumes, and their constituent materials.  

Simon Harvey and Kingsley Marshall, Long Way Back: Developing working principles for crewing feature film production with higher education students. 

“If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn’t pass that up when it comes your way.” – Regina King (The Wrap 2018: 45)  

Since the release of the feature film Weekend Retreat (Dir. Brett Harvey 2011), produced by Simon Harvey, students and graduates at Falmouth University have worked on over a dozen feature film and high end TV projects as part of direct opportunities presented by staff, through directly produced, co-produced or partnered projects via the Sound/Image Cinema Lab, a research centre based at the university.   

Using our three most recent projects – the feature films Enys Men (Dir. Mark Jenkin 2022), which premiered in Cannes as part of Director’s Fortnight in 2022 and is due for release January 2023 through the BFI and Long Way Back (Dir. Brett Harvey 2021) that was released in cinemas in 2022, together with a coproduction of the short film The Birdwatcher (Dir. Ryan Mackfall 2022) as case studies, we apply a production studies approach in the vein of those highlighted by Banks, Conor & Mayer (2016). Through interviews with participants, we contextualise placements through a research overview that “take[s] the lived realities of people involved in media production as the subjects for theorizing production culture” (Mayer, Banks & Caldwell, 2009, 4). We consider how these projects have served as a catalyst for both learning gain, provided confidence in seeking out other opportunities, and have helped industrial partners and production companies reconsider their approaches to entry level talent.  

Simon Harvey is the Associate Director with Kneehigh, Associate Artis for Hall for Cornwall and Artistic Director of o-region, a Cornwall-based theatre and film production company, which has produced original works since 2002. 0-region’s latest feature film Long Way Back, was released in cinemas in 2022. He has worked as professional director for the last twenty years, with a diverse portfolio of experience which includes small scale rural touring through to mid-scale international touring, working with theatres all over the UK, Australia and the USA. Simon has a strong interest in story telling, physical comedy and ensemble work, and works with both text and devised material. He has worked as an associate lecturer on the Film and Theatre courses at Falmouth University for over a decade. 

Kingsley Marshall is an academic and producer based in Cornwall specialising in the production of short and micro-budget feature films. He is Head of Film & Television at the School of Film & Television at Falmouth University, and a member of the Sound/Image Cinema Lab – a research centre that develops short and feature film projects, involving students, graduates, and the local community. Most recently, Kingsley worked as executive producer on the feature film Enys Men (dir. Mark Jenkin, 2022), which premiered in Cannes as part of Director’s Fortnight in 2022 and scheduled for release through BFI and Neon in 2023.  

Júlia Havas and Nick Jones, Dystopian Futures on Hungarian Soundstages: Technology and Support Work in Runaway Productions  

Over the past decade, Hungary has become the second largest hub in Europe after London for Hollywood runaway productions. Blockbuster productions such as The Martian (2015), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), Gemini Man (2019), Black Widow (2021), Dune (2021), and the first seasons of The Terror (2018), The Witcher (2019), and Shadow and Bone (2021) have all taken advantage of the country’s tax incentives, cheap non-unionized local labour, and lax regulation of working conditions (Sayfo 2020; Imre 2012). Meanwhile, Hollywood’s outsourcing of its screen production to Hungary ideologically benefits the Hungarian state: it serves to neutralise critiques of Viktor Orbán’s regime as anti-West through its involvement in global media production chains.   

As these examples attest, this transnational outsourcing is the purview of science fiction, fantasy, and horror productions whose narratives revolve around elaborate digital world-building and VFX. These fantasies of spatial exploration are in some ways media heterotopias: fluidly global, yet distinct spaces assembled from international labour supply chains (Chung 2017). However, it is not the VFX and CGI animation expertise that Hungarian workforces provide to digital world-building but the soundstages and traditional below-the-line production skills supporting it. In this paper, we critically examine the ethical dimensions of this division of labour, and the extent to which it leaves traces on the texts themselves. To do this, we unpack how Hungary and its screen workforce become one element in a technological system generating globally legible visions of the West’s digital future, as imagined by that West.  

Júlia Havas is Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of York. She is the author of Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television (Wayne State UP 2022). She has published on Anglo-American television, the gender and race politics of popular media, streaming culture, Eastern Europe in film and TV, and the transcultural travel of media in Television and New Media, MAI, VIEW, Animation Studies, and various edited collections.  

Nick Jones is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television, and Digital Culture at the University of York. He is the author of Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory (Routledge, 2015), Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture (Columbia, 2020) and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (Edinburgh, 2023). His work on action filmmaking, VFX, digital media, spatial theory, and 3D has also been published in a wide range of journals and edited collections.  

Natalie Hayton, Democratising Adaptations and Discovering the Archive: confronting issues of ethics, representation, custodianship and copyright in the creation of a Genetic Edition of Andrew Davies’ 1994 BBC adaptation of George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch   

Archival catalogues and online resources can be thought of as adaptive gateways to primary resources, where descriptions and metadata can provide an interpretive representational function as well as meticulously record details of provenance, format, and rights. While such a stance invokes debates surrounding the pursuit of objectivity, once valorised across the archive sector, this approach has been readily adopted by the team of the AHRC-funded project to create a Genetic Edition of Andrew Davies’ 1994 BBC adaptation of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871-2).  

This paper will interrogate the online scholarly Edition’s democratising aim to provide an Open Access full production history that foregrounds the collaborative nature of the process of adaptation using archival material. An exploration of how it selects, integrates and showcases previously, un/published resources while contextualising them within an interpretive framework reveals how confronting issues surrounding archival custodianship, copyright and provenance complements that aim.  

Discovering, aggregating and adapting a range of archival media throughout the course of the development of the Edition has seen the whole team engaged in its own process of adaptation as well as archival practices of appraisal and selection. But what has led those far from objective decisions? How do we choose what to ‘keep’ and how to represent it?   

Natalie Hayton is an Archivist in Special Collections at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Having completed her PhD in English and Adaptation Studies at De Montfort University in 2013, Natalie secured a post-doctoral position to co-organise and launch the Andrew Davies archival collection. Qualifying as an archivist in 2020 from the University of Dundee, she is a member of the Archives and Records Association (UK and Ireland). Her research interests include archives and pedagogy, appraisal theory and the democratisation of the archive.   

Matthew Hilborn, 'Controversies of the Streaming Age – Spain and the Torrente Saga (dir. Santiago Segura, 1998, 2001, 2005, 2011, 2014)' 

This paper explores the ongoing anxieties in Spanish cinema over how best to preserve, remember, or forget its offensive, cinematic bogeyman: the outrageously fascist, racist, sexist ex-cop “Torrente”. From 1998-2014, this obese, politically-incorrect monstrosity starred in five blockbuster films, becoming by far its highest-grossing franchise ever. Nevertheless, the establishment largely snubbed this awkward eyesore (Merás 2014), a polemical inclusion within film histories that, debut notwithstanding, was largely snubbed for key awards. Yet, while an American remake starring Sacha Baron Cohen has seemingly vanished, and foul-mouthed copycats have failed to land, rumours of Torrente 6 have persistently circulated in recent years, fomented not least by its actor, creator, and director, Santiago Segura, who claimed, in late 2022, to have completed a script. Moreover, continuing parodies and retrospectives (e.g., Fotogramas’ 2021 showcase), and the rise of the arguably ‘Torrentian’ far-right party Vox, demonstrate enduring relevance. Discussing the ethical burdens on streaming services, and taboo viewing ‘as social practice’ (Jenks 1995: 2) combining scopophilia and scopophobia, I explore a deliberate purpose to offend, asking, What do we do with Torrente? The most ‘representative’ national franchise, featuring sharp sociopolitical satire, a who’s who of Spanish acting talent, and cameos from celebrities, politicians, and sportspeople – and, simultaneously, the most distasteful comedy imaginable? In 2020-21, streaming services FlixOlé, Filmin, and Netflix ES added the saga: moves so controversial that senior executives offered public justifications, and star Neús Asensi came out to complain about her treatment on-set 20+ years prior. Lately, Segura has pivoted toward feminist, family-friendly comedies, playing gentler fathers learning respect for motherhood. Yet, is Spain ready to shun white-supremacist, machista terror in favour of women, minorities, and immigrants? Or, despite its protestations, does it crave more Torrente? 

Matthew Hilborn is an interdisciplinary researcher at King’s College, London, specialising in European Film, Media & Cultural Studies, His AHRC-funded PhD thesis, ‘Side-Splitting: Humour and National Identity in Contemporary Spanish Cinema’, completed in 2021, explores the ubiquity, evolution, and political impact of comedy across the last 50 years of Spanish film, tracing how laughter can defuse but also intensify sociopolitical tensions at key junctures in national history. His current project, ‘Screen Encounters with Britain’ (AHRC), investigates how transnational video-on-demand services like Netflix and YouTube affect the nature and extent of European audiences' digital encounters with the UK. 

Simon Hobbs and Megan Hoffman, Confronting a Genre: The Ethical Implications of Post #MeToo True Crime  

The current fascination with true crime sits uneasily in a society still newly attuned to concerns with systemic violence and misogyny brought to light by the #MeToo movement. Across the contemporary media landscape, stories of serial killers, family annihilators and puzzling cold cases vie to intrigue and entertain audiences with familiar true crime tropes that centre male killers and fetishise a forensic focus on the destroyed female body. However, against a backdrop of civil activism, some true crime producers are challenging the ethical issues that have plagued the genre. These new narratives shift the focus from killers to victims and to the systemic failures that made those victims vulnerable to violent crime.   

In order to critically assess the success of such productions in challenging the true crime genre’s exploitative tendencies, this paper focuses on Joe Berlinger’s Confronting a Serial Killer (2021). We explore how the show’s host, Jillian Lauren, uses her own experiences with domestic abuse and sex work to question serial killer Sam Little’s own self-narration, giving voice to otherwise disenfranchised victims and lending both authority and sensitivity to her discussions of the systemic violence, racism and misogyny that defined his crimes. In doing so, we identify Confronting a Serial Killer as a key text in a new wave of ethical true crime production which uses strategies shaped by the #MeToo movement to contest male-dominated narratives of violence.  

Simon Hobbs is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of Portsmouth. His research areas include extreme art cinema, fandom, material culture, and true crime. His work has been published in several edited collections and journals, including Transnational Cinemas (Taylor & Francis, 2015), Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critiquing Violent Crime in the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and Crime Fiction Studies (2022). He is the author of Cultivating Extreme Art Cinema: Text, Paratext and Home Video Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).  

Megan Hoffman is an independent scholar. Her research interests include crime fiction, true crime, popular culture and gender studies. She is the author of Gender and Representation in British 'Golden Age' Crime Fiction: Women Writing Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her work has also been published in journals and edited collections including Crime Fiction Studies (2022), Critiquing Violent Crime in the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 100 British Crime Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 100 American Crime Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Murdering Miss Marple: Essays on Gender and Sexuality in the New Golden Age of Women’s Crime Fiction (McFarland & Co., 2012).  

Christopher Holliday, “A poor attempt to replicate my work”: The remixed soundcapes of digital de-aging 

Within the VFX spectacle of Hollywood cinema’s expanding digital de-aging processes, a vital (if  often overlooked) component of the virtual recreation of youth has been the application of archival voice recordings, synthesized speech technology, and machine learning to seamlessly ‘cast’ popular stars as their younger selves. Sidestepping any requirement for secondary vocal impersonations, the digitised re-conjuring of youthful star sound in popular film and television  (mirroring the rise of posthumous voicework in recent animated features) has been facilitated by sophisticated developments in sound recording technologies, from increased storage capabilities to audio-mixing techniques. The emergence of specialised companies (such as Ukrainian tech startup Respeecher and U.S.-based Replica Studios, Descript, and Modulate) has also helped to develop voice-altering technologies and provide modulated voice cloning to accompany Hollywood’s  pristine de-aged visuals. This paper explores the sonic dimension of the de-aged virtual body within contemporary media culture’s increasingly post-mortem soundscape. It argues that such de-aged voicework is firmly implicated in the broader “ethical and aesthetic uncertainty” of de-aging  technologies, including the “ethical (and legal) questions” regarding the “respectful” posthumous  application of a star’s image and vocal performances after death (Holliday 2022: 220). By examining the relationship between a star’s potent vocal signature and intellectual copyright – alongside the vexed relationship between property law and “the commercial imitation and simulation of recorded sounds” (Gaines 1991: 130) – this paper suggests that the vocal “technological reconstitution” and digital compositing central to computerised “posthumous” performances (Bode 2010) raise further questions about de-aging’s claims to (un)ethical enaction and (dis)embodiment.

Christopher Holliday is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London, specializing in Hollywood cinema, animation history, and contemporary digital media. He has published on digital technology and computer animation, and is the author of The Computer Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (EUP, 2018), and co-editor of the anthologies Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2021). Christopher  is currently researching the relationship between identity politics and digital technologies in popular cinema, and is the curator of the website/blog/podcast www.fantasy-animation.org.  

Bella Honess Roe, Flee (2021), animated documentary and the ethics of empathy  

Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)’s emotional resonance and ‘humanising’ re-telling of a child refugee’s flight from Afghanistan is frequently commented on in its glowing reviews and the film has received an almost overwhelmingly positive response since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021. This paper will explore why this particular refugee story has resonated so strongly with critics and audiences, despite similar stories having been told many times before in documentary, fiction and, especially since start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, on the news. Building on my earlier work on the ‘evocative’ capacity of animated documentary, I will use Flee as a case study to dig deeper into questions of empathy, imagination and ethics.   

Flee is one example of many animated documentaries that give insight into experiences that the majority of viewers will have no personal experience of (in this case, being a child refugee). Many of these types of animated documentaries actively discourage empathy, primarily by not providing individual characters that engage us on an emotional level, and instead enable viewers to know rather than feel what something is like. The response to Flee as ‘humanising’ would suggest that is not the case with this film and that it does invite us to ‘imagine from the inside’ (Eder 2016, 87) and feel with the subjects. However, and as I will explore in this paper, Flee’s anonymising of ‘Amin’ and universalisation of his story, along with its centring of the director raises questions of what and how Flee’s animation is asking us to imagine and emotionally engage with.   

Bella Honess Roe teaches Film Studies at the University of Surrey in the UK. She has published widely on animated documentary, including a 2013 award-winning monograph, and several articles and book chapters. Recently she has been exploring the intersection of imagination, empathy and animated documentary. She is also co-edited Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Animation Studies Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018) and edited Aardman Animations: Beyond Stop-Motion (Bloomsbury, 2020).   

Tanya Horeck, True Crime TikTok: On Ethics and Algorithms  

In the post #MeToo media landscape, true crime representations continue to flourish. Public discussion of the realities of systemic sexual violence has led to greater attentiveness to ethical issues around screening true crime, particularly as it concerns the representation of victims and gendered forms of violence. However, the expansion of true crime across social media platforms, including true crime TikTok, raises new questions about ethics and accountability – especially regarding audience participation in the genre. To date, there are 5.6 billion uses of the hashtag #truecrime on TikTok. This paper explores the rise of true crime TikTok with a focus on content responding to sexual and gender-based violence in true crime cases and TV series. Drawing from recent scholarship on the TikTok algorithm (Abidin 2020; Burgess et. al 2022), the paper analyses a sample of user videos to examine how true crime content creators negotiate the tension between an individualized understanding of sensational criminal cases and an awareness of the broader structural underpinnings of sexual and gender-based violence. What affective publics (Papacharissi 2014) are formed through true crime TikTok and to what extent does the app enable feminist digital activism against rape culture (see Mendes et. al)? The paper addresses these questions through a broader discussion of the role true crime TikTok might play in furthering understanding of a feminist analysis of #MeToo.  

Tanya Horeck is Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film and Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era. She is currently working on a British Academy funded study (with Susan Berridge) on sex, consent, and intimacy coordination in the TV industry.  

Kierran Horner, Existential Conflict versus an Ethical Self: Intersubjective Relations and Mortality in Beauvoir, Sartre and Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7  

Pursuing a central theme of death’s proximity to life, this paper is concerned with the contrasting ways in which Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre depict intersubjective encounters and how death enters into these communications between subjects. Through a close reading of Agnès Varda’s pivotal Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), it argues that the film reflects such ideas of the proximity of death to life, an ethical responsibility for the mortality of others and oscillations between attitudes of subjectivity and objectivity. Resisting the intersubjective antagonism which is inherent in Sartre’s early philosophy as a patriarchal construct, Beauvoir’s version of existentialism presents a reciprocity without conflict within intersubjectivity that amounts to an ethical relation with the Other. This latter relation between subjects is also addressed in Cléo, in which Varda undermines the binary oppositions and (Sartrean) hierarchical frameworks – in which the masculine is subject and the feminine Other – that Beauvoir combats in her signal works. Instead, Cléo embodies attitudes of subject and Other and moves towards an implicitly Beauvoirian viewpoint, accepting her own mortality and her responsibility for the death of the Other. Cléo’s feminine subjectivity is ambivalent, in a state of persistent becoming, an ongoing process of reiteration.  

Kierran Horner’s current research investigates ethical representations of female suicide in post-war European film. Their recent monograph, Haunting the Left Bank (Peter Lang, 2023), takes a feminist-philosophical approach to themes of mortality and intersubjectivity in the films of Varda, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. They held the post of Honorary Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow in Film Studies at King’s College London whilst preparing this book for publication. Engaging with topics such as Pop Art, phenomenology, pregnancy and gendered roles, Kierran has published articles in journals such as L’Esprit createur, Film Philosophy, Studies in French Cinema, Studies in European Cinema, Mise au Point and Film International.  

Yushi Hou, The environment in Contemporary Chinese Surveillance Cinema: The “naked city” and Ethics 

This paper borrows Michel Foucault’s Panopticon and the term “surveillance cinema” that I quote from Catherine Zimmer, to consider the representation of urban space in a series of contemporary Chinese crime thrillers related to CCTV monitoring, which I name Chinese surveillance cinema. These surveillance cinemas include Johnnie To’s Drug War (2012), Xu Bing’s Dragonfly’s Eyes (2017), Jia Zhangke’s Ash Is purist White (2017), and Lou Ye’s The Shadow Play (2018). Drawing attention to the urban anxiety originating from all-pervasive surveillance, my research tries to concentrate on the audio-visual representation of CCTV monitoring in these crime thrillers, and how the surveillance elements interact with the crime theme, as well as linking to the profound social-political context in mainland China. These films more or less unveil that when the Skynet Project (Tianwang Project) and the Sharp Eyes Project (Xueliang Project) have been put into effect in PRC under the slogan of Safe City, previous underground orders and imaginary space of “Jianghu” have been crumbled, replaced by a superficial peacefulness brought on by the surveillance network and high-tech police force. However, I argue that a sense of fear, possibly related to the panoramic gaze, invisible monitoring, and the transparency of personal privacy, hence also become a new origin of urban anxiety, permeating through the dark tone of these Chinese crime films. 

Yushi Hou received her PhD at the Film Department, the University of Southampton in 2022. Her PhD thesis is about Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Neo-noir, her research interests also include East Asian cinema, Chinese film industry, genre studies, and cinematic space. She has published on contemporary Chinese femme fatale figure, and female spies in Chinese cold war cinema. 

May Adadol Ingawanij, Animistic Apparatus as a Curatorial Method   

Focusing on her experience of developing Animistic Apparatus as a curatorial method of creating and thinking, May will discuss how this led to her conceptualisation of artists moving image as cosmological poetics attentive to fabulating kinship and figuring space as potency, and attuned to agency in vulnerability. Animistic Apparatus (together with Julian Ross) grew out of her study of the ritual uses of itinerant film projection around Thailand and neighbouring territories since the Cold War period. From that research she began to entertain the idea of an affinity or contemporaneity of sorts between the previous century’s ritual practices of projecting films for spirits, and present-day artists’ moving image practices in and connected with Southeast Asia. As the project took shape, a notion emerged: that artistic and ritual practices might be thought in comparative and relational terms as repertoires of agency for humans who are precarious. Through curatorial practice, we might approach artistic practices as animistic practices that make relations and affirm social bonds connecting those precarious humans with other beings in common, and both practices as related repertoires of agency of the powerless and the displaced in specific conjunctures of colonialism and global capitalism. Like animistic film-projection rituals, artists’ moving image might be thought of as a practice of agency of those precarious and vulnerable humans who seek new orientations toward other possible futures.   

May Adadol Ingawanij // เม อาดาดล อิงคะวณิช is a writer, curator, and teacher. She works on Southeast Asian contemporary art; de-westernised and decentred histories and genealogies of cinematic arts; avant-garde legacies in Southeast Asia; forms of future-making in contemporary artistic and curatorial practices; aesthetics and circulation of artists’ moving image, art and independent films belonging to or connected with Southeast Asia. She is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Westminster where she co-directs the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media. Recent curatorial projects include Legacies, Animistic Apparatus. Recent writings published in Afterall, Screen journal, Southeast of Now journal, New Left Review, MIT Press.  

Esther Johnson, DUST & METAL: a cinematic reflection on Vietnam’s love affair with motorbikes 

DUST & METAL (CÁT BỤI & KIM LOẠI) brings together for the first time, a live cinema documentary feature film using little seen archive film from Hanoi-based Vietnam Film Institute (VFI). Directed by Esther Johnson, the project has resulted in a unique partnership with TPD: The Centre for Assistance and  Development of Movie Talents, and with VFI for digitising rare archive film. With a score composed by electronic artist Xo Xinh, and sound design by artist Nhung Nguyễn, the global pandemic has led to creative collaborative co-production methods for the production between the UK, Vietnam and US. 

Funded by the British Council, DUST & METAL steps away from Hollywood’s portrayals of the American/Vietnam War, to instead offer an unorthodox perspective of Vietnam past and present. Alternative perspectives of Vietnamese cultural heritage are told through the synergy of difficult to access archive film, crowd-sourced material, and newly shot footage. At the heart of the research are unfamiliar histories of freedom in Vietnam that connect with the country’s ubiquitous mode of transport: the MOTORBIKE. With a population of 97 million, and 45 million registered motorbikes (the highest in SE Asia) that’s almost one bike for every two people. The countries urban roads and ‘hẻm’ alleys are only accessible by two-wheels. These roads are awash with the transportation of goods of all types and sizes on the back of motorbikes, including washing machines, entire families, and chickens.  

This presentation will comprise extracts from DUST & METAL and discuss the research methodologies used in production, including learnings from the first ever partnership the Vietnam Film Institute has undertaken with an artist and filmmaker. 

Esther Johnson (MA, RCA) works at the intersection of artist moving image and documentary. She is former recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Research Prize, and is Professor of Film and Media Arts at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Esther’s poetic portraits focus on alternative social histories and marginal worlds, to reveal resonant stories that may otherwise remain hidden or ignored. The repositioning of archival material is explored as a way of looking at intangible cultural heritage, and of addressing the relationship between memory and storytelling. Work has exhibited in 40+ countries, and broadcast on BBC and Channel 4. 

Sophia Kanaouti, Arendt’s “political space”: “Killing Eve”, real politics, and the feminist politics of the woman psychopath  

The paper examines Arendt’s notion of “political space”, the democratic “space between men (people, here)” with a view to two juxtaposed instances of violence and corruption: Killing Eve, where the woman psychopath creates a “political space”, a space of democracy and listening, between her and the woman she loves, and the recent political reality of the EU parliament, where two Greek women politicians are being investigated (and one jailed) for corruption. In Killing Eve, Villanelle, the assassin, is vulnerable towards Eve, the woman she desires.  

In the way the story of one of the women members of EU parliament is told, the jailed Eva Kaili puts the blame on her partner (albeit a male partner), and insists she didn’t know he was bringing corrupt money into their home (she does not address the millions her father was carrying in a bag). Desire, in that instance, is not placed within the woman, even though she is a politician and one would expect political feeling to be present. This is a person that is less political, because there is no space left for her own desire: as voters insist on social media, they voted for her not for her ability, but because they desired her.    

How does this fictional psychopathic killer, by definition void of feelings, feel more than corrupt patriarchal politicians? How does corruption fill democratic “political space” with the selfish self, in an aimless task of being without other people? How does Killing Eve subvert the self through desire? How does desire create “political space” in Killing Eve?  

Sophia Kanaouti teaches media and politics and gender / social exclusion at the University of Athens and the University of Crete in Greece. She is a 2018 and a 2022 Fellow of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry of The New School for Social Research, New York, and a 2021 Democracy and Diversity Fellow of the same institution. She is finishing a book on the Structural Elements of Sexism: Women and Politics, and her most recent article is coming out from Brill in 2023: “A Media Pandemic: Sexualised Right-Wing Politics and Mis-sublimation" 

Tina Kandiashvili, “Something Terrible about Reality”: Environment and Plato’s Epistemology in Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964)  

Environmental films often draw one-sided connections between humans and nature. Humans are villainized for destroying the ecological future of the planet and hence are faced with an ethical responsibility to stop violent actions against it. The conflict usually highlights the idea of physical damage that has been applied to nature, which, in turn, can cause physical extinction of life on Earth. This perspective has popularized many of the urgent environmental concerns, yet it limits space for further investigation of the complex relationship of humans with the environment, including the question of the environment's effect on spirituality and knowledge. Hence, the present paper aims at drawing connections between environment, ethics, and epistemology by applying Plato’s Phaedrus to the analysis of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). In the dialogue, Plato views ‘beauty’ (kallos) as the primary trigger that enables the ‘soul’ (psūkhḗ) to experience ‘love’ (eros), allowing it to recall the world of ‘Forms’(eidos) and reach the highest form of knowledge (noesis). As I will argue, Antonioni represents ‘beauty’ through nature, the damage of which makes it impossible for ‘soul’ Giuliana (Monica Vitti) to love and thus return to the world of ‘Forms’. As she says: “There’s something terrible about reality”. The aim of this paper is first of all to introduce Platonic thought to the study of Antonioni’s oeuvre, which, more broadly, spotlights the relevance of Ancient philosophy to film studies. More importantly, however, it intends to highlight the importance of film in presenting original approaches to the environmental question.  

Tina Kandiashvili is a second-year PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh researching Søren Kierkegaard’s ethical theory in Lars von Trier’s cinematic oeuvre. At the same university, Tina has earned an MSc in Film Studies and an MA in Philosophy and Theology. Currently, Tina is a guest lecturer at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs, teaching the postgraduate course: “Political Thought and Cinema”. At the University of Edinburgh, she is a tutor for the “Introduction to European Cinema” and “Bible in Literature” courses. Her research interests include the intersections between film and philosophy and film and religion. 

Joanne Knowles, ‘Essential stuff’: TV reviews in Just Seventeen and the framing of TV for teenage girls  

This paper examines TV reviews from the girls’ magazine Just Seventeen between 1983-1987 drawn from the Femorabilia archive of twentieth-century girls’ and women’s magazines, held at Liverpool John Moores University, exploring issues raised by archives of TV reviews and previews for particular audiences. It addresses questions about the sustainability, ethics and necessity of such archival research on the presumed reception of TV by young viewers, and the ability of such magazines to embody a different kind of ‘screen archive’.  

Historically girls’ comics and magazines have been undervalued both financially and culturally (Gibson, 2015) meaning that although they were hugely popular and widely consumed, their preservation has been precarious. This has the further consequence that our contemporary critical view of them is strongly shaped by existing research studies such as Angela McRobbie’s seminal work on Jackie (1978). While research has analysed the ‘code of pop’ (McRobbie, 1990) in magazines like Jackie, little attention has been paid to these magazines’ representation of screen media and their framing of how their audience might engage with popular film and television. 

This paper would focus on the archives of Just Seventeen from 1983-1987, in which TV reviews and previews became a regular feature, and when a period in which teenagers were being more widely acknowledged as also being television viewers with increasing agency with regard to family viewing choices, to examine what was offered to its readership as ‘essential stuff’.  

Joanne Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture, Communication at Liverpool John Moores University. She is interested in popular media and culture from the 19th century to the present day, particularly in relation to gender and narrative. She has published on seasonality and television in the Journal of Popular Television and for Viewfinder, and her latest article, on girls’ magazines, fashion and public space, is forthcoming in Film, Fashion and Consumption.  

Mustafa Kocabinar, Challenging Stereotypes: The Representation of Henry V in David Michôd’s The King (2019)  

This paper examines David Michôd’s The King (2019) in terms of its representation of masculinity. Previous heroic depictions of Henry V attempted to rouse the patriotic spirits of British audiences. Thus, Laurance Olivier’s Henry V (1944) offered a morale booster for British audiences in the second world war, while Kenneth Branagh in Henry V (1989) depicted the king’s journey from his youth to learning how to be a ‘true’ king for his nation. Played by Timothée Chalamet, the depiction of Henry V in The King offers a ‘softer’ version of masculinity, with less emphasis on violence, stoicism, and muscular performance. This paper seeks to explore the depiction of Henry V in The King in terms of the cultural barometer charting shifts in discourses of masculinity in the 2010s. Combining textual and contextual analysis, I explored how the film responds to contemporary Western society through reworking stories of the past. Drawing on the work of film scholars such as Claire Monk, James Chapman and Sue Harper, I employ contextual analysis to explore the representation of Henry V in The King within the context of star studies and historical film approaches. I also consider the film’s production (e.g. its international cast and crew) and global distribution on Netflix.  

Mustafa Kocabinar: I am a PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Southampton. My research is based on the representation of British Kings in Cinema. In conjunction with the purpose of my study, I emphasize the construction of British Kings in terms of the cultural barometer charting shifts in discourses of masculinity in Western Culture in the 2010s – I specifically focus on Hollywood and British Cinema.  

Astrid Korporaal, Material Beings: Decolonial Roleplay in the work of Ana María Millán and Erika Tan  

Screens have long been regarded as portals into other worlds or visions of the future. Decoloniality asks what the material costs are of creating new worlds and who is given the power to shape our future. Ariella Azoulay has shown that image-making practices are intertwined with the imperial rights to destroy existing worlds and to manufacture a new one. She proposes that we treat archived images and objects as inscriptions of living, potential worlds. This leaves the question open how we might imaginatively project these recovered worlds, what the material underpinnings of these projections would be, and how we deal with the power dynamics of this process. In this paper, I look at the use of roleplay as a strategy to decolonize and reconnect the process of visualizing potential realities and the material relationships that sustain these realities. I compare Erika Tan’s The Forgotten Weaver (2017) and Ana María Millán’s Trescaras (2017-18). In Tan’s work, a weaver brought to England for the Empire Exhibition (1924) becomes a proxy for the artist, inverting the convention of the present speaking for the past. In Millán’s work, the Colombian comic supervillain SnowFlame is reinvented through collaborative motion capture. I argue that in both works, the screen becomes a medium for divestment from the abstract imagination that erases existing worlds. The work of making a figure stand in for an entire lifeworld and reducing a lifeworld to a dehumanized figure is hijacked to reclaim and sustain expanded, multiply inhabited versions of these worlds.   

Astrid Korporaal is a curator, researcher and writer completing an AHRC-funded PhD at Kingston University, in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Entitled Peripheral Visions: Reframing the Margins in Film and Film Festival Ecologies, the project is centered on experimental collaborative practices in contemporary moving image production and presentation. She also holds an M.A. in Global Arts from Goldsmiths University in the United Kingdom and a B.A. in Arts, Culture and Media from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Previously, she was Curator of Education Partnerships at the ICA, Co-Founder and Director of Almanac Projects in London and Turin, and Assistant Curator of nomadic curatorial collective FormContent, among other roles. She has written articles for publications such as Art Monthly, Arte e Critica, Performance Paradigm and NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies. 

Richard Langley, Albert, Employablity and the Elephant in the Room  

In recent years, ‘employability’ has become a key idea in UK HE, with an increasing emphasis on universities to help students develop certain skills, attributes and capabilities (which usually lie beyond the specific remits of their degree programme) to prepare them for the twenty-first century workplace. Thought of another way, employability concerns preparing students with an understanding of the ‘rules of the game’. The emphasis, pedagogically, is on giving students skills and strategies to be able to adapt themselves as ‘players’ – not on questioning the nature of the game.   

One of the skills we now teach on the MA in Film and TV at the University of Birmingham is BAFTA’s albert training, which teaches students how to use the Carbon Footprint Calculator, alongside wider information about climate change in general. The albert initiative has been, without question, a progressive and necessary change in UK production culture; however, it omits the elephant in the room. In its aim to be scientific, neutral and apolitical, it completely ignores the presence of neo-liberalism and late-stage capitalism (and their obsessions with notions of growth and progress), and the systemic changes required, for example, to meet UK net zero commitments. The emphasis in the teaching, again, is on the individuals (as students and as productions) to adapt the way they play the game, rather than the game itself. It’s time to address the elephant.  

Richard Langley is currently Programme Convenor for the MA Film and Television Production at the University of Birmingham. He did his first degree, in American and Canadian Studies, and both his MPhil and PhD at University of Birmingham, undertaking the latter part-time so that he could pursue other interesting career opportunities. Consequently, Richard has had a broad-based work experience across the culture sector, in arts centres, museums, television development and video production. As well as his own experiments in the development of an audio-visual academia, Richard has worked in a range of freelance roles (camera, edit, production) and across a range of genres (sports, comedy, drama, current affairs).  

Richard Langley, Muriel Tinel-Temple, Dominic Topp and Ted Wilkes, ROUNDTABLE: Video Essays as Assessment 

This panel on the use of video essays in teaching and assessment within Film and cognate subjects will consist of short (5mins) presentations from each of the panellists followed by a roundtable discussion and opportunity for audience participation. 

Video essays are becoming a commonplace method of assessment within our discipline(s), contributing to its sustainability and expansion by supporting student diversity and different learning preferences, offering new ways of analysing moving images, building multimedia skills through 'authentic assessment', and varying assessment types beyond the traditional essay. We envision this panel as an opportunity to share experiences and best practice, and to address key issues and challenges arising from this new form of assessment. 

We anticipate the following areas to be raised in discussion 

• the legitimacy of the video essay form for teaching and assessment 

• the balance between critical and creative thinking 

• enabling students to engage with audio-visual objects of study in the same medium, bypassing the ekphrasis of translating them into written or spoken language 

• student needs and diversity 

• module design: incorporating video essays into existing modules versus videographic criticism as standalone practice 

• teaching the video essay and the flipped classroom 

• the value and limitations of assessment rubrics and marking criteria, including student self-marking and peer review 

• legal and ethical considerations: the use of archival and found footage, publishing student work 

• submission processes 

• academic integrity 

• technical facilities and training necessary for staff and students 

Richard Langley is a Lecturer in Film at the University of Birmingham (UK), focused on audio-visual practice-based teaching and research. He was one of the first people at Birmingham to graduate with an AV PhD and designed and delivered the university’s first video essay module in 2015. He also supervises practice-based work at postgraduate level, including numerous MA dissertations and currently seven AV PhD students, who are working across a range of filmic forms – including video essays, documentaries, abstract/experimental and fiction. He also conducts his own experiments in audio-visual academia. 

Muriel Tinel-Temple is Lecturer in Film and Digital Content Creation, University of Roehampton. She mainly teaches ‘critical practice’, and her research explores experimental filmmaking, found footage/archive-based films, self-representation, Francophone cinemas and mediated landscapes. She is the author of Le cinéaste au travail: autoportraits (2016), co-editor of From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Representing the Self in the Moving Image (2019), and she recently published ‘Found Footage and the Construction of the Self: Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD and Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream’ (Ekphrasis, 2021). She organises screenings at Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, including ‘Jacques Perconte: Digital Landscapes’. 

Dominic Topp is a Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Southampton. He previously taught at the University of Kent and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His writing has been published in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind and Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual and in the edited collections Mapping Movie Magazines: Digitization, Periodicals and Cinema History (2020) and Stars, Fan Magazines and Audiences: Desire by Design (forthcoming). He has used audiovisual essay as an assessment method on a variety of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. 

Ted Wilkes is a Screenwriter, Lecturer and Video Essayist from London. He produces work on his YouTube channel Sight Unsound which covers both theoretical and practical areas of Film production. Currently, he teaches at UAL: London College of Communications and Regent’s University, London. His feature screenplay ‘FULFILMENT’ is under option at ArdimagesUK (GOD’S OWN COUNTRY) and received development funding from The Uncertain Kingdom which supports projects that interrogate British culture. He also writes articles on craft and industry intelligence for Screencraft and Arc Studio Pro. 

George Larke-Walsh and Elayne Chaplin, The Ethics of True Crime Adaptation: The Staircase  

This paper explores the ‘migration’ of a true crime story, from crime scene, to book, to documentary and fiction series under the conference topic ‘Ethics’.  It uses the term migration in the fluid sense described by Westerstahl Stenport and Traylor (2015) and Leitch (2022) wherein content “migrates from, to, and between genre, medium and device” (Westerstahl Stenport and Traylor: 75) and considers this process in respect of the ethics of adaptation specifically between documentary and fiction.   

If we consider the adaptations of The Staircase as repositories of interconnected and competing information about events, is there any point in discussing their ethics and the presentation of truths, or is the purpose of such adaptations to simply “add new properties to a social artefact” (90).  Do they “encourage members of their audience to return, more richly informed” (Leitch:5), or do they cancel each other out?    

The texts discussed have a symbiotic relationship in that they all engage with an ‘original’ event that is ill-defined at best. Arguably, the appeal of these texts is that, while the definitive truth remains elusive, each text offers moments, glances, gestures or comments that tease audiences towards a solution.  The ethics of these moments, or ‘hint’ markers if you will, are specific to each format and this paper explores their use and affect in practice.   

George S. Larke-Walsh is a faculty member in Arts and Creative Industries at the University of Sunderland, UK.  She began her academic career in the north east area of the UK, but then moved to the USA, teaching at the University of North Texas from 2004 to 2020.  Her scholarly interests focus on non-fiction and fiction film theories.  Her publishing history includes books and articles on ethics in true crime, as well as the presentation of mythologies, and masculine identities in narratives about the mafia.  

Elayne Chaplin is a staff tutor at the Open University, UK.  Her research interests include the horror genre, in particular the relationship between history, political ideology, and the depictions of monstrousness in film; East Asian cinema including the work of Kitano Takeshi; and more broadly focused on sociohistorical formulations of gendered identity in cinema.    

Dominic Lash, "Privacy, consent, and expression in Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről, 2017)"  

Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul centres on the developing relationship between two employees of a Hungarian slaughterhouse: the new young quality inspector Mária (Alexandra Borbély) and the older financial officer Endre (Géza Morcsányi). Both characters are seen by others as somehow "defective", Endre thanks to his paralysed left arm and Mária because of her autism spectrum disorder. Lilla Tőke has recently written that, despite promising to do something else, the film ends up operating within "a framework that is as gendered as it is ableist". This paper will argue that Tőke acutely pinpoints some problematic aspects of the film, but that she also underestimates the complexity of its relationship to its subject. I will claim that the film resonates with the philosopher Stanley Cavell's reflections on the notions of privacy, consent, and expression, while also suggesting some of their limitations. Cavell draws on Wittgenstein's notion of expression, according to which we do not infer somebody's emotions from their facial expressions, but rather see their emotions in their expressions. I will argue both that something similar can be said about our relationship as viewers towards filmic expression, and that autistic experience profoundly challenges claims of the universality of such accounts, because people with autism spectrum disorder characteristically do make inferences from facial expressions or other bodily gestures. In both its narrative and its form, then, On Body and Soul vividly dramatizes urgent questions about the ways our understanding of films reflects, and might inform, our understanding of one another.  

Dominic Lash is Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Bristol. His first monograph, The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions, was published in 2020 by Edinburgh University Press and his second, Robert Pippin and Film: Ethics, Politics, and Psychology after Modernism by Bloomsbury Academic in 2022. He has published in journals including Screen, Movie, Film-Philosophy, and Open Screens, and taught at the universities of Oxford and Reading, as well as at King's College London, University College London, and Anglia Ruskin University. He is currently writing a BFI Film Classics volume on Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure (1997).   

Giulia Lavarone, The Sustainability of Film-Induced Tourism: Remarks on Italian Case Studies  

Film-induced tourism, i.e. “visitation to sites where movies and TV programmes have been filmed as well as (…) tours to production studios, included film-related theme parks” (Beeton, 2005),  has attracted the interest of public and private bodies operating throughout the world in the tourist and in the audiovisual sector over the last twenty years.  These phenomena have been broadly discussed by academic research within several disciplinary fields, from tourism management to cultural geography and urban anthropology, as well as by media and fan studies.  

The concept of sustainability, explicitly addressed in the most recent contributions on film-induced tourism (e.g.: Tzanelli, 2020; Lundberg and Lindström, 2020; and many others), has been strongly evoked since the early studies in this field, such as Beeton’s (2005), Tzanelli’s (2007) or, in the Italian context, Provenzano’s (2007).   

This paper will briefly recall the different meanings of economic, environmental and social sustainability emerging from the international literature on film-induced tourism. Selected Italian case studies will be subsequently discussed in the light of these concepts, with a particular focus on the phenomena of overtourism associated to the TV series Un passo dal cielo (2011-) at Lake Braies.  

Giulia Lavarone is a research fellow in Film Studies at the University of Padova (Italy), where she participates to the CineLands research projects, devoted to the relationship between media, landscape and tourism. She has authored scholarly articles and chapters in edited books, as well as the two monographs Cinema, media e turismo (PUP, 2016) and Parigi ci appartiene? (PUP, 2022). Among her recent contributions, the chapters in the books The Routledge Companion to Media and Tourism (edited by M. Månsson et al., Routledge, 2021) and Audiovisual Tourism Promotion (edited by A. Leotta and D. Bonelli, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 

Ming-Yu Lee  Essay Film-making in the Age of Anxiety: Letter-Film as a Way of Resistance and Regaining Utopia 

During the world pandemic of Covid-19, the Japanese filmmaker Yuri Obitani and I finished a filmed correspondence, Correspondence: Yuri Obitani/Ming-Yu Lee. In this paper, I aim to discuss the following issues: first, how current world situations including war between Russian and Ukraine and Covid-19 pandemic have profoundly changed the landscape of independent filmmaking in both form and content. Independent filmmakers now adjust their ways of filmmaking to a relatively more personal (diary film) or collective, collaborative way (letter-film). Secondly, how anxieties of the uncertain future, such as anxiously waiting for responses, being eager to be heard or understood, and to be misunderstood, have become a permanent and lingering motif in the letter-film? And how do we understand and express this anxiety in our Correspondence? And third, in Correspondence, how the use of language (Japanese and Chinese), or avoiding using them, has become a narrative strategy in the process of production as a symbol of resistance to a language barrier. Béla Balázs’ once described cinema as “the first international language.” In Correspondence, Yuri Obitani and I have also tried to reestablish this tower of Babel, as a way of regaining the Utopia of cinematic language. 

Ming-Yu Lee is Assistant Professor of Radio, Television and Film at Shih Hsin University, Taipei, Taiwan. He is the author and editor of Paysages du contresens (2010) and The Diary Film and Subjectivity of the Self: Taiwan-New York – Paris (2016), and Crossing Cinema: the Diary Film, the Essay Film, and the Voice of I (2022). He is an independent filmmaker, his film works were selected and won awards in international film festivals and museums, including Liverpool Underground Film Festival (The Underground Award), Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival, VIDEOFORMES, Festival Tous Courts, Taiwan Biennial, and Jeu de Paume. He is also the curator of EX!T 7 – Filming in the Moment: the Diary Film Festival, EX!T 11 – Film Letter: Counterpoint and Echo, and EX!T 12 – My Own 

Private Mekas (cocurator). 

Nikki J.Y. Lee, An Ecocritical Approach to Discourses on the Korean Film Industry:  A Preliminary Exploration of the Environmental Turn 

In this paper, I propose to examine discourses on the contemporary South Korean film industry from an ecocritical perspective. Within the limitations of a preliminary exploration of fast-moving contemporary events, the paper provides an overview of the ecological ramifications of the  ‘anthropocene’ Korean film industry and conceives alternative new paradigms to imagine its future. In the face of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and as part of the Green New Deal (the South Korean government’s new economic scheme), the Ministry of Science and ICT announced a policy  in 2020 to develop the digital media ecology with an emphasis on ‘fairness’ and ‘sustainability’ (Cine 21, 2020. 6. 26). This sub-scheme will shape the transition - and recovery in coming years - of the Korean film industry from its current deep crisis, caused during the pandemic. In these circumstances, the industry’s environmental turn appears to be an imperative. In tandem with it, the fundamental premise of the industry is also due to be altered. 

In engaging such crucial momentum, I intend to critically analyze discourses on the development of the Korean film industry since 2016 when the Paris Agreement on greenhouse-gas-emissions was signed. Principal materials to be consulted include relevant academic research on the industry, including papers commissioned and published by the Korean Film Council, as these key sources provide important data and frameworks, not only for the government’s agenda-setting, but also for Korean and English language scholarly approaches to the industry. I will investigate research concerned with the industry’s growth; and its fairness and sustainability from the vantage point of ‘intersectionality’ while drawing upon T. J. Demos’ emphasis: “The ‘intersectionality’ insists on the inseparability between environmental matters of concern and sociopolitical and economic frameworks of in/justice.” (Demos 2019) 

Nikki J. Y. Lee is Senior Lecturer in Asian Media at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She has  published various articles and book chapters on the globalization of the Korean film industry, inter-Asian film co-production, Korean film directors and stars, and the sound works of Live Tone, South  Korean film sound studio. Her recent chapter on Ryu Seung-wan’s Die Bad was published in Rediscovering Korean Cinema (Michigan University Press, 2019); and she co-wrote a chapter on Heo Young, film director of the Japanese colonial period, which was published in Theorizing Colonial  Cinema: Reframing Production, Circulation and Consumption of Film in Asia (Indiana University  Press, 2022). She is currently working on contemporary Korean blockbusters; and Sino-Korean  filmmaking collaboration. 

Maruša Levstek, Green Planet: XR to Change Minds About Our Planet  

As immersive experiences, such as augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR), are becoming more and more popular, it is important to understand their impact on our society. The impact of media on public opinion is well documented (e.g. Kosho, 2016), however, emerging immersive media is less understood (Spangenberger et al., 2022).   

This session focuses on research conducted with The BBC Earth & Factory 42 Green Planet Augmented Reality Experience, investigating its impact on visitors’ sustainability-related values and behaviours. Visitors were invited to complete a short exit survey at the experience venue. The survey measured their sustainability knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours before and after attending the experience. Visitors' preference for conservation of species featured in the experience was also investigated. Survey participants were approached to participate in a follow-up survey a month later. Additionally, twenty participants were randomly selected to take part in an individual in-depth interview.   

Our results suggest that attending The Green Planet Augmented Reality Experience can have a positive impact on one’s sustainability attitudes and behaviours. However, the interviews revealed a self-selection bias as most visitors were Green Planet and Sir David Attenborough fans. Therefore, many visitors were already highly educated on the issues around sustainability. Potential of immersive experiences in social change will be discussed.   

Maruša Levstek is an XR Audience Researcher at StoryFutures, Royal Holloway, University of London. Maruša has an inter-disciplinary background in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, which she implements in researching the role of immersive experiences in social change. Maruša worked with a range of augmented, mixed, and virtual reality projects, notably the Factory42-BBC Green Planet AR Experience, The National Gallery’s The Keeper of Paintings app, and the StoryTrails project with the BFI, Niantic, and the BBC. 

Maggie Xiaoge Li, Rebuilding Lost Memory in Digital Games  

Along the River During the Qingming Festival is an important artwork in Chinese art history that captures people’s daily life and landscapes in the capital city during the Northern Song periods (960-1127).1 In this paper, I will analyse how this Chinese painting has been represented in digital games, and how the memories that have been captured in this painting become ‘experienceable’ to game players. Ni Shui Han (NetEase, 2018) is a multiplayer online role-playing game on the PC platform, the game scenes directly change this painting from a static scene to a dynamic space. The game player plays a character who lives in this space and has been ‘implanted’ with memories of this world. Therefore, the memories recorded in this painting are not only can be observed but also can be experienced by players. The virtual reality in the game is no longer only restore ‘reality’ from the painting, it builds a memory that connects the player with the bygone era through the interactions between the player and their character, this world is meant to appear ‘real’ and draw the player in and increase the sense of presence.   

Maggie Li is a lecturer in Game Theory at the University for the Creative Arts. She completed her PhD from the University of Southampton, her research focuses on game studies and game culture in China. As Visiting Lecturer she taught on MA Global Media Management in 2021 and has worked as Teaching Assistant for a range of modules in the Film Department. She has been involved in the organisation of several conferences, including the 9th Annual BAFTSS Conference. She has publications on digital games and Chinese game culture, and has forthcoming publications on game sound and music.  

Yuan Li, Man in Love, Woman in Activism: Gender, Politics, and Linguistic Relativity in New Taiwanese Melodrama  

On the poster of Man in Love (2021), one slogan reads, ‘the most heart-rending new Taiwanese romantic melodrama’. Adapted from a Korean film of the same title, Man in Love is transplanted to a Taiwanese-Hokkien speaking context which is located in northern Taiwan. This paper states Man in Love as a part of the new Taiwanese-language cinema and emphasises the bilingual representation of the characters, diverging from the great linguistic and aesthetic divisions between the Mandarin films and Taiwanese language cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. In this paper, I emphasise the Taiwanese Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin in this film are encoded against a gendered background. By using Han Byung-Chul’s The Agony of Eros, this paper analyses how love and romance is pronounced and visually presented by the heroine by crossing the linguistic borders, yet deconstructed by the hero in this film. With the analysis of the code-switching among Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiwanese Mandarin, as well as the farting sound depicted in Man in Love, I argue that the sexuality reflected in the deconstructed ‘new romance’ echoes the anxiety embodied in the previous Taiwanese language cinema. However, unlike the ‘vernacular modernism’ in those films, which has been revealed in Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley’s paper, the new Taiwanese language melodrama captures the self-negotiation of the anxious individuals living in a global discourse of capitalism and consumerism.  

Yuan Li is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Southampton, UK. With the continuous concern for authorship in Taiwan New Cinema, she received her Bachelor’s degree in Film and Television Studies from Beijing Normal University in 2016 and Master’s degree in Film Studies from the University of Southampton in 2017. Her current research interests include transnational Taiwan cinema and languages in Taiwan films. 

Bjarke Liboriussen , The unintended procedural argument for transactional climate change leadership in Civilization VI: Gathering Storm  

The videogame Civilization is an alternative history simulation spanning the period from 4,000 BC to the present day. The latest iteration of the game, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Gathering Storm (Firaxis Games, 2019) includes an ecological dimension by simulating the causal connections between human civilization and global warming.  

Civilization employs what Ian Bogost (2007) calls procedural rhetoric. Classic Aristotelian and written rhetoric persuade through argument, visual rhetoric through images, and “procedural rhetoric is the practice of persuading through processes in general and computational processes in particular” (Bogost, 2007, p. 3). For example, the process whereby coal power plants contribute to climate change is in Civilization represented as a process, an interactive simulation, not just through texts and images.  

The perspective of procedural rhetoric is a useful addition to ecocriticism, but the case of Civilization illustrates how procedural rhetoric might inadvertently argue for a particular type of leadership, namely, transactional leadership (that is, management). The interactivity of videogames entails an active subject position that is often enacted as a commander (who handles critical problems) or a manager (who handles known problems), but rarely as a leader (who handles wicked problems; see Grint, 2010, pp. 12–21 on leadership). Support for a leader’s handling of the “super wicked problem” (Morton qtd. in Bruhn & Gjelsvik, 2018, p. 120) of global warming, which might include drastic lifestyle changes, requires more than calculative compliance based on maximization of self-interest but also a shared understanding of “the common good” (Etzioni, 2018, p. 97).  

Bjarke Liboriussen is Associate Professor in Digital and Creative Media at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China’s School of International Communications. His most recent publications were on the interplay of identity, performance and technologies in creative work and on videogames as popular heritage. Inspired by the film-philosophy of Jacques Rancière, his ongoing research focuses on the connections between cinema and videogames.  

Tim Lindemann , ‘History Isn’t Here Yet‘ – Landscape, Entanglement, and the Nation in First Cow and Meek’s Cutoff  

This paper examines Kelly Reichardt’s historical Westerns Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and First Cow (2019) in terms of their cinematic landscape and responds to the call for an exploration of environmental, democratic, ethical, social, and economic futures in film. It will be argued that the two films fall in line with a recent trend in US indie cinema which approaches marginal rural landscapes from an embodied, interactive perspective of sustainability and care. Reichardt’s two Westerns, both set in the early- to mid-19th century, apply this approach to the ideologically charged terrain of the supposed ‘wilderness’ of the early United States and the process of its imperialist consolidation.  

An ethical approach to landscape is foregrounded in both films: firstly, in relation to its emergence through dwelling and bodily interactivity between a community and its respective environment and, secondly, in terms of its significance for the creation of the United States as a nation state. Therefore, this paper suggests a theoretical approach that is based around close analyses of landscape representation as well as on the writings of geographer Kenneth Olwig. Olwig tracks the meaning of landscape in the West from a social, communal concept based on custom and community to a scenic, disembodied image used in the consolidation of nation states – the Western film is a key example for the latter in the US context. This paper will thus highlight how Reichardt’s two films subvert the scenic landscape tropes of the classical Western to critically reframe US history from the embodied perspective of the oppressed and marginalised. By rethinking the past from subaltern perspectives, the films invite reflections about more cooperative, ethical futures and environments.  

Tim Lindemann is an early career researcher and teaching assistant at Queen Mary University of London. He has previously worked as a research assistant at Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin, and as a curator for Interfilm short film festival. His recently passed Ph.D. thesis analyses depictions of landscape and rural poverty in US indie films. 

Xi Liu, Slow living: re-editing space and time in short videos  

This paper will explore the cottagecore aesthetics of slow living in the famous Chinese Youtubers Li Ziqi and Dianxi Xiaoge’s short videos which showcase ideal everyday life in Chinese villages. The idea of slow living involves ecological and sustainable attitudes toward the pace of contemporary life and the conscious negation of different temporalities which make up everyday lives. Aligning with the key themes of this panel - ecoaesthetics, I will examine how the short videos present human-nature unity in their control of time and space in video-making. This paper includes two sections. I will first compare the images of ‘slowness’ in films and short videos and show the new understandings of ‘stillness’ and ‘slowness’ in short video editing. The key questions are, in the editing process, what subjects are speeded up and what subjects are slowed down, and why they do so. Secondly, I will examine the representations of ‘care’ and ‘attention’ which are maintained between humans, non-human animals, and nature in the videos. I want to explore how care and attention, as the practices of slow living in everyday life, build a sustainable lifestyle.  

Xi Liu is a teaching associate in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her studies focus on Chinese film aesthetics and affect theory and conduct a dialogue between Deleuzian philosophy and Chinese film studies, discussing the construction of space and time both in and beyond the film world. She recently published a book chapter ‘Spatial perception: aesthetics of yijing in transnational kung fu films’ in the book Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization.  

Xi Liu, Steven Roberts, Jaap Verheul, Christina Wilkins, Early Career Researcher & Job Search Support Roundtable: Research and Teaching Pathways 

Teaching-specialist contacts, or roles that are heavily focused on teaching alongside research and administration, are becoming a common pathway in academia. This panel is about focusing on the positives (as well as looking for solutions for the negatives) and the tips and tricks that others have utilized as part of their academic lives when balancing contracts with heavy teaching-loads with other aspects of their careers. We have four speakers, Dr Xi Liu, Dr Christina Wilkins, Dr Jaap Verheul and Dr Steven Roberts, who will each present their experiences and practical advice and we hope to have a positive and enlightening discussion. The aim is to all go away with some good ideas and strategies! This is an inclusive session and all are welcome at any career stage or contract type. 

Xi Liu is a teaching associate in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her studies focus on Chinese film aesthetics and affect theory and conduct a dialogue between Deleuzian philosophy and Chinese film studies, discussing the construction of space and time both in and beyond the film world. She recently published a book chapter ‘Spatial perception: aesthetics of yijing in transnational kung fu films’ in the book Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization. 

Jaap Verheul is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on the formation transnational cinema cultures in European media industries, and how this affects the cultural politics on the screen. Jaap recently edited a collection on The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), which won the Publication Award for Best Edited Collection from the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS). He is currently completing his monograph on the regulation of European screen cultures after 1989.  

Steven Roberts is Lecturer in European and World Cinema (teaching pathway) at the University of Bristol and co-convenor of BAFTSS’ British Cinema and Television SIG. He has published articles and an award-shortlisted book chapter on the history of film technology and style, specialising in widescreen cinema. Before his current lectureship, Steven was an hourly paid teacher at Bristol and then the University of the West of England, completed an AHRC-funded PhD in film, catalogued the Pamela Davies Collection for the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, and researched European film for the ‘MECETES’ project during his MA at the University of York. 

Christina Wilkins is an early-career researcher in film and literature, specialising in adaptations. She has published on mental health, nostalgia, the body, stardom, and queer identities. Her book, Embodying Adaptation: Character and the Body, was released through Palgrave in August 2022. She currently teaches at the University of Birmingham.   

Tom Livingstone, Rigged for Scalability: Game Engines and Sustainable Futures  

This paper will examine the recent cycle of capitalisation and R&D driven by game engine adoption. Taking Aleena Chia’s insight that game engines are “rigged for scalability” I will ask whether game engines’ emergent ubiquity across multiple areas of visual culture, from animation to XR, is compatible with the sustainable futures of screen storytelling.   

The paper will focus on the game engine driven process of Virtual Production, where VFX are rendered in real-time within an LED volume. The process has been used widely in some high-profile productions and has been celebrated as ecologically beneficial. However, I will suggest that paying attention to the aesthetic characteristics of Virtual Production as they escalate and proliferate provides a means of identifying and critiquing potentially unsustainable processes of intensification within game engine use as they are driven by blockbuster productions.  

Scholarly work such as Chia’s (and others) suggests that the proliferation of game engines is underpinned by a logic of platformization. I will assess the dominant framing of game engine use as financially and ecologically beneficial against this logic. As will be evidenced in my analysis of Virtual Production, an engine’s drive for scalability can “lock in” a set of industrial and aesthetic practices that are in tension with prevailing understandings of sustainable futures. The affordances of game engine technology are many, and they will be vital components of the moving image’s sustainable future. But these affordances must be weighed against the technical defaults and rigging of the engines themselves.   

Tom Livingstone is a Research Fellow at The University of the West of England (UWE) working within MyWorld, a creative R&D programme driving industry expansion and innovation in the south-west of England. His research focuses on emergent media with a particular interest in the impact of game engines on visual culture. He has published widely on film and digital media and his first book Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital Visual Effects will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024.  

Dario Lolli, Capturing Water: Shinkai Makoto’s Weathering with You and the digital aesthetics of ‘atmospheric’ animation  

Shinkai Makoto’s animated feature Weathering with You (Tenki no ko, 2019) is a coming-of-age adventure set in a Tokyo affected by a severe climate catastrophe. This subject matter – reinforced by its open reference to climate change and the spiritual elements of its drama – easily calls for readings based on ethics and sustainable forms of co-existence. Such ecocritical readings, however, have remained primarily focused on narrative and storytelling, to the point of completely displacing the film’s aesthetic form (e.g., Yoneyama, 2020), including animation’s specificity of embodying the environmental themes that it purportedly represents. As the work of a digital ‘native’ director, this film exemplifies and popularises a series of aesthetics innovations that, while increasingly common in anime, have not yet been analysed in terms of their ecocritical potential.   

To fill this gap, this paper focuses on the different ways the film tries to ‘capture’ water, on the screen and beyond. In Weathering with You, Shinkai’s expressive style takes on an atmospheric quality in which rain and water effects emerge as more than mere decorative elements. Through digital effects that modify surfaces and simulate light refraction, they punctuate emotional responses to the very atmospheric variations that propel the narrative. What are the ethical implications of this ‘atmospheric’ animation? What if this aesthetic becomes an instrument to advertise and sell numerous commodities, including bottled water, water ‘captured’ through a licensing deal? I will argue that, if we are to make sense of this ethical paradox, it is to the potential of animated water that we need to turn.  

Dario Lolli is Assistant Professor in Japanese and Visual Culture at Durham University, UK. His in-progress monograph, titled Dispositives of Extension, investigates the ecologies of affect, creativity and value established by anime franchises as they move across territories, media, and contexts of use. His recent research projects, respectively funded by the Japan Foundation and the Daiwa Foundation, have examined the morphology of the Japanese licensing sector and the archiving and preservation of anime intermediate materials. His work has been published by Convergence, Animated Movements and Media Culture & Society, amongst others.  

Katerina Loukopoulou, The United Nations’ Cinematic Worldmaking of a Sustainable future: the Case of Power Among Men (1959)  

The United Nations (UN) set up its film department as soon as it was established in 1945 in San Francisco. But, it was mainly during the late 1950s, when accomplished filmmaker Thorold Dickinson headed the UN’s Film Service, that its productions firmly moved from informationals into creative documentary narratives, galvanising cinema’s worldmaking powers to project the world to the world. Amongst the films that Dickinson produced, Power Among Men (1959) stands out as the first UN feature-length film with global distribution. The film’s voice-over narration, poignantly delivered by film star of the time Laurence Harvey, revolves around the motif of “men build, men destroy”. The universalist tone permeating the narrative aims to unify the film’s four parts, each one dedicated to an episode of materialist reconstruction in four very different geographical and socio-economic contexts (Italy, Haiti, Canada, Norway). It does so by foregrounding the constructive and destructive powers of the four elements of fire, earth, water and air, culminating into one of the earliest cinematic visions of sustainable development. This paper aims to foreground this little-known film’s significance for its creative articulation of UN’s proto-environmental politics and of what we now call 'sustainable futures'. I will do so by mobilising the notion of ‘worldmaking’ (Nelson Goodman, 1978) and by drawing on research in the UN archives, funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant on documentary peace cinema. My paper offers a contextual and textual analysis of a film that deserves unearthing and critical re-appraisal for its prescient adaptation of sustainable discourses into screen narratives.  

Katerina Loukopoulou is a film historian and Senior Academic Developer at Middlesex University London. Her current research interests include peace cinema and embedding research on climate change and sustainable development into the HE curriculum. Her peer-reviewed publications include journal articles in Film History; and in Visual Culture in Britain; and essays in the collections: Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2012); Cinema's Military Industrial Complex (2018); Global Humanitarianism and Media Culture (2019).  

Rayna Lountzis, Mental Health On/Off Set: Fostering inclusive working practices in the Film and TV Industry - a British Academy Innovation Fellowship analysis  

This paper examines the ongoing research undertaken as part of a two-year British Academy Innovation Fellowship which is aimed at advancing the position of those with mental health problems and/or disabilities, paying special attention in this instance to PTSD. We have already contributed to two films as part of this project, employing people who are disabled, including ex-service men. Part of this project includes advancing the position of those often marginalised. According to recent British data, only two percent of those employed in the film and TV industries have a disability, but for the wider workforce it is 20 percent. A large survey of over 5,000 workers in the industry found nine out of 10 people suffered from mental health issues, including suicidal thoughts. By combining theoretical work drawn from theorists such as Deleuze and Bergson on time and memory relating to PTSD, with specific textual analysis, plus work from industry consultations including interviews with a variety of filmmakers, this three-way approach attempts to produce innovative results that will be relevant. This work outlines what the current position is in the industry in terms of employment in this context, the challenges, and what changes are and should be taking place to foster a more inclusive and caring workplace.   

Rayna Lountzis is a multilingual entrepreneur and a power vibe transformational coach who works with individuals and groups, supporting them to reach their highest potential and bring their heart-desired projects to life. Being an advocate for unity and oneness has drawn her to projects where she can make a difference through positive impact and inclusion. Rayna is a third-year doctoral degree student in Film Studies, creating a novel film movement ‘Situational Film’ as part of her thesis. 

Xi Lu, The War Film and Existentialism: All Quiet on the Western Front  

In the recent war film All Quiet on the Western Front (Edward Berger, 2022), a chaotic and absurd world is vividly represented to remind spectators of the brutality of war and the fragility of human life. Apart from depictions of the WWI battleground, All Quiet on the Western Front also presents considerations of the meaning of life, freedom, death and choice, themes central to Existentialism. I will argue that Jean-Paul Sartre’s basic tenet of Existentialism – “existence precedes essence” - informs the film as a while and that soldiers’ individual lives are described as nothing important during wartime. They seem to be reduced to what, Simone du Beauvoir in The Blood of Others (1945), calls the cogs whose essence is predetermined. The film clearly shows that the soldiers are treated as tools of war and as a mass collective without individual differences. The soldiers can be easily replaced by one another and each soldier is an “in-itself” rather than a “for-itself”. I will show that Existentialism has a close connection with war as well as war films. During the two World Wars millions of human beings were deprived of their lives and freedom, which we may suppose prompted the existentialists to initiate a new philosophy to bring people’s attention back to individual existence, choice and freedom. I will argue that the war film genre in general resonates directly and indirectly with Existentialist themes.  

Xi Lu is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh working on the relationship between the war film genre and Existentialism.  

Virginia Luzón-Aguado, Not Playing Nero’s Fiddle: Finding Hope in Recent Ecocritical Films  

Recently, it has become increasingly difficult to locate ecocritical films that project hope. Dramas such as Deepwater Horizon (Peter Berg, 2016) or satires such as Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) portray scenarios in which the overly optimistic Neoliberal reliance on technological fixes and the permanent failure of political leaders to grab the bull by the horns foster rampant individualism and the dissemination of misinformation about the environmental crisis. While these grim portrayals may stir an environmental conscience in some spectators, they can also be considered to be pernicious as they can also lead to hopelessness and inaction. In other words, all has been lost and since there is nothing left to do, we might as well keep on enjoying life as we know it, ultimately digging our own grave. As Fiala (2010: 51) says, “we are in the midst of a crisis of millennial proportions and yet we waste time and pursue our own self-interests, fiddling while Rome burns.” Fortunately, one may still locate certain films which stubbornly refuse to fit this pattern. The Olive Tree (2016, Icíar Bollain, script Paul Laverty) and My Octopus Teacher (2020, Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed) insist on the possibility of a hopeful future through their portrayal of human relations to other elements of the biotic community. It is only by reconfiguring our relationships to other living things and redefining our role in the ecosystems we inhabit, that the environmental crisis might be mitigated, even if not altogether averted.  

Virginia Luzón-Aguado is a permanent lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Her research interests are wide and has published work on Hollywood film genre, masculinity, stardom and different forms of ecomedia in different journals and anthologies. Her most recent publications include a monograph on Harrison Ford (Bloomsbury, 2020) and the book chapter “Turning over a New Leaf: Exploring Human-Tree Relationships in The Lorax and Avatar” (Bloomsbury, 2022). Her current work focuses on transnationalism and environmental issues in cinema, particularly critical plant studies, biophilia and the representation of landscape in Spanish and US film.  

Carla MacKinnon, Exchange of capital in short animated documentary production   

This paper discusses ways in which economic and symbolic capital is exchanged in the production of short animated documentary films. Drawing on my quantitative and qualitative research into contemporary production culture, I will show that short animated documentaries emerge from a production ecosystem in which free labour and personal financial contributions by filmmakers often subsidise production credited to high profile funders, broadcasters and financiers.    

A study that I recently conducted analysing the production contexts of 105 short UK animated documentary films programmed in leading festivals between 2015 and 2020 shows that 30% of the shorts were fully or partially self-funded. Films that were partially self-funded included films that also received public funding, funding from trusts, charities and foundations, funding from companies and brands, funding from broadcasters, and funding from online publications.    

This paper presents three case studies of films included in the study, including interviews with multiple crew members, funders and commissioners. Through these examples I will show how economic capital provided by a funder or financier is often a relatively small part of the overall capital, including social and cultural capital, at play in the production of short film. In-kind labour and resources, and financial top-ups by producers and directors, are commonly used to get films ‘over the line’, but often go uncredited and are therefore invisible. This allows the perpetuation of a funding culture which chronically underfunds short films, potentially prohibiting entry for those with less access to economic or symbolic capital.    

Carla MacKinnon is an animator and researcher, and a tutor in animation at Royal College of Art. She has a PhD from Arts University Bournemouth, for a thesis on Animated Documentary. Her animated shorts and installations have been exhibited at galleries and festivals worldwide. She has also worked as a film festival producer and programmer, as well as a producer of live action and animated short films.   

Dan Martin, ‘It’s about…just finding a way to survive’: Northern Masculinity, Seriality, and (Re) Imaginations of Working-Class Futures in Sky’s Brassic (2019 - )  

In British culture, the North of England is often constructed as a place of lost futures. Across different periods of its representation, the Northern place-myth is associated with a fatalistic set of discourses that cohere around the ‘master-narrative’ of once rich working-class communities whose political agency is inexorably eroded by post-industrial decline (Mazierska, 2018). For Paul Dave (2018), the North’s ‘long association with failure’ is expressive of a wider failure in the history of proletariat destiny; a breakdown, even, in the possibility of working-class futurity. Within this fatalistic master-narrative, representations of the North dominantly inscribe a singular spatialising and gendered image of post-industrial decline. What is often mourned is a future in which masculine agency – grounded in the imagery of physically extensive labour – can no longer be imagined as the route to social progress (Thornham, 2016; 2019).   

By contrast, this paper contributes to a growing recognition of a progressive political potential in contemporary filmic and televisual representations of the North, which utilise complex constructions of space-time to refute masculinist fatalism and, instead, open up new articulations of classed history (ibid.; Forrest, 2020). My particular interest is in the textual politics offered in the recent Lancashire-set serial drama Brassic. Television seriality, in its negotiations of narrative continuity and interruption, raises formal questions around what long-term sustainable future means and the kinds of actions which might realise it. Employing close textual analysis, this paper demonstrates how Brassic appropriates seriality to comment on the ideological contradictions within “lost” notions of working-class male agency. I argue that the series both offers an example of how Northern masculinity might be recuperated from fatalistic narratives of lost futures, and justifies why such a recuperation is important if we are to hold a ’genuine openness to the future’ (Massey, 2005) when imagining the North of England.  

Dan Martin is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Huddersfield currently working on a project which investigates how the social and cultural values of public service media are affected by ongoing platformisation. He recently completed his doctoral thesis, entitled ‘The Representation of the Northern Male Body in British Film and Television’, and has a continuing interest in issues of working-class representation, masculinity, and the negotiation of national and regional identity in British visual cultural. Outside of academia, Dan is an avid home cook and Liverpool fan. 

Phil Mathews, Decolonising curriculums and enabling transnational approaches across postgraduate media production courses   

This paper will discuss the theoretical and practical steps taken to facilitate and enable a postgraduate taught framework of six interconnected postgraduate media production courses to address diversity, inclusivity, sustainability and decolonisation of the curriculum.    

I lead a postgraduate framework of six interconnected courses at Bournemouth University with over one hundred students from diverse backgrounds comprising, MA Producing, MA Scriptwriting, MA Sound Design, MA Directing, MA Postproduction Editing and MA Cinematography.  these courses are autonomous in terms of assessments however they are dependent on each other to collaborate, develop and produce film content. My role as framework leader is to ensure that community, cohesion and collaboration is developed and maintained through the year in a culture of inclusivity, and supportive of diversity in terms of contexts, theories, guests and exemplars.  This paper will discuss the present approaches the teaching team have taken from interventions, student feedback, teaching materials and theoretical and philosophical underpinning, such as the Ubuntu approach to collaboration through to embedding diversity within the intended learning outcomes of the unit specs and then into the unit briefs themselves. International Industrial contexts are supported, and practices are student oriented and not fixated on colonialised approaches of the global north.    

The paper will outline the wide range of steps taken thus far and identify areas of success and areas in need of further development and support.    

Phil Mathews is postgraduate framework leader and deputy head of department for media production at Bournemouth University. Mathews gained his practice-based doctorate in screenwriting in 2018 and prior to this wrote for film and television, and co-wrote the BAFTA nominated short ‘Soft’, 2006. Mathews’ research interests cover decolonisation, creative collaboration, romance genre, screenwriting practice and theory. Recent conference papers include: Motivation and character arcs. A truly global approach or the pervasiveness of a western narrative hegemony? SRN 2022.  Decolonising production practices, NAHEMI 2022.   

Catriona McAvoy, Confronting “Institutional Whiteness” in Research and Practice: Ethics, Responsibility and Solidarity 

In film studies there is a promising new movement to discuss ‘below the line’ workers and move away from auteur-based narratives of the film production process, instead revealing the  collaborative process of filmmaking and investigating previously undervalued contributors. Positively much of this research focusses on the stories of women, however these are  predominately cis gendered, heterosexual white women. These stories should be told but  space also needs to be made for other voices to avoid reinforcing “institutional whiteness” and further entrenching discrimination.  

Drawing on studies by Jemma Desai and Clive Nwonka on representation within  cultural organisations, discussion from theorists such as Stuart Hall and Sara Ahmed and analysis of the available literature I aim to challenge this problematic trend. Considering  Peter Tatchell’s recent call to return Pride to its roots of solidarity between LGBTQ+ people,  “women’s liberation, black and Irish communities, working class people and trade unions” and recent criticisms of the police and the need for solidarity in the face of institutional discrimination, this issue is urgent.  

Through reflection on my own research practice and awareness of the need for solidarity amongst all oppressed people I want to explore responsible and caring ways we can approach research to move the conversation forward. I would like to open this discussion to others and to ask that we all reflect on our practice and ways that we can stand together to build a sustainable, ethical and responsible framework for research that reflects on the past to build a better future. 

Catriona Mcavoy is a PhD student at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research focusses on below the line workers and decentering narratives from the Stanley Kubrick Archive. She has worked as a post producer in the film industry and has also presented research at many international conferences. She co-edited Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn (2015) and has published several journal articles and book chapters including in Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives (2015), Norman Mailer: Film is Like Death (2017), The Oxford Journal of Adaptation (2015) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick (2021). 

Adelaide McGinity-Peebles, Precarious Nature and Identity in the Indigenous Cinema of the Sakha Republic (Russian Federation)  

Since 2016, the cinema of the Sakha Republic has gained international and national acclaim and plaudits, consolidating its status as Russia’s most successful regional, Indigenous film industry. However, Sakha cinema also boasts a significant audience at home in the Republic, who frequently favour Sakha films over Hollywood alternatives at the box office. Sakha cinema has undoubtedly become the major cultural tool in the Republic for exploring and promoting Sakha nationhood and cultural identity, domestically and abroad. This paper explores the role of Sakha film in promoting and educating audiences about Sakha rituals and customs, particularly regarding the Sakha nature and environment, which are so important to the identity and very survival of the Sakha people. While the Republic’s nature and traditions are in a precarious state due to a combination of factors (climate change, out-migration and, historically speaking, Russian/Soviet colonialism and aggressive mining), Sakha cinema plays a vital role in centering Sakha rituals and customs at the heart of what it means to be Sakha in the 21st century. In this paper, I draw on three diverse but equally pertinent examples of this phenomenon to illustrate my argument: Toyon Kyyl (The Lord Eagle, 2018); 24 Snega (24 Snows, 2016); and Pugalo (The Scarecrow, 2020).  

Adelaide McGinity-Peebles is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Nottingham, UK, where she is conducting her research project “Figurations of the Arctic in Russian Cinema, 2010-Present”. She is completing her first monograph titled Imaging the Russian Heartlands: Contemporary Nationhood in the Cinema of Russia’s Provinces, which is under contract with Cornell University Press and scheduled for publication in 2024. She has published articles on gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in post-Soviet cinema in the Slavic and East European Journal, Film Studies, The Routledge Companion to European Cinema, and The Oxford Research Encylopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Communication. 

Laura McMahon, Care, solidarity and entanglement in Khady Sylla’s Une fenêtre ouverte (2005)  

Une fenêtre ouverte (2005), a documentary by the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Khady Sylla, offers an intimate, unsettling portrait of her friend, Aminta Ngom, as the film viscerally registers the mental health issues suffered by both filmmaker and subject. There are ethical questions here of consent and exposure, as Bronwen Pugsley suggests in her reading of the film. Pugsley points to the ethical risks of the documentary’s possible exploitation of Ngom’s condition, and of its problematic construction of parallels between Sylla and Ngom. I pursue this question of ethical risk, but I draw the discussion in a slightly different direction by reading this intense mode of entanglement between filmmaker and subject as a practice of care. Key to this practice of care is the film’s temporality, its patience and sustained engagement – what Debarati Sanyal describes in another context as ‘the solidarity of attention’ (2022: 92). I ask how Sylla’s film undertakes a practice of care that is feminist in its sustained attentiveness to Ngom’s subjectivity and corporeality, as well as to the constraints – gendered, familial and economic – that govern her life. I explore how this practice of care is also extended to the filmmaking self, as Sylla reflexively and performatively turns the camera upon her own body and subjectivity. While invoking a history of care and solidarity in non-Western feminist documentary (e.g. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Jocelyne Saab), I also draw on recent scholarship on the ethics of care in documentary, including a special issue of French Screen Studies (2022).    

Laura McMahon is an Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis (Legenda, 2012). She is currently working on a project on feminist historiography and moving image practice, examining engagements with memory, temporality and the archival in recent film and video work by female filmmakers.   

Matt Melia, Zappa (2020) and the Zappa ‘Vault’ – Film as Archive   

For his 2020 documentary film Zappa, director Alex Winter was given access to the privately held archive of the pioneering American musician, filmmaker and anti-censorship activist Frank Zappa. Zappa died in 1993 and his archives have since been kept by the Zappa trust and his widow Gail Zappa (who died during the making of the documentary). Like the Stanley Kubrick Archives, the Zappa Archives contain a wide ranging and comprehensive collection of material  from across Zappa’s life and work from his early childhood film-making experiments to later animated film-making and amateur films to recordings (some of which remain unreleased) , ephemera, fconcert footage, interviews and material relating to his campaigning. The Zappa archive, in LA, is not public facing and, according to Winter, had been in a state of decay prior to the making of the documentary.   

Hence This paper, somewhat hypothetically given that I have not yet visited the Zappa archives (and which have now been bought by Universal) , aims to consider how the film documentary engages with (and even imposes itself) upon the physical space and material of the Zappa archive. It considers the restoration of the Zappa archive by Winter and asks how the film itself can be considered as part of the project in sustaining and maintaining the material therein.  It asks the broader question, how do we engage and make the most of archival space when that space is not available? The paper forms the very start of a potential research project on Zappa and will draw on not only the only existing paper on the Zappa archive by Maureen Russell  (in which she interviews “Zappa Archive ‘Vaultmeister’ Joe Travers’), but also (hopefully) interviews with Alex Winter as well as the Zappa trust.  

Matt Melia is a Senior lecturer in Film, Media and Literature at Kingston University. His specialist interests include the work of both Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell and he has published widely on both. His publications include The Jaws Book: New Perspectives on the Classic Summer Blockbiuster (Bloomsbury, 2021),  Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange (Palgrave, 2023) and ReFocus: The Films of Ken Russell (EUP, 2022). He is also editor of The Jurassic Park Book: Thirty Years of Spielberg’s Dinosaurs (Forthcoming, Bloomsbury: 2023).  Matt’s research is archive-focussed and he is hoping to be able to visit the Frank Zappa ‘Vault’ in the next year.   

Carla Mereu Keating, Blinding lights: Ferraniacolor and the hazards of working with novel film technologies   

In January 1952, inside Stage 2 of the Ponti-De Laurentiis film studios in Rome, on set shooting started for the film that would go down in history as Italy’s first colour feature Totò a colori (1952) starring popular Neapolitan comedian Totò. The casting of Totò, chosen to bring to the screen the innovative colour system Ferraniacolor, produced by domestic film stock manufacturer Ferrania, paid off by generating high box office returns. Ferraniacolor gained international visibility when the process was chosen against more established alternatives to capture Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Australia (the documentary The Queen in Australia, 1954). Processed in the UK at Denham’s film laboratories, the film achieved impressive results ‘often turning the screen into a riot of color’, as described by an anonymous reviewer. Looking back at the application of the Ferraniacolor process in the 1950s, the paper aims to assess the impact that the introduction of colour technologies had for Italian film studios and the film crews who first adopted these and other novel filming processes and techniques when working on studio sets. Revisiting memoires of filmmakers and studio workers involved in the making of Ferraniacolor films during the early 1950s, the paper highlights the risks that existed when shooting colour films, and the hazardous, harmful conditions (e.g. adverse health effects) that are thought to have resulted.  

Carla Mereu Keating is a Research Associate, University of Bristol, working on the ERC-funded project STUDIOTEC. In 2016-29 Carla was British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, where she teaches translation and international film distribution. Carla has previously taught at the Universities of Reading and London Southbank, and was Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, University of London (2015-2016). She has published The Politics of Dubbing (2016), and research on the industrial, political and material issues which underpin the production and global circulation of film and media.  

Kayla Meyers, Infinite Possibilities: Imagining a Future through the Multiverse   

The compounding crises of the last two decades have left little room for imagining our collective future. Looming ecological collapse, threat of new pandemics, ascendant authoritarianism, and the failures of governments and peacekeeping organizations to respond effectively have left populations despondent and impotent. There has emerged a pervasive sense that under extant economic and political conditions, there is no escaping these existential threats. But in the early-2020s, during a time of immense uncertainty, the cinematic trope commonly known as the multiverse caught mass appeal. Films like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Loki (2021), and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) all break "the iron grip of a single, predetermined timeline" (Nussbaum, 2022) by deploying the multiverse as a storytelling technique. I argue the multiverse provides a framework for hope and longevity. While cynically we can understand the use of the multiverse as a means for conglomerates like Disney to limitlessly iterate blockbuster successes, their appeal speaks to this trope's resonance with audiences. In creating a space to imagine infinite possibilities, the multiverse offers the viewer pathways toward solving intransigent issues and dreaming of a better future. But even as these films allow us to envision limitless worlds, their plots and characters' still privilege a single timeline and "return to how it was before." So rather than the multiverse being a pure vehicle for escapism, it is a productive space where we can transform, course correct, and survive.  

Kayla Meyers is an independent scholar and writer whose work examines the intersections between visual culture, race, gender, digital media, and US politics through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her publications include the article “‘Straight Outta Congress’: Blacking Up the Tea Party Movement” (Journal of Popular Culture, Summer 2019), the book Who Said What: A Writer's Guide to Finding, Evaluating, Quoting, and Documenting Sources (And Avoiding Plagiarism) (2020), and the chapter “I Figured You Were Probably Watching Us”: Performing Gender and Citizen Surveillance in Ex Machina" (Bloomsbury, 2022). She serves as Programming Manager for SXSW EDU in Austin, Texas, USA.  

Rachel Milne, “Hardship Within the Context of Joy”: Rafiki’s Queer Resistance  

Representations of Africa in film have been repeatedly haunted by a regressive single-story narrative that focuses on the ongoing effects of colonialism and racism. In Wanuri Kahiu’s 2018 feature film Rafiki, however, this pessimistic narrative is replaced by what Kahiu conceptualises as ‘Afrobubblegum’. At once a visual preference and a political statement, Afrobubblegum filmmaking makes use of bright and playful aesthetics to depict African subjects “living a beautiful vibrant life” (Kahiu 2017). Afrobubblegum art therefore places a focus on liberated futures through gentle forms of resistance, unbounded self-expressions, and an immersion in diurnal and frivolous activities that are specifically, or plausibly, ​​African.   

In telling the story of Kena and Ziki, two young girls who fall in love, Kahiu subverts conventional queer narratives of control and resistance in favour of foregrounding a gentle lesbian love story. Without evading or denying the obstacles that queer Africans routinely face, Kahiu ultimately situates portrayals of violence, silence, and alternative modes of resistance “within the context of joy” (Kahiu 2019). Through a focus on the film’s narrative of queer becoming (Bradway 2015), alongside a consideration of its aesthetics, I argue that Rafiki is important not just as a cultural representation of marginalised identities, but also as a form of immersion that is in itself activist in its ability to foster a sense of belonging, and a vision of a shared future, for queer African audiences.  

Rachel Milne is a Visiting Lecturer at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. She holds a BA (Hons) in Media from Queen Margaret University, and an MLitt in Comparative Literature from the University of Glasgow. Much of her research investigates representations of marginalised identities in literature and film. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and blogs, and she has presented her research on depictions of disability, queerness, and childhood in literature and film at various international conferences.  

Stuart Moore and Kayla Parker, Our Camera is Not a Projector: Co-creation as a Strategy of Resistance 

This presentation will discuss how and why our process-based collaborative practice rejects the ‘auteur’ who projects or imposes their will on the production and considers the pro-filmic to be a canvas or screen for their ideations. Although the essay film can be thought of as a subversive form of documentary, the auterial tendency is often present in the narration. Using examples from our filmmaking practice, we provide a critical perspective on the methods we have evolved in response. 

At the end of the 19th century, Louis and Auguste Lumière used their Cinématographe to capture and project their actualités, or ‘motion pictures’, of everyday life. Initially, the brothers filmed life ‘as it happened’ before the camera. The ‘purity’ of this actualité – a single unedited shot of ‘action’ that emphasized the lifelike movement – gradually became corrupted, as filmmakers responded to their audiences’ appetite for spectacle, leading mainstream film away from experimentation with the medium to the traditional theatrical narrative structure dominant in cinema and the tendency for the filmmaker to project their ideations onto and into the film took hold. 

We have developed a filmmaking methodology that embeds the reflexive inter-subjectivity of dialogic process. Its exploratory, contingent nature enables us to foster new methods and ‘ways of seeing’, allowing relationships and interactions to emerge, rather than pursuing pre-conceived outcomes. What ‘comes out’ is not our ‘vision’ of what we think or imagine the film to be: we spend time being open and receptive, allowing the making process itself to co-create the film. 

Stuart Moore is an accomplished filmmaker and sound artist and an experienced cinematographer, having worked professionally on television wildlife and natural history series. He has won awards from London Short Film Festival and two South West Media Innovation Awards for his innovative short films. His recent 16mm film Zinn, commissioned for the Dark Skies project, featured in The Lab’s Light Field (San Francisco) and the Visions  in the Nunnery exhibition (London). He is currently completing a 3D3 AHRC-funded practice-led PhD focused on the personal Super8 archive, film and memory at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol. 

Kayla Parker is an artist film-maker who creates innovative works using film-based and digital technologies. Her research interests centre around subjectivity and place, embodiment, and technological mediation. In her practice, she uses process-based methods informed by écriture feminine to explore the interrelationship between bodies and liminal spaces. Kayla lectures at University of Plymouth where she co-ordinates the  Early Career Researcher Network in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business and supervises artists’ doctoral research projects. She has curated many programmes of artists' moving image, including ‘Passing Through’ for the British Art Show 9, Plymouth (2022). Her publications include chapters and extended essays on film-making. 

Jonathan Murray, The Spy Writer Who came in from the Cold: post 1989 screen adaptations of John le Carré  

Between the Cold War’s ostensible end in 1989 and visible re-emergence in the early 2020s, espionage narratives remained a prominent and insistently topical strand of British audiovisual production. That phenomenon has ensured that the screen spy remains a major popular cultural archetype through which British identity, history and geopolitical status are defined and debated. One important and visible strand within this process has involved the production of no fewer than 9 post-1989 screen adaptions of the works of English novelist John le Carré (1931-2020). Examining the contemporary canon of le Carré adaptations from The Russia House (1990) to The Little Drummer Girl (2018), this paper explores two interrelated areas of interest. The first involves identification of the key reasons for diverse filmmakers’ enhanced post-1989 level of collective interest in le Carré’s work, and the second, the position of post-1989 screen adaptations of le Carré within contemporary British screen espionage fiction’s central preoccupations, including: interrogation of Britain’s involvement in modern military conflicts from WWII to Iraq; re-imaginings of the figure of British spy as non-male, non-white and/or non-heterosexual); debates around the historic, present-day and future British state’s identity, history, geopolitical status and integrity.    

Jonathan Murray is Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. He is a former editor of Visual Culture in Britain and Animation Journal and is a contributing writer on the permanent staff of Cineaste magazine. His publications include the books Discomfort and Joy: the Cinema of Bill Forsyth (2011) and The New Scottish Cinema (2015). 

Caitriona Noonan and Inge Sørensen, European Screen Agencies and Sustainability:  Interventions for Greening the Screen  

This paper reports on the work performed by European screen agencies to support, facilitate and create a greener film and television industry. It interrogates the rhetoric of sustainability employed by publicly funded agencies in smaller nations including the Danish Film Institute (DFI), Screen Ireland (Fís Éireann), Screen Scotland, Film Cymru and Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds (Flanders Audio-visual Fund).  In the last few years environmental sustainability has emerged as a more visible concern amongst some screen agencies. These bodies are not environmental agencies, and so they rarely have specific mandates to act around climate change. Nonetheless, they are a critical source of funding, resources and mobility for filmmakers, and so they have some levers which could be used to encourage change.   

Drawing on empirical evidence from interviews and discussions with professionals, screen agencies and the newly instated role of Sustainability Manager in many agencies and production companies, our research points to a typology of responses and actions currently being pursued, revealing commonalties in the approaches employed but also several problematic logics underpinning these interventions.   

Our research reveals that any radical ambition to change the environmental credentials of the sector are tempered by the careful balance that they feel they must strike around ambitions for economic growth, national competitiveness and innovative creative practice. We conclude that for screen agencies to be more effective and urgent agents of environmental change, fundamental changes would need to happen within their expertise, funding allocation and public mandate.   

Caitriona Noonan is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Cardiff University. Her research is on screen production, labour and policy. She is co-author of the book Producing British Television Drama: Local Production in a Global Era (Palgrave, 2019) and her work appears in the International Journal of Cultural Policy, Cultural Trends, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Caitriona was principal investigator on an AHRC-funded project 'Screen Agencies as Cultural Intermediaries: Negotiating and Shaping Cultural Policy for the Film and TV Industries within Small Nations'.  A book on this project will be published by Palgrave in 2023.  

Inge Sørensen is Lecturer in Media Policy at Centre for Cultural Policy Research, University of Glasgow. She researches the practices, policies and political economy of national and global screen industries with particular focus on Public Service Media, streamers, screen agencies, funding models as well as environmental sustainability and EDI. Inge peer reviews for AHRC and UKRI. She advises the British and Scottish governments, national screen agencies, regulators, and trade unions in the UK, Scotland and Denmark.   She is currently Principal Investigator on Sustainable Screen Scotland, a RSE Network Grant, and The Thunberg Test, funded by UKRI and Screen Scotland.   

Jennifer O’Meara, From Soft Focus to AR filters: the Evolving, Technologically-Designed Face of Female Stardom  

The future of screen studies requires increased attention to the two-way flow of influence between immersive and deceptive technologies and traditional screen media. To this end, my paper charts the relationship between historical and contemporary technologies that create idealised versions of the female face on screen. Building on scholarship on stardom, gender and deepfakes, analogue filtration effects from classical Hollywood (including the application of Vaseline, stockings and other fabrics to the camera lens to create a “Gaussian Girl” effect) will be compared to trends for augmented reality (AR) beauty filters. Such filters have been critiqued for their negative impact on self-esteem, with women in particular seeking surgery in order to look more like their AR representations (RyanMosley 2021). But they are yet to be examined from a screen studies perspective. To address this, I will reference historical screen works that foreground the female face as a technological design experiment, including the use of fabric filters on shots of Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress (1934) and the use of de-aging effects on Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her (1992). I will also examine images of classical Hollywood actresses who have been “reimagined” via digital filters, thus merging traditional and contemporary screen beauty effects. The latter examples will help  underscore how AR and deepfake technologies can: 1) work to democratize glamour effects from cinema history for the masses, while; 2) subjecting female stars to more damaging forms of commodification, idealisation and (digital) over-exposure, even in death.  

Jennifer O’Meara is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She has  published on a diverse range of film and media topics in venues such as Cinema Journal,  Feminist Media Studies, Celebrity Studies and The Velvet Light Trap. Her second monograph Women’s Voices in Digital Media was published by University of Texas Press in 2022. Her current research project, funded by an Irish Research Council Starting Laureate Award (2022- 2026), is titled “From Cinematic Realism to Extended Reality: Reformulating Screen Studies at the Precipice of Hyper-reality.”  

Nikolaus Perneczky, World Film Heritage: Decolonising Care and Sustainability in Global Audiovisual Archiving 

The history of North-South cooperation in the field of film preservation and archiving predates the end of colonial rule. Then as now, as Ghaddar (2022) observes with respect to archival  records more generally, “the Western archival community tended to evade the central  questions of power and inequality” by recourse to “technical and professional arguments”— part of a larger and persistent pattern of what decolonial scholars have come to call “archival  paternalism” (Agostinho 2019). Western archival standards and practices are not only inadequate to archival realities in the Global South but can, as Carolina Cappa put it at Eye Conference 2022, turn into “prison concepts”. Departing from practices of “imperfect” archiving (from the hacking of equipment to the recycling of obsolete technology), film archivists in the Global South have developed a more fundamental critique of protocols of long-term, high-standard preservation and restoration in ethical, economic, and ecological perspective. Importantly, the critical insights gleaned from these archival practitioners are relevant far beyond their places of origin, as the untapped potential of indigenous practices and technologies of care—for instance, the use of African adobe architectures for low-energy cooling (Sanogo quoted in Cosgrove 2019)—may yet gain wider traction on a warming planet. Such reliance on local solutions, however, does not imply that the challenges facing archivists in the Global South are essentially “home-made”. Rather, they are the outcome of a long history of uneven development and unequal exchange in the field of global audiovisual archiving which, I will argue in conclusion, calls on Western archival institutions to engage in a process of “constructive reparations” (Táíwò 2022). 

Nikolaus Perneczky is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. His postdoctoral project, “Restitution and the Moving Image”, considers colonial legacies of uneven development and unequal exchange in global audiovisual archiving through the lens of restitution. 

Anat Pick,  Éric Rohmer’s Vegetal Ethics  

This paper will focus on The Green Ray (1986) as an example of a ‘green theology’ of film. Drawing on Simone Weil’s idea of metaxu, a bridge between the material and transcendent, I explore Rohmer’s summer comedy as a form of sustainable cinema, revolving around the double meaning of the chlorophyllic: plant sustenance and divine grace.  

Anat Pick is Reader in Film at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (Columbia UP, 2011), co-editor of Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (Berghahn, 2013), and has published widely on animals in film and non-anthropocentric film philosophy. Her current book project, on Simone Weil and cinema, contributes to an eco-centric theory of film at a time of environmental crisis.  

Agnieszka Piotrowska, The ethics of collaboration – a personal experience Wash (2022)  

The presentation consists of a short theoretical paper and a moving image  presentation. Wash (2022) is a hybrid documentary which was funded by Strategic Research England 2021. It uses a variety of creative tools (documentary, drama, animation, paintings, Zoom recordings).  The project was initiated as a collaboration between Professor Mutapi of the Edinburgh, the University of Zimbabwe and artists internationally.  It builds on a piece of creative research work in Zimbabwe , the various moving image pieces of work, that had been screened extensively internationally and also published in Screenworks in 2019 and 2021.    

Wash was inspired by the immunology and social studies research carried out by the University of Edinburgh and the University of Zimbabwe.  Their project focused on an attempt to curb the spread of diseases through a variety of simple tools.  In particular, the researchers tried to encourage the community to build toilets where they were not any.  What Mutapi discovered was that there was an unexpected resistance to the project – on the part of women.  It transpired that the women used the walk to the toilet as a space for communications.  

We therefore wanted to explore gently the issue of the Difference which does not run across the lines of ethnicity but rather across the lines of education and class. The paper explores different levels of ethical collaborations in this hybrid work which is being used by NGOs globally. The work itself and the process of making it brings to the fore a discussion of a collaborative activist documentary film making and the challenges it presents.  

Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award-winning BBC trained -filmmaker and a theorist. She is a Reader in Film at SODA, Manchester School of Art,, and a Visiting Professor in Film at the University of Gdansk, Poland.  She is the Former Head of the School for Film, Media and the Performing Arts at the UCA, UK  She was the Director of the global network ‘s conference Visible Evidence held  in the summer of 2022 at the University of Gdansk. Piotrowska has written extensively on psychoanalysis and cinema and is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film (2014, Routledge.)  Its Second Edition in will be published in 2023.   

Victoria Pistivsek, Caring White Men?: American Masculinity, Liberal Resistance, and Funny Sustainable Failures in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema  

Discourses around ‘angry white men’ and ‘crisis of masculinity’ are commonplace in 21st century America. In the wake of rapidly changing gender and racial politics and the resulting pressures acting on hegemonic masculinity, Amanda Lotz has suggested that, on screen, it is particularly the maladjusted anti-hero who mediates angry white men’s uncertainties and dissatisfactions with contemporary life, for this figure is eager to reclaim white heteropatriarchal power through violent, hypermasculine, and toxic means. However, I posit that due to recent cultural turmoil—the coronavirus pandemic; the #MeToo and BLM movements; Donald Trump’s presidency and the regressive macho-populist politics it disseminated—representations of men have significantly transformed. Considering how across the contemporary American mediascape explicit liberal critique and progressive action have seemingly taken root, this paper argues that onscreen male constructions have shifted toward ‘resistance’ and ‘care,’ acting as dramatized correctives for real world troubles; this may be especially true for narratives involving ‘sustainable futures.’ By examining two Hollywood films, Don’t Look Up (2021) and Downsizing (2017), which comically allegorize the climate crisis and (Trumpian) political instability, I will show how their male protagonists are defined in opposition to ‘toxic masculinity,’ exhibiting extreme emotional care for and anxiety over how to save the world from (climate) disaster. Yet, since these satirical texts feature pessimistic endings and anti-heroic tendencies, I will unpack the ways in which (conservative) doubt is strategically cast on caring hegemonic men as well as on sustainable futures by presenting both as laughable and doomed to fail.   

Victoria K. Pistivsek is a PhD researcher and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her doctoral project investigates angry white men, troubled gender politics, and crisis culture in post-2016 American film and television.   

Tia Price, True Crime Dark Fandom: The Dominatrix and The Dildo  

Ryan Broll posited the concept of dark fandom with specific reference to Columbiners, fans of the 1999 Columbine High School shooters; this he extends to include those who are fans of people ‘who commit heinous acts’ (Broll, 2019). This paper will examine dark fan participation in the already ethically complex genre of true crime, with particular focus being paid to the sexualisation of the serial killer through the creation and use of sex aids. These items, often created and released as unofficial additions to Netflix documentaries, reflect a fascination with true crime, and show the extent to which interest in the genre has exceeded the limitations of the screen.  

The products considered here are serial killer-themed sex aids created by dark fan Nico Claux and sold on the website Serial Pleasures. These objects demonstrate an extreme arena of dark fandom whereby thresholds of taste have been crossed and notions of respect have been knowingly dismissed. The objects themselves are based on specific serial killers, sexualise acts of abuse and penetration and promote stigmas related to queer sex. Language used to promote the items leans upon connotations of abuse and the resurrection of notorious and long dead murderers, which has the effect of re-victimising victims as the re-enactment of their killers’ crimes is marketed as a way to achieve sexual pleasure. The true crime genre is already an ethically problematic area yet these items highlight an acceleration in ethically transgressive cultural practice.  

Tia Price is a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth. Her research focuses on the representation of the corpse in popular culture and its relationship to dark fandom. Due to be published in a forthcoming Routledge Handbook Museums, Heritage, and Death (2023), she has also presented on the representation of murder victims in private museums (2020) and the performative resurrection of the corpse within dark tourism (2022). She works as an SpLD Tutor and Assessor.  

Chiara Quaranta, Echo and Narcissus: Listening to Film as Being-with 

The myth of Echo and Narcissus tells of the conflicting relationship between a resonant voice (Echo) and a mirrored image (Narcissus), from which a hierarchy between sound and image and a gendering of the two is derivative. The fable also hints at the cultural self-referentiality of the visual and the relationality of the sonorous –a discrepancy on which Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, elaborates, emphasising sound’s tendency towards a relation. If sound is thus conceived as potentially highly relational, then there cannot be aurality without some form of co-participation –and indeed, even in the myth’s liminal case of a two-voice monologue, when Narcissus (the image) ceases to speak, Echo completely loses her voice because of the lack of the other’s sounds to repeat. My argument unfolds from sound’s potential for establishing an ethically charged relationship between spectator and the film within which listening is conducive to the formation of a community who share an openness to the irreducible alterity of the other. An engagement with (gendered, classed and racialised)  listening shifts focus from the speaker (i.e., character/film) to the listener (i.e., the spectator), promoting spectatorial empathic efforts through sounds not necessarily reducible to fixed meaning. By looking at Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure and Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch, I will outline the ethical possibilities of listening to female voices in films wherein the sonorous significantly renders embodied, relational subjectivities and encourages a spectatorial engagement defined in terms of reciprocity and co-existence.  

Chiara Quaranta is Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and a board member of the journal Film-Philosophy. Her research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and cinema, with particular attention to ethics and aesthetics. 

Sophie Quin, Of elk and wolves: Extinction and evocations of species from the Irish animated bestiary  

In recent years, a number of Irish animation productions have symbolically resurrected interpretations of now extinct Irish fauna; Alan Shannon’s The Last Elk (2000) and Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s Wolfwalkers (2020). This paper will discuss the approach to human/non-human animal interactions within each film and propose that a 21st century understanding of the natural world and ecological awareness colours these, changing historical fact to suit narrative aims. In The Last Elk, humans are seen to kill the final elk even though this species became extinct 11,000 years ago and is unlikely to have met with humans. Meanwhile, Wolfwalkers takes a different approach to the animal/human relationship as human protagonists are allied with these wild wolves, literally becoming them. This narrative speaks instead to a version of reconciliation and a reversal of the narrative of the wolf as merely a dangerous predator and the human as hunter hellbent on carrying out their extinction. It will be argued that within both narratives the animals are not overtly anthropomorphised and remain viably animated as ‘realistic’ animals. Consequently, it will be questioned if our encounter with these species, although animated drawings, could be read as more authentic to the real creatures on which they were based. Both works lean into motifs of Celtic design and flaunt evidently Irish narratives suggesting that these animated films are powerful vehicles advocating for the beauty and worth of the natural world and potentially suggest ways to conserve and accept responsibility for the demise of species.  

Sophie Quin is an early career researcher and recent graduate of the Master of Arts by Research programme at the Institute of Art Design and Technology (IADT) in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin. She received a BA Hons degree in Animation from IADT in 2019, specialising in hand-drawn animation and filmmaking. Her MA research, “Quin Films: Children’s Animation, National Broadcasting and Irish Cultural Identity,” received funding from the Irish Research Council under the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Programme 2021. Her interests include Irish animation history, animals in animation, stop-motion, and the use of archives to better understand historical animation practices. 

Lucas Rinzema, Care and Cow 

Andrea Arnold’s 2021 documentary Cow takes an intimate approach to the daily life of Luma, a dairy cow, and one of her calves. Affectively, Cow is a caring film: close-ups and shaky camerawork create reciprocalities between film, viewer and cow. Nonetheless, it documents the life of a cow who is stuck in an abusive system. Bracketing the film’s activist potential and affective involvement, we can see clearly that the film does not interfere helpfully in Luma’s life: while it clearly cares about this specific cow, and while it might help promote more caring human-cow relations, it intrudes her space carelessly. This talk maps these ambivalences, thinking through embodied cinematic immersion, its generation of caring interspecies relationality, and the problematics of ethical distance in documentary filmmaking. To unpack this, I stay with “the tensions between care as maintenance doings and work, affective engagement, and ethico-political involvement.” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 6). I attempt to flesh out the both caring and uncaring human-cow relations that Cow produces by means of a combination of film phenomenology—affording an account of the ways the film ties the bodies of viewers and film together (e.g., Barker 2009; Sobchack 1992; 2004)—and a linguistic approach to the ways in which cows talk to us (e.g., Cornips and Hengel 2021; Cornips 2022)—making it possible to take seriously the role cows play in these ambivalent relations. These approaches come together to describe the assemblage of cow, film and human viewer, thereby offering a relational take on the ambivalences of care in mediated human-animal relations.   

Lucas Rinzema is a Research MA student in Arts, Media and Literary Studies at the University of Groningen. He holds BA degrees in Philosophy and in Arts, Culture and Media. Current research interests include feminist posthumanism, human-animal studies, (film-) phenomenology and (film-)aesthetics. As in the present paper, the focus most often lies at the intersections of these fields. Besides this, and often relatedly, he is a filmmaker working mostly on short, non-narrative, ecocritically oriented films. 

Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Exploitation and Violence: Precarious Labor in Squid Game  

The international Netflix television series Squid Game from South Korea became a breakout hit during the global pandemic in the fall 2021. Audiences around the world binge watched the episodes, depicting contestants fighting to their death to win price money, donated by voyeuristic foreign spectators. Each time, a contestant dies, the amount increases. Like gladiators in an arena, the Squid Game contestants are on display in a constructed game scenario with VIPs watching the carnage from above. This paper will focus on the last two remaining contestants, battling each other in Episode 9. The protagonist Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is facing his childhood friend Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), a lawyer, who has played dirty tricks to make it to the end of the games. Both of them have failed in their personal and professional lives and are unable to sustain themselves in an unforgiving global economy. However, Seong Gi-hun decides to disrupt the rules of the games and takes an ethical stand to object the power of greed.   

The series resonated during COVID with audiences, faced with similar situations of precarity: losing secure employment, facing creditors, not being able to afford food or pay medical bills. The rich elite who facilitates the games to experience a sense of “childhood fun” (as the dying organizer Oh Il-nam played by Oh Yeong-su explains to Gi-hun on his deathbed), exploits the contestants in multiple ways: reducing human beings to fighting sensations, thriving on exploitation and violence, and dismissing suffering as the self-afflicted.       

Karen A. Ritzenhoff is a Professor of Communication at Central Connecticut State University where she is co-Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is co-organizer of a hybrid conference on “Squid and Beyond: Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary Asian Popular Culture” at CCSU in April 2023. Ritzenhoff co-edited Gender, Power and Identity in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (Routledge, 2022).   

Sofie Roberts, Wales and the Green Screen: Sustainability and Environment in Welsh Filmmaking  

This paper considers Welsh cinema’s response to environmental and sustainability concerns both on screen and behind the scenes through a contextualised approach. It argues that contemporary Welsh film narratives are part of wider cultural discussions about protecting the environment and sustainability and, not unrelatedly, reflective of Welsh filmmaking since devolution as engaged with the issues, concerns, and viewpoints of a newly liberated and increasingly confident small nation. This growing confidence was further cemented by the establishment of Ffilm Cymru Wales, the development agency for Welsh film (2006) and Wales gaining law-making powers (2011).  

There is a growing body of Welsh films that oppose globalised capitalism, economic and social inequality and ecological devastation. This investigation considers the ways in which the arts can effectively communicate messages relating to the climate emergency and sustainability, and that these film narratives relate to real-world Welsh policies. The messages communicated in films such as American Interior (2014) or Gwledd (The Feast, 2021) align with Welsh Government ambitions, such as the Environment (Wales) Act (2016) which emphasises sustainable management of natural resources, and The Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act (2015), trailblazing sustainability legislation to ensure that actions taken today should not negatively harm tomorrow. Ffilm Cymru Wales is expanding its sustainability efforts, including development of the Green Cymru Programme (2019) and an Environmental Policy (2022). This paper considers the cumulative impact of such initiatives, concluding that despite there not being devolved powers over culture what is seen at a political level is part of the cultural discourse in Wales.   

Sofie Roberts is a Researcher at Bangor University. Her projects involve evaluating community perceptions and involvement in climate projects aiming at low carbon emissions and environmental sustainability, and she has a background in the low carbon sector. Sofie completed her PhD in Film Studies at Bangor University in 2022, analysing Welsh cinema of the last thirty years through the prism of postcolonial theory, and is interested in further research into green initiatives and sustainability in film. 

Szilvia Ruszev, New identities of virtual stardom: How do virtual influencers change or maintain social stereotypes? 

Virtual influencers, created and developed for the taste of social media users across fashion,  lifestyle or politics, appear in visual or moving-image formats with digitally created bodies and choreographed behaviours and opinions. Their appearance is engineered to fully support their goals as trendsetters. The visual markers defining their identities easily connect them to established social stereotypes including but not limited to race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class prescribed by the characteristics of the target audience. Nevertheless, there is a spectrum of virtual influencers who either maintain or rather purposefully try to change these social stereotypes. Virtual influencers have been investigated in the field of marketing studies or from the perspective of affective computing, both neglecting the question of social stereotypes. I investigate virtual  influencers as characters in a transmedia story world from the perspective of screen studies and media representation theory. I will investigate celebrity virtual influencers such as Lil Miquela (@lilmiquela), Imma (@imma.gram), Blawko (@blawko22) and Kami (@itskamisworld) - a virtual influencer with Down syndrome who has been created from data derived from over 100 young  women with Down syndrome. I will compare their visual appearance and the storytelling strategies used and examine in what ways they maintain or challenge social stereotypes. I argue that the appearance of these virtual celebrities constitutes an experience of a hybrid,  virtual realism that is defined based on their position on the spectrum of real–unreal-looking  figures of the “uncanny valley” (Mori, MacDorman, & Kageki, 2012) and full body “avatarisation,” an expanded form of identification with virtual characters. (Genay, Lécuyer, & Hachet, 2021). This virtual realism offers the possibility of a flexible and open representation of social stereotypes as an open-ended and modular representational system that is able to respond to user’s expectations regarding diversity and inclusion.  

Szilvia Ruszev is media artist and researcher, currently holding a position as a Lecturer in Post Production at Bournemouth University. Her practice-led research engages critically with various aspects of emergent media and technology, including but not limited to immersive storytelling, representation in digital media and experimental artistic practices. Both her academic and practice-based work has been internationally published in peer-reviewed journals and renowned film festivals and exhibitions. 

Ipsita Sahu, From "Voice of God" to "Voice of Nation": Melville Demellow and the television series Perspective and Now  

When television arrived in the late 1960s, it was aligned to the public broadcasting unit of All Indian Radio (AIR). A new documentary language emerged, shaped not so much by the longstanding Griersonian form of Films Division( the state documentary unit that continued from colonial times), but by radio features. In this paper, I map this transformation in the Indian documentary by focusing on two popular factual programs of the 1970s, Perspective and Now produced and anchored by the iconic radio personality Melville Demello. Already a household name of significant stature, Demellow's television series and its distinct travelogue form made dramatic changes to the documentary film's propaganda style by replacing the typical "voice of god" and repetitive "sights and sounds" of the state with interviews, oral history, and most distinctly a lyrical and evocative use of sound. The rhetoric of "truth value" was transferred to Demellow's auteurist legacy in radio instead of the statist gaze. Moreover, Demellow's Anglo -Indian ethnicity vitally informed the travelogue documentaries, which mounted grand narratives of national identity by fusing the colonial settler form of pristine nature with an anthropomorphic Nehruvian vision of land as “Bhrat-mata” or “Mother-India” . The chapter will look at episodes of Perspective and Now to analyse how key disputes of the seventies around land due to indigenous dislocation from conservation programs, large scale slum demolition, peasant unrest and wars with neighbouring countries were negotiated in these documentaries through its complex visual sign system of televisual landscapes. 

Ipsita Sahu is currently pursuing her doctoral in Cinema Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her thesis titled “Arrival of Television in India: A Media Archaeological Study” explores the changing audio-visual context of 1970s India, linked to the entry of television. Sahu’s work on single-screen theatre and urban history was recently published in the BioScope journal. 

Libby Saxton, ‘The Anguish of the Future’: Iconicity, Sustainability and Mushroom Clouds  

How do filmic and photographic images collude with, and imagine redressing, the forms of domination that have turned humanity into a new kind of nature? Cinema’s imprints of and on nonhuman nature – its physical links to the world it records and whose resources it depletes – have received close attention. Preoccupied with the index, the intensifying debate about what Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway call ‘cinema beyond the human’ has largely ignored another kind of sign: the icon. Yet the genre of photographs and film sequences that we now describe as iconic, entangled as it is with the most controversial aspects of humanism, has helped to demarcate and define an era when humanity has become, in Jennifer Fay’s words, a ‘geological force’. For example, film of the military test that, according to some geologists, marked the start of this epoch distorted the natural phenomenon of the cloud into the template for one of its most prominent symbols. Writing on American environmentalism, Finis Dunaway suggests that iconic images, including iterations of the mushroom cloud, ‘have impeded efforts to realise – or even imagine – sustainable visions of the future’. My paper will complicate this claim by considering cameo and leading roles by mushroom clouds in films including Children of Hiroshima (Kaneto Shindo, Japan, 1952), Being Women (Cecilia Mangini, Italy, 1965) and I Saw the World End (Es Devlin and Machiko Weston, UK, 2020) and recent augmented reality artworks by Nancy Baker Cahill. These works all contend with what Éric Rohmer, discussing Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, France, 1959), named ‘the anguish of the future’, but also contemplate the prospect of worlds, human and ‘natural’, without violence or systems of domination. Using the mushroom cloud as an example, and borrowing Marie-José Mondzain’s concept of an ‘iconic empire’, I will explore the photo-cinematic icon’s complicity in, and role in envisioning alternatives to, humanity’s world-conquering ambitions.  

Libby Saxton in Reader in Film at Queen Mary University of London. She is author of Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (Wallflower, 2008) and No Power Without an Image: Icons Between Photography and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and co-author of Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (Routledge, 2010). She co-edited Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium (Legenda, 2013) and a special issue of Paragraph on ‘Religion in Contemporary Thought and Film’ (November 2019). She is working on projects about iconic environmental images and the colourisation of historical photographs and film.  

Chrishandra Sebastiampillai, Runaway film production and film-induced tourism: sustainability of heritage houses as film sets in Malaysia.  

Malaysia emerged at the turn of the millennium as a viable location for runaway film production – where films are set in one country, but shot in another (Croy and Walker, 2003). Malaysia’s heritage houses have featured recurringly in various international productions such as Indian Summers (2015-2016), Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and The Singapore Grip (2020), bringing local and international film-induced tourism to them. However, there is currently no regulation on film production in heritage houses nor is there any formal oversight of how film crews operate in them, leaving the safety of the houses featured to the relevant owners or film crews.  

This paper takes as its case studies the heritage houses featured in the three projects listed above, namely the early 19th century Georgian mansion of the Governor of Penang, Suffolk House (Indian Summers), the late 19th century Cheong Fatt Tze Straits eclectic mansion (also in Penang) and the Neo-Gothic & Tudor Revival late 19th century residence of the British High Commissioner, Carcosa Seri Negara in Kuala Lumpur (the latter houses both featured in Crazy Rich Asians and The Singapore Grip). It considers questions such as the harms and benefits of their use as runaway film production sets and the sustainability (and viability) of film induced tourism as a means of preserving the houses. It also explores the relationship of the film and tourism industries with the buildings, and the role of colonial legacies and migrant narratives in their past and current administration.  

Chrishandra Sebastiampillai is Lecturer in Film, Television and Screen Studies at Monash University Malaysia. Her research interests include stardom and celebrity, the romance genre and its film couples, and Southeast Asian cinema. Her recent publications include works on Henry Golding’s Eurasian stardom, the ‘love teams’ or film couples of popular Philippine cinema, and Philippine stardom. She is currently working on projects that examine the representation of Malaysian heritage houses onscreen and the precarious state of heritage cinema buildings in Malaysia. 

Alexander Sergeant, Caring for the World: The Virtue of Superman  

To paraphrase a famous passage from Bordwell, Staiger and Thompsons’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985), it seems excessively obvious to speak about the ethical potential of a superhero franchise like Superman. With a name derived from George Bernard Shaw’s translation of Nietzsche’s concept of the übermensch, Superman deals with a narrative world in which concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are coded more explicitly and individualistically than even the most hyperbolic of classical Hollywood melodramas. Yet, just as Bordwell found the obviousness of Hollywood filmmaking the beginning rather than end point of his stylistic analysis, so too it is important not to allow the hyperbolic nature of the superhero’s persistent battles with evil to obfuscate a far more nuanced set of ethical concerns made available to the spectator through the franchise’s affective and experiential potential.  

In dialogue with film theory’s ‘ethical turn’ (Jinhee Choi and Matthias Frey, Cine-Ethics (2013)) over the past two decades and motivated by the global popularity of superhero narratives, this paper examines how we might account for the broader ethical potential of the Superman franchise. Drawing from a framework of virtue ethics, it compares and contrasts how Superman: The Movie (1978), Superman Returns (2006) and Man of Steel (2013) present ‘goodness’, both stylistically and thematically, and how the nature of that presentation might fit within a wider series of generic cues and expectations akin to a mode of ethical practice (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)). More broadly, it asks what the figure of the superhero tells us about popular notions of morality in a world increasingly concerned by such apocalyptic threats as climate change, and how the superhero’s vigilante mode of caring might guide contemporary understandings of virtue.  

Alexander Sergeant is a Senior Lecturer in Film & Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth He is twice-nominated by BAFTSS for his research, first as the co-editor of Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) and second for his more recent monograph Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema (SUNY Press 2021). He is the co-founder of Fantasy-Animation.org and co-host of the Fantasy/Animation podcast.  

Alexander Sergeant and Evan Pugh, The Ethics of Reality Television: Understanding UK Production Cultures  

In recent years, controversies over the suicides of Love Island participants Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis and exposés on the production practices of The Jeremy Kyle Show have seen a shift in debates over reality television. Once dominated by concerns over the genre’s troubled and contested relationship to documentary practice, there has been a move within both popular and critical discourse from an ethics of realism to an ethics of care as the duties and responsibilities of its practitioners are heavily scrutinised and debated. These debates have coincided with a recent turn towards ethics within film theory, as well as an increasing focus on production culture as a key site of critical investigation (Caldwell, 2008; Dwyer, 2011).  

In dialogue with all three of these developments, this paper offers preliminary findings from an ongoing study of production ethics within the UK reality television industries. Drawing from ethical theories of film practice, the co-author’s professional experiences and original interviews with leading UK practitioners working on shows such as Big Brother, Love Island and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, we propose to examine the “lived in reality” of ethical discourse as it manifests on the set of some of the UK’s most high-profile productions. Our study aims to examines the process by which ethics are mediated through ‘top-down’ producer initiatives and enacted through the often-intuitive decisions made by those on set, offering not an evaluation of whether reality TV is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but a framework for understanding how such notions are measured and understood within the embodied, day-to-day labour practices of contemporary UK television production.   

Alexander Sergeant is a Senior Lecturer in Film & Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth specialising in popular film and television. He is twice nominated by BAFTSS for his research, first as the co-editor of Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) and second for his more recent monograph Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema (SUNY Press 2021). He is the co-founder of Fantasy-Animation.org and co-host of the Fantasy/Animation podcast.   

Evan Pugh is Deputy Course Leader and Senior Lecturer in Television production at University of Portsmouth. Having worked in the TV industry since 2001, his first directing role was on Big Brother in 2014, which led to working on the show for 11 years. He continues to work as a gallery director on shows such as I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, Love Island and more recently shows for Netflix. 

Jack Shelbourn, New Naturalism and Writing a New Film Production Manifesto 

‘New Naturalism isn't just about the cinematic form, but also about the films' content. A  recurring theme in Malick’s films is that human encounters with nature are  transformational, transcendent events.’ (B, 2021) The dogma of New Naturalism in its visual form, was first defined by Terrence Malick and Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, ASC, AMC. with reference to their film The New World (2005).  This was developed further for Tree of Life (2011). More recently It has been used to describe the cinematography of Chloe Zhao’s Oscar winning film Nomadland (2020) by writer Benjamin B with reference to shooting only with natural light which Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards successfully achieved.  

Benjamin B expanded beyond Malick and Lubezki’s visual dogma by exploring the feel and visual dynamics of what appears on screen and ultimately how the characters are portrayed. But by looking beyond the creative impact of the dogma an intriguing question now comes into view. 

Could New Naturalism and it’s expanded interpretation, completely without intention, contain the formula for sustainable practices for cinematography embedded within it?  

At a critical time in which we all need to make fundamental changes to our way of doing  things a manifesto devised from New Naturalism could make a positive contribution to  combatting the effects of climate change. By taking positive action now it would help provide the next generation of film makers with a ‘manifesto’ that embraces restraint and helps discover new creativity solutions, just as with the Dogma 95 movement of Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Could it aid films in becoming more sustainable in the wider sense, such as in the community and financially? And what would this new manifesto look like? What restraints would be included or excluded? This paper aims to address these questions by focusing on the early research conducted as part of Jack Shelbourn’s on-going PhD. 

Jack Shelbourn is a working cinematographer and senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln. Jack has recently begun a PhD by practice. With the working title of: Sustainable practices in the art and craft of cinematography. Can ‘New Naturalism’, with its emphasis on natural light, lead to more sustainable and environmentally friendly practices in cinematography? Jack’s work as a cinematographer has won awards. Most notably Mind-Set (2022, Dir. Mikey Murray) winning best UK feature film at the Manchester International Film Festival 2022. Jack specialises in low budget film making, shooting with natural and available light. 

Justin Smith, Adding value to BBC IP – A sustainable approach to PSB archives and fair use exceptions to copyright law: the case of Andrew Davies’ 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch   

At last September’s BBC 100 conference, a panel of BBC archivists and historians admitted that the Corporation is ‘divided’ internally over the contentious matter of making its vast archival content available (even to licence-fee payers). To date, the BBC’s Written Archives Centre at Caversham remains a delightfully arcane research facility whose content information is only published in basic outline on its website, though it is promised that a fully-searchable catalogue is ‘coming soon’. Much was made of the recent launch of BBC Rewind featuring ‘over 30,000 pieces of uncovered content’ dating back to the 1940s, to coincide with the BBC’s centenary. Yet this is selective material that has been carefully curated.   

In the decision to include in the region of 50 clips (of average duration 3 minutes) from the BBC’s 1994 Middlemarch in our Genetic Edition, this project makes the case for fair use exceptions to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) under the following Sections: 29A Text and data mining exception, 32 Illustration for instruction, and 30(1) Criticism and review. Yet BBC Legal’s advice remains that ‘Motion Gallery’s standard clip licence requires the licensee to clear contributors/underlying rights, irrespective of whether the licensee considers their use to be covered by FD.’  This paper argues that projects like ‘Transforming Middlemarch’ add new value to BBC archival content by repurposing it in a freely-available critical context, helping to celebrate the very richness of the BBC’s vast legacy. We challenge other researchers to follow where we have dared to tread.  

Justin Smith is Professor of Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University Leicester and Visiting Professor of Media Industries at the University of Portsmouth. He is the director of the Cinema and Television History Institute at DMU and co-director of research in Creative and Heritage Industries. He was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded projects ‘Channel 4 and British Film Culture’ (2010-14), and ‘Fifty Years of British Music Video’ (2015-2018). He is currently PI on the AHRC project ‘Transforming Middlemarch’ (2022-3). 

David Sorfa, The Lad Meets the Existentialists: Tony Hancock, The Rebel and Rendezvous in July  

Existentialism fell out of academic fashion in the 1970s due, I suspect, to the sense that this philosophy encouraged a crass individualism that could be mobilised to support the introduction of neoliberal economic and political models around the world. Film theory was taking its ideological and neo-Marxist turn around the same time and its roots in Existentialist thought became increasingly embarrassing. At least, that’s part of the hypothesis I am developing in a new project on film and Existentialism. In this talk, I will consider the parodic presentation of Existentialism in Robert Day’s 1961 comedy The Rebel, starring the radio star Tony Hancock (perhaps now best remembered for Hancock’s Half Hour and committing suicide in 1968). I will contrast this discussion with Jacques Becker’s Rendezvous in July (1949) and its presentation of post-war youth culture, jazz, film students and anthropology in post-war Paris. I would like to explore here what we might be able to find of value in Existentialism and to begin to uncover a hidden history of film theory and film-philosophy that might be coming back into style once again.  

David Sorfa is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and Programme Director of the MSc and PhD in Film Studies.  He is editor-in-chief of the journal Film-Philosophy and has written on Michael Haneke, Czech film, surrealism, belief in cinema and the philosophical implications of point-of-view. He has particular interests in film-philosophy, Existentialism, phenomenology, the work of Jacques Derrida and the presentation of thought and thinking in cinema.   

Anna Sowa, “The worst thing you can do to the environment is to make a film about it” … but it does not have to be...  

About one million people in Brazil earn a meagre living by sifting through rubbish and collecting, sorting and selling it to the country’s recycling industry. Although waste pickers continue to face myriad challenges, in many ways the Brazilian Catadores (Portuguese for ‘pickers’) are a success story. They are people who together raised their voices, formed cooperatives and, in some cases, won inclusion for their group in the municipal waste system. Through their work, Catadores do more than sustain their livelihoods—they prevent recyclable materials from ending up in landfill, protect natural resources from use in production, and reduce the cost of solid waste management for municipalities. This is the theme of Chouette Films’ new i-Doc ‘Catadores: the Trailblazers’. It focuses on the story of individuals who, despite being somewhat invisible to society, are strong and capable entrepreneurs who are using their own initiative to improve the world they live in. Today, the local cooperatives that they have formed are essential to the national waste system. Not only did the theme of the film but also the process of making it pertained to environmental sustainability. The narrative as well as the documentary genre were developed and decided upon collaboratively with the waste pickers themselves. Drawing on the experience of working as a film producer, supported by extensive literature review, interviews with academics, filmmakers, festival organizers, sponsors, etc. this paper will provide a critical reflection on questions of representation, co-creation and environmental and social responsibility of filmmakers.  

Anna Sowa is a documentary film producer at Chouette Films and PhD by practice candidate at the London Film School/ University of Exeter. Based at SOAS, University of London, Chouette Films fuses the worlds of academia and creativity. By harnessing the powerful and expressive language of film, Chouette Films draws stories from the world of academia and extends the reach of their impact to wider audiences. The vision of the enterprise is to amplify the voices of research projects and social ventures, so that their unique and important stories are heard rather than being lost to gather dust on library shelves. Chouette Films is recognised for their contribution to social change and prowess in using film to advance research, commended by the AHRC, Best Film by Research award, the Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival, and the IBC Social Impact Award for Ethical Leadership in Filmmaking, amongst many others.  

Hannah Spaulding, Remembering QUBE: Digital Afterlives, Cable, and Sustaining “Failed” Technologies  

In 1984, Warner Communications made a fateful announcement: QUBE, the interactive cable system launched seven years before in Columbus, Ohio was shutting down. QUBE promised subscribers a “television of tomorrow”, where they could vote in live polls, purchase exclusive programming, take classes, and even go shopping—a fantasy that proved too expensive and ultimately, unsustainable. Yet QUBE’s “failure” is not the end of its story. The system helped shape television’s post-network era, developing early versions of what would become Nickelodeon, MTV, and the Movie Channel, and anticipating contemporary trends in digital media. More directly though, QUBE programming, memorabilia, and technology endures, not only in official archives, but in digital spaces documenting and reanimating QUBE’s legacy.   

In this paper, I examine QUBE through the lens of sustainability, analyzing its relationship with cable policy, histories of failure, and digital rediscovery. One the one hand, QUBE seems an emblem of unsustainability, pointing to the broader failure of two-way cable to live up to its Blue Sky fantasy. On the other hand, the continued efforts to re-present and remediate QUBE in digital spaces points to the capacity for televisual and technological failures to endure, sustain dedicated fan communities, and hold residual importance within television history. Ultimately this paper reevaluates narratives of technological “failure”, exploring QUBE’s digital afterlife where obsolescence does not mean erasure.  

Hannah Spaulding is a Lecturer in Television Studies at the University of Lincoln. Her research centers on histories of gender, surveillance, and domestic media. Her current book project explores the history of “home utility television” in the United States, tracing how the medium was used and imagined for the management and fortification of domestic life.  She holds a PhD in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University and her work has been published in Television and New Media, the Journal of Sonic Studies, and JCMS.   

James Staunton-Price, Beyond ‘Skills for a Sustainable Industry’: Socio-ecological experiments in nonfiction filmmaking pedagogy 

In recent years leading UK film industry bodies have made pronouncements towards decarbonising the UK screen industry (albert, BFI and Arup, 2020). In practice the new role of sustainability manager “sits comparatively low on the production hierarchy, [and] can be powerless to put policy into operation.” (Torchin, 2022) In an effort to normalise sustainability management, initiatives have been introduced into film school education: checklist systems such as PEACHy (Production Environment Actions Checklist (youth)) and standalone modules such as the ALBERT Education Partnership’s ‘Applied Skills for a Sustainable Film Industry’.  

While well-intentioned, such initiatives conform to a conception of HE that places it “at the service of the economy and industry” (Friedman and Whitford, 2018) characterised by “a fetishization of instrumental skills at the expense of ideas, free-thinking and an open engagement with the world” (Petrie and Stoneman, 2014) - the neo-liberal conditions under which filmmaking education has proliferated since New Labour. Depoliticised sustainability training and certification become another selling-point for employability, obfuscating the substantive change to practices and ontology that the climate and ecological catastrophes demand.  

In this presentation I give an overview of historical and contemporary pedagogical initiatives which seek to go beyond the sustainability/skills paradigm. I argue these initiatives, at various degrees of entanglement with mainstream higher education, provoke consideration of how far the extractivist global culture which has led to climate and ecological catastrophe is engrained in the doxas of nonfiction filmmaking practice and its education. Furthermore, they prompt deeper consideration of what conception of nonfiction filmmaking pedagogy might be fit to respond to that catastrophe, and to what extent that might be enacted within mainstream education.  

James Staunton-Price is an AHRC (SWWDTP) PhD Researcher in anti-extractive nonfiction filmmaking pedagogy situated between UWE Bristol and Aberystwyth. His interests include documentary film, the film and television industries, political ecology, degrowth, new materialism and pedagogy for social change. James’ research is informed by his experience as a documentary filmmaker and a lecturer.  

Lindsay Steenberg, Violence, Precarity, and the Warriors of Contemporary Television  

From the freelancer, to the mercenary, or the gladiator (or volunteer auctorati), the embodied language we use to describe labour and labourers in a gig economy is often revealingly linked to state-legitimised violence. This paper takes such language and archetypal allegories seriously, interrogating the ties between the Roman gladiator, the prize fighter, the Viking raider and precarious labour under contemporary capitalism. Examples include the berserker frenzy of the Viking’s consumption in visual fictions such as Vikings and the gladiators and celebrity fighters paid per fight in Spartacus or paid per view in the Ultimate Fighting Championships.  

I argue that the gladiators of hyper-capitalism can be functionally, if superficially, positioned on spectrum between two different modes: the agonistic (a deadly and deadpan mode of competition) and the ludic (a more playful and less rule-bound approach). Whilst the gladiators of Squid Game are forced to compete to the death to clear their crippling debts, the Roman gladiators of Spartacus are empowered by their violent skills to resist their enslavers. What is the nature and drive that propels such competitive forces? What are the boundaries of the games are being played and who are the players and sponsors when violence is the main language of play? These are the research questions underpinning this investigation of the spectrum of violent play and competition in the screen landscape of the neoliberal labour market.  

Lindsay Steenberg is Reader / Associate Professor in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University where she is chair of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Research Network.  She has published numerous articles on violence in the media and the crime and action genres. She is the author of Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science and Are You Not Entertained? Mapping the Gladiator in Visual Culture.  She is currently working on a new monograph on the fight scene with Lisa Coulthard at the University of British Columbia.   

Francesco Sticchi, Gladiatorial Games and the Exploitation of the General Intellect: On the Success of Squid Game (2021)  

More and more films and TV series address the precarisation of society, the transformation of labour into a performance, the dynamics of human capital, and new modes of marginalisation and exploitation. Concurrently, there is a growing interest in the analysis of the artistic productions that address these changes and social concerns. Many times, the cinema and television of precarity resorts to the aesthetic features of social realism, whereas, sci-fi dystopias and horror productions may also offer interesting and productive insights on changing power relations though effective and imaginative allegories.   

This paper aims to discuss how the extremely popular Netflix series Squid Game may contribute in the understanding of contemporary capitalism. By displaying a series of gladiatorial competitions in a social landscape of indebtedness and lack of future perspectives, the series allows us, on one side, to appreciate and discuss the subject at the centre of precarious labour; it also displays the dynamics of exploitation and extraction of human collective intelligence (the Marxian General Intellect), the very source of capitalist voracious and destructive growth.  

Francesco Sticchi: I am Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Most recently, I have published the monograph Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television: Chronotopes of Anxiety, Depression, Expulsion/Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and works in the field of film-philosophy and ecology of media.  

Sarah Street, Encounters with Colour at Denham Studios  

In the 1930s Britain was one of the first non-US countries to take up Technicolor. Part of the Prudential Assurance Company’s motivation to back Alexander Korda and the building of Denham Studios was to develop Hillman Colour, a new colour process in Britain, and when this did not turn out to be practicable Korda established links with the Technicolor Corporation. Several significant Technicolor films were subsequently made at Denham, the first British studio to produce a Technicolor feature film. The paper will consider four main interrelated spheres: camera and lighting; sets; personnel; architecture. It explores how colour posed challenges on account of the large, cumbersome Technicolor cameras that very few cinematographers were trained to operate. The high-key lighting required put physical strains on performers, lighting technicians and other studio personnel. Designing and making sets and costumes for colour films also necessitated different protocols, approaches and techniques. Finally, the paper will consider how colour was part of Denham’s very fabric: since the studio’s visual records only exist as black and white photographs and a promotional film, reconstructing the physical environment today using VR technology presents challenges in identifying and tracing how colours looked, as well as their function. As a working environment, colour was important at Denham for signposting and lighting, as well as hallmarking parts of the complex’s architectural design and ‘narrative image’. The paper describes the approach taken to re-creating the ‘lost’ colours that were part of the studio’s functioning and design.  

Sarah Street is Professor of Film, University of Bristol. She has published extensively, including British National Cinema (1997) and Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (2002). Her latest books are Deborah Kerr (2018); Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (2019, co-authored with Joshua Yumibe; winner of Kovács book prize, SCMS 2020, and Michael Nelson prize, IAMHIST, 2021), and Colour Films in Britain: The Eastmancolor Revolution (2021, co-authored with Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith and Carolyn Rickards). She is PI on the ERC Advanced Grant: STUDIOTEC: Film Studios in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, 1930-60.  

Yue Su, Children, Risk Society and Liquid Kinship in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Cinema

The low birth rate has caused enormous social anxiety in Japan since the economic stagnation beginning in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, Japanese children have been labelled in terms of ‘problems’, ‘crises’, and ‘strangeness’ in mainstream media and political rhetoric (Grimes-MacLellan, 2011). This vision of ‘strange children’, however, is more an image distorted through the lens of the unsustainability of current national development. It is also reflected on screens, especially through the popular J-horror genre, in which we see ghostly, uncanny and monstrous children (Lury, 2010). Given this context, I want to argue that Kore-eda Hirokazu significantly speaks to this mainstream discourse through the representation of children as autonomous agents. Looking at his two films which foreground children as protagonists, Nobody Knows (2004) and I Wish (2011), I address how the child characters play a mobile and active role in a risk society and a liquid form of kinship. On the one hand, the risk is embodied by the isolation of the children in Nobody Knows and the child’s wish for a volcanic eruption in I Wish. Kore-eda proposes that children are not crises themselves but that they live with and deal with a wide range of crises. On the other hand, both cases depict the unsustainable kinship structure, in which children are no longer the bedrock of family continuity and integrity. The children, however, can act as agents of making kinship, which is achieved through the blurred boundary between adulthood and childhood as well as carers and those who are cared for in Kore-eda’s kinship narratives. 

Yue Su is a PhD student in the Co-Tutelle PhD Programme in Global Screen Studies between the University of Warwick and Nagoya University in Japan. His research interests lie in the fields of the cinematic representation of kinship, World cinema, and queer cinema. His PhD project concerns the idea of ‘liquid kinship’ in the films of Kore-eda Hirokazu.  

Dyna Herlina Suwarto, Creative Hustle as Coping Practice of Precarity among Local Filmmakers  

The Yogyakarta independent filmmakers experience precariousness that rooted to the industrial informality and lack of workers protection regulation. Filling the research gap about precarity in the informal media context, this study explores about production practice of the local film practitioners amidst the precariousness. Drawing from the qualitative approach that involves 23 interviewees, it reveals that they conduct creative hustle practices include dual lives, relational work and speculative action. Most of the film practitioners work for multiple jobs that categorized into passionate and commissioned project. Furthermore, they rely on interpersonal relationship to move from one project to another through hanging around and helping about practices. To maintain and develop their career in the film industry they keep working and hoping in flexible manner. The creative hustle practices enforce the self-resilience towards precarity without change the fundamental causes.   

Dyna Herlina Suwarto is a Ph.D. student in the film and television studies programme, at the University of Nottingham and a member of teaching staff at the Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She is a co-founder of Jogja Netpac Asian Film Festival, Indonesian Film Studies (KAFEIN) and Cinema House (Rumah Sinema) in Indonesia. Her research interest is related to media industries.   

Juan A. Tarancón, Break On Through to the Other Side: Roberto Minervini and the Challenge of Hope   

The effects of the various interconnected crises of the last two decades include a transformation of the ways in which feelings are organized and distributed. Estranged from the new socioeconomic landscape and pessimistic about the possibilities of holding back the tide of developments, many people had recourse to an us-versus-them mindset. What is perhaps most startling is that we all naturalized the simplistic narrative that divides society into two irreconcilable cultural tribes, thus precluding any resolution other than total annihilation. In a context marked by pessimism, cynicism, and political polarization, being strategic about mobilizing hope may be one way of moving beyond an interpretative framework that has contributed to division and social stagnation, prompting both camps to endlessly harden and radicalize their positions. I aim to show that Roberto Minervini’s approach to filmmaking rests on an effort to transcend rigid categories and disturb our certainties about the current political situation. I will argue that his films challenge spectators to pay heed to the feelings and the sense of reality of those who think differently about the forces that are transforming society and urge us to reconstruct the current context as one of community, relationality, and care.  

Juan A. Tarancón is Lecturer in Film Studies and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. He has written on film genre theory, on representations of immigration and Mexican American culture, and on the work of filmmakers like John Sayles and Carlos Saura. His work has appeared in CineAction, Cultural Studies, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, New Cinemas, and varied Spanish scholarly journals. He is the co-editor of Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Screening the Crisis: US Cinema and Social Change in the Wake of the 2008 Crash (Bloomsbury, 2022).  

Sarah Thomas, Trust, authenticity and agency in the celebrity digital double 

This paper examines the replication of star identity into celebrity ‘digital doubles’ in order to consider how virtual celebrity is being used to shape important emergent parameters around trust in the digital body. To producers of synthetic media (like the digital human or AI-produced content) the celebrity digital double can act as a signifier of responsible agency and ethical approaches of these new digital forms; yet for others, they are also significant symbols of artifice and illegitimacy. I will explore the process of turning known personalities, performances and images into digital language, capturing and curating a fixed star image, especially those that use volumetric capture, hologrammatic projection and AI-software. I will examine how the marketing of these digital imaginaries shape alternate perspectives around the authenticities of stardom and tech-driven/star-driven storytelling. I will also discuss the impact of digital doubling on celebrity and performative agency, where – on the one hand –unions like SAG-AFTRA and Equity are campaigning against exploitation and negotiating for improved performer digital rights management, and – on the other - celebrities themselves engage in increasingly visible ‘virtualisation strategies’ where their digital replication expands their brand identity and asset value. Through this, I will consider how some examples of the celebrity digital double, including avatars of David Beckham, Abba and David Attenborough, act as a means by which consumers are encouraged to learn to ‘trust’ a seemingly safe and ethical digital environment, whereby the presence of star image and performance appears to reconcile some of the long-standing issues about the replication of digital identity.  

Sarah Thomas is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. Specialising in research on the Hollywood film industry, stardom, and immersive media, she is author of the Peter Lorre - Face Maker: Constructing Stardom in Hollywood and Europe (Berghahn 2012) and James Mason for the BFI Film Stars series (BFI Bloomsbury 2018), co-author of ‘Using Eye Tracking and Raiders of the Lost Ark to Investigate Stardom and Performance’ in Dwyer et al (eds.), Seeing Into Screen: Eye tracking the Moving Image (Bloomsbury 2018), and ‘The Star in VR’ (Celebrity Studies Journal 2019). 

Lizzie Thynne, A feminist revisioning of British Documentary history  

What does an attention to the work of early women non-fiction film-makers tell us about how documentary history might be re-visioned and diversified?  

What might looking outside the circle of Grierson’s boys reveal about how factual film was being developed by women in other sectors and contexts?  

Using examples from films by women who worked outside the Documentary Movement, including those on the recent BFI DVD collection of archival restorations, The Camera is Ours: Britain’s Women Documentary Makers (2022), Thynne will present some initial responses to these questions looking at how selected directors such as Sarah Erulkar, Muriel Box, Kay Mander and Evelyn Spice contributed to the form and development of non-fiction film. Often working in what were less visible and certainly less prestigious genres in the 1930s and 1940s such as the information film they were able to exploit the medium to explore new subjects and to address aspects of women’s daily experiences which were side-lined in many films of the Documentary Movement which focussed on men at work.  

Lizzie Thynne is a documentary film-maker and Professor of Film at the University of Sussex. Her recent biopic, Independent Miss Craigie (2021), a special feature on The Camera is Ours dvd (BFI, 2022), explores the career and life of director Jill Craigie, (1911 - 99) whose innovative films are re-evaluated in the AHRC project led by Thynne, Jill Craigie: Film Pioneer. Thynne’s other feature documentaries On the Border, Playing a Part: the Story of Claude Cahun and Brighton: Symphony of a City have been widely screened at international festivals and major galleries.   

Muriel Tinel-Temple, Digital Landscapes: movements and metamorpheses in the work of Jacques Perconte  

Jacques Perconte is a French visual artist. He works in digital, mainly filming places, landscapes, and territories, and then manipulating the compressed files by using his own homemade techniques of data-moshing. Although deeply digital, Perconte’s work is grounded in the real and in the materiality of the explored area, hence a strange and unsettling encounter between the organic, the mineral, and the digital.   

Because he constantly returns and re-films the same places, he talks about them as ‘friends’ you visit, and he is more interested in recording a ‘moment’ of/in the landscapes and letting it to be revealed later, than he is in controlling and imposing a point of view on it. By playing with the limits of visibility, revealing traces of movements, textures, lights, colours and shapes, and resisting the idea of the ‘spectacular’, he situates himself in opposition to the mainstream (and damaging) drone-high-definition overview of our planet.   

For this paper I would like to focus on two points:  

Using notions of human geography and performing landscapes (as developed by John Wylie), but also the concept of ‘Metamorphoses’ developed by the philosopher Emmanuele Coccia, I will discuss Perconte’s relationship to the natural world, seen and understood as a continuous (digital) transformation, reassessing endlessly ‘our’ place within it.  

Then, drawing upon Sean Cubitt’s work in The Practice of Light (2014), I will analyse Perconte’s uses of mostly unpredicted movements, light and recurrent colours to explore the way nature, culture and techniques are intertwined and interdependent.  

Muriel Tinel-Temple is Lecturer in Film and Digital Content Creation, University of Roehampton. She mainly teaches ‘critical practice’, and her research explores experimental filmmaking, found footage/archive-based films, self-representation, Francophone cinemas and mediated landscapes. She is the author of Le cinéaste au travail: autoportraits (2016), co-editor of From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Representing the Self in the Moving Image (2019), and she recently published ‘Found Footage and the Construction of the Self: Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD and Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream’ (Ekphrasis, 2021). She organises screenings at Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, including ‘Jacques Perconte: Digital Landscapes’. 

Christa van Raalte, Where have all the PMs gone? The importance of sustainable working environments in addressing persistent skills gaps in UK TV 

The UK television industry has for years reported skills shortages impeding both quality of output and global competitiveness (ScreenSkills June 2022). The situation has recently been exacerbated by the influx of funding from streaming companies. The demand for high quality content represents a great growth opportunity for the industry; shortages of experienced, skilled professionals in key roles, however, represents a very real risk to our ability to respond to that opportunity and indeed to the sustainability of the British industry.   

The skills that consistently head the lists of shortages reported by organisations such as ScreenSkills, the BFI and the Work Foundation are those of experienced production managers (PMs) (eg ScreenSkills Feb 2022; ScreenSkills Sept 2022). The industry struggles to recruit to the role: more significantly, perhaps, it fails to retain the experienced PMs it has.  This failure not only represents a level of wastage the industry can ill afford, it also represents a very human cost for those leaving the industry. Existing evidence suggests that for PMs, as for other television professionals the decision to abandon their careers is not taken lightly and is often taken with regret (Wallis et al 2019;  Wreyford et al 2021). They take from the industry the skills and experience that are in short supply, because they feel the industry has left them no choice.   

This British Academy funded project explores the lived experiences of people working in production management roles, and, particularly, of those who have left the industry. We seek to understand what the industry can do to retain critical talent. This paper will present our preliminary findings from the study.  

Christa van Raalte is Associate Professor of Film and Television at Bournemouth University. Her research interests include constructions of gender in action cinema, narrative strategies in complex TV, and working conditions in the film and television industries. She has recently published articles on these topics in journals including the New Review for Film and Television Studies, the Journal of Popular Film and Television and Media industries, as well as a number of book chapters and industry reports.   

Rowan Aust is Lecturer in Television Production and Industries at the University of Huddersfield. An ex-television Producer, she is also C-Director of Share My Telly Job, which advocates for parity in television work through better management of hours. Her research interests are in the lived experience of TV and film workers and regimes and ethics of care.  

María A. Vélez-Serna, Anti-infrastructural media: Reuse and detournement of sponsored film in environmental conflicts  

This paper explores the use of audiovisual media to facilitate and to contest infrastructure projects, with a focus on extraction and energy transitions in Colombia. Starting from archive research on corporate and industrial film of opencast coal mining, I argue that the visibility of infrastructure is mobilised in environmental conflicts through the use and reappropriation of moving images.   

As Campos Johnson (2018) has argued, visuality can be infrastructural, mediating relationships between things; in this way, audiovisual media participate in the production of material relations, such as the construction of roads, mines, ports, and dams. Sponsored media, including industrial and public relations film, training and corporate communications video, state-funded television, and online campaigns, make infrastructure visible to persuade stakeholders, explain processes, and coordinate activities. This limited visibility can become a site of contestation when environmental conflicts arise from infrastructure projects. Activists and affected communities also use audiovisual media to propose competing visions of progress and relationships to land. In activist media, clips from sponsored media can be turned against themselves, used as evidence or contrasted with on-the-ground realities and testimonies.   

My research seeks to understand some of the motivations and strategies through which independent media producers appropriate and recontextualise sponsored film and video in disputes about mine expansion, hydroelectric dams, and windfarms. From a climate justice perspective, it asks whether there are other ways of looking at infrastructure besides the technological sublime, and whether infrastructural cinema can be put to other uses.  

María A. Vélez-Serna teaches film and media at the University of Stirling. She is the author of Ephemeral Cinema Spaces (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), and co-author of Early Cinema in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). She has also published on archive film reuse, early film distribution and showmanship, and on Colombian films and audiences of the 1940s. She studied at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the University of Glasgow. 

Jaime Vindel, The dam as cinematographic Atlante: hegemony, hydroelectricity and ecological sensitivity in the Italian film production of the economic miracle  

During the post-war decades in Italy (and more particularly between 1958 and 1963), developmentalism took on the dimension of a miracle in the narratives of political and economic power, aimed at leaving behind both material poverty and the historical trauma suffered by the nation as a result of fascism and the civil war that took place during the Second World War. One of the symbols of this period was the construction of Alpine dams for the production of hydroelectric energy, which were to guarantee the supply of the large Italian cities. Dams as the Atlantes of progress became a narrative starting-point around which to generate new hegemonic discourses, as in the films made for Edison Volta by Ermanno Olmi. But the imaginaries of the dam also welcomed a more ambiguous vision of industrialism in films that reflected the impact on natural ecosystems, as in Manon-finestra 2 (1956), filmed by Olmi himself with a poetic script by Pier Paolo Pasolini. These and other films of the period announced a tension between the interests of the energy corporations, the political hegemony of Christian Democracy, Pasolini's conversion of the anti-fascist ethic into anti-industrialism and the propaganda apparatus of organizations such as the Italian Socialist Party and the Italian Communist Party, in a context in which the "economic miracle" saw its hydroelectric utopia crack after the Vajont dam disaster in 1963. Finally, the paper will underline how the end of this hydroelectric utopia coincided with the emergence of a new fossil modernity around the development of prospecting promoted by ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi), which had its documentary translation in a controversial documentary filmed by Joris Ivens in 1960.   

Jaime Vindel holds an European PhD in Art History. He is post-doctoral Researcher of the Institute of History of the Spanish National Research Council, where he is Head Researcher of the projects: "Fossil Aesthetics: a political ecology of art history, visual culture and cultural imaginaries of modernity" and “Energy humanities. Energy and sociocultural imaginaries between the industrial revolutions and the ecosocial crisis”. He was coordinator of the "Cultural Ecologies" contents block of the Independent Studies Programme of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and is the author of books such as Estética fósil. Imaginarios de la energía y crisis ecosocial (Arcadia, 2020).  

Ed Vollans, Accidental archives and paratextuality  

As a commodity sold for economic gain, commercial videogames require promotion: from flyers for new cabinet-sized arcade machines, early television advertisements explaining how to connect the console to the TV, right the way through to contemporary pre-roll YouTube adverts and trailers. As with all promotional paratexts, studying this kind of industrial communication provides a lens through which we can view both the product, and the wider concerns of the industry. We can see how the product was presented, how the product’s audience was positioned, constructed, and ultimately how the consumer was communicated with alongside context – games ratings, formats, even the representation (or not) of players. Recognising the value of promotion, work in games studies has engaged with the concept of paratexts as a separate framing device, one suitable for historic study (e.g Young, 2007, Therrien & Lefebvre 2017), and has seen archives generated for academic purposes therein. In this paper, Vollans revisits and reviews one of the first open academic archives of digital game promotion, published in thesis form in 2010, just how much longevity and use does a simple PhD thesis have a decade later, and what might this mean for future studies?    

Exploring the disparity and challenges between accessibility then, and over a decade later, this paper draws together key themes exploring the challenges in generating and maintaining paratextual archives for the purposes of historical study. It reflects on the nature of ephemera within the archive, and the cultural status of promotional ephemera specifically, while offering practical reflections on data management, and the overall sustainability of academic self-archival projects.  

Ed Vollans is a Lecturer in Media & Advertising at the University of Leicester. He attained his PhD, focusing on promotional trailers and contemporary media industries from the University of East Anglia in 2015. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, and has worked in a number of HE institutions within the UK. Prior to academia he worked for UKRI, and as a Journalist for Screen, Indian Express. His research explores promotion within the contemporary entertainment industries, and the implications of industry change on promotion.  

Verena von Eicken, Levelling the playing field – Enabling learning on gender and politics for film students   

How can Film Studies enable learning on representation, gender and identity politics at a time of social upheaval? The 2020s are an exciting, rewarding time to be working with film students on the topic of representation and identity: increased media awareness and discussion of ongoing inequalities of people due to their ethnicity, gender identity or socio-economic background has taken off through social media initiatives such as #metoo, #blacklivesmatter or #oscarssowhite. The MeToo movement, closely related to the Weinstein scandal that exposed the rampant misogyny and sexual abuse in the film industry has gained strength from individuals taking the courage to speak up about their experiences of victimisation and empowerment. The polarisation of political camps and rise of extreme right wing politicians in the 2010s has thrown into relief a social rift along lines of gender, race and class: fourth wave feminist activists and other interest groups campaigning for greater visibility and social equality, have been propelled into action by the public figures blatantly abusing their power, from the deep-seated misogyny and sexism of extreme Donald Trump and his supporters, police violence against people of colour in the US, to the xenophobic politics of Suella Braverman, the accusations of racism within the British monarchy and the evident disconnect of conservative British politicians from the people they were elected to represent.  

In this paper, I will discuss how teaching on modules on the representation of gender and identity in film since starting out as a seminar tutor in 2011, I have learnt as much from working with my students as I have aimed to bring to them. I have worked with groups of students with widely diverging levels of knowledge and interest in discussing these issues of identity and representation: the fact that they are so closely related to students’ personal experience is a major asset, as it invites students’ engagement – and, at the same time, a challenge, since students yet have to find their voice and confidence to express their position and identity when undertaking an undergraduate degree. I will reflect on how working closely with students on these fundamental, equally personal and highly socially relevant topics has motivated me to continually develop and update my curriculum: choosing case study films and academic texts as focal points for discussion, I have had to reflect on my own biases and privilege arising from my background and education. Selecting materials, tasks and activities based on students’ input, I have drawn of a range of teaching materials such as new film texts, mediatised events and academic publications alike. Specifically, I will discuss the usefulness of postmodernist ideas and texts due to their approach to (his)tory/herstory as personal, subjective and empowering storytelling; and how the semiotics tenet that ‘language creates truth’ is crucial in situating developments in naming and declaring aspects of gender, sexual and ethnic identity (such as the appeal that the designation of a ‘non-binary’ gender identity has to many millennials). In so doing, I hope to contribute to a reflection and discussion on how the academy can present complex ideas around identity, power and empowerment in an accessible, inclusive way.  

Verena von Eicken is a Senior Lecturer at Falmouth University‘s School of Film and Television, where she also researches on gender in film and television, history in film and contemporary German Cinema. Among her forthcoming publications is a chapter entitled ‘Visualising heritage in period drama – A case study of Beloved Sisters (dir. Dominik Graf, 2014)’ that is part of a conference publication of the (IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S) 2022 Canterbury Conference. Verena studied Film and TV Studies at the University of York, where she completed her PhD, ‘German Actresses of the 2000s - A Study of Female Representation, Acting and Stardom’ in 2015.   

Harry Warwick, Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Visual Culture  

Once an avatar of social and economic progress, the coal-fired power station has become the emblem of deindustrialisation and decline. Launching the Conservative party’s 2010 manifesto in the long-defunct Battersea Power Station – which at its peak supplied as much as a fifth of London’s electricity – David Cameron exploited this very association: Battersea Power Station, he claimed, is ‘a building in need of regeneration in a country in need of regeneration’. Cameron appears to have got his wish: its redevelopment funded by a consortium of Malaysian firms, the erstwhile power station is now a complex of luxury apartments, offices, and shops. By contrast with Cameron’s gentrified pseudo-utopia, however, this paper turns to the history of dystopian representations of Battersea Power Station, particularly those produced in the period of the building’s dereliction. The paper begins with a reading of the famous depiction of the building on the cover art of Pink Floyd’s album Animals (1977), which industrialises Orwell’s agricultural allegory in Animal Farm (1945); compares this artwork with Michael Radford’s cinematic Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), in which the power station coincides directly with authoritarian power; and concludes by examining Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), whose ‘reproductive futurism’ is also a fossil futurism – a vision of the future dependent on the heat and light of fossil fuels. The power station embodies not only our social hopes and dreams, this paper contends, but also our fears.  

Harry Warwick is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His first monograph, Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979–2017, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press in March 2023. 

Liz Watkins, Colourisation, Ethics and the Archive: attending to the dead.  

Colourisation describes the retrospective digitisation and addition of colour to analogue photographs that were initially recorded in a black-and-white format. This presentation examines the ethical implications of colourisation in the interpretation and exhibition of black-and-white photochemical records of the First World War. Examples include work by Dynamichrome for The Big Show, IWM North, They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson, 2018), and the images colourised by Marina Amaral for All the World Aflame (2020) and A Woman’s World (2022). For Amaral, colour acts as an ‘emotional enhancing agent’ (2020) able to emphasise empathy, anxiety or disgust in an approach that is suggestive of a presentational aesthetic that embeds colourisation in a discourse of colour realism and the sensuous appeal of different hues on the viewer’s perception of the image. The addition of colour is able to exaggerate or obfuscate the delineation of figure and ground, which would otherwise rely on the variations in light and shadow in a black-and-white image. If colourisation is able to emphasise or diminish details that were considered salient to the photographer, or implement a new visual hierarchy, how does it intersect with moral values in the history and representation of conflict? Or the way that we negotiate loss? The presentation begins to discuss the ways that colourisation connects with how we know the past through historical images (Crane 2008) and to examine how the digital editing and circulation of images (Odumosu 2020), might ethically, attend to the dead, vulnerable, and wounded.   

Liz Watkins Research Fellow, University of Leeds:  My research interests include colour, its theories, technologies, and materiality in photographic and film archives. I am Chair of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies and I have held research fellowships at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich and Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. My publications include essays in Screen, Journal for Cultural Research, photographies and Parallax. I have co-edited books on Color and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2013), British Colour Cinema (Bloomsbury 2013) and Gesture and Film: Signalling New Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2017).   

Alan Watt, Morality and hypermorality in film storytelling: Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992)    

There is a danger that a narrow view of ethics, conceived as following an objective moral standard  that excludes evil, leads to an equally narrow understanding of film’s potential to explore the ethical,  highlighting only films which exemplify and endorse the approved ethical standards. By opening up  to less orthodox philosophical approaches, however, it becomes possible to appreciate the ethical  significance of films that trouble the relationship between good and evil and do not simply endorse  commonplace conceptions of the good. This paper takes such an approach, highlighting the idea of  ‘hypermorality’ as proposed by Georges Bataille in Literature and Evil: whereas conventional  morality would insist on upholding the moral law (taboo) at all times, hypermorality rather insists on  the necessity and value of larger patterns of taboo, transgression and atonement, and on art’s  capacity to highlight such patterns and engage the ‘complicity’ of audiences in experiencing them.  While Bataille applied this theory to the medium of literature in analysis of writers such as Emily  Brontë and William Blake, this paper will consider its possible application to film through a detailed  analysis of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992). At the micro level, the paper argues that this film  does indeed fit the ‘hypermorality’ pattern outlined by Bataille, indicating that his ideas can be  usefully applied to cinema. More broadly, I argue the need to incorporate hypermorality into our  understanding of ethics, which in turn means affirming the vital importance of transgressive cinema  to any serious conversation about ethical film futures.   

Alan Watt is a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh Film Studies department, where he is  conducting research on tragedy and the post-classical American Western; previously he taught for  two decades at Central European University, Budapest. He holds an MA in Film Studies from  Kingston University and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Warwick, where he specialised in  the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Besides work on Nietzsche his publications include studies of  other modern European philosopers including Jacques Rancière and Georges Bataille, and his  current research interests include explorations of the interface between film and philosophy.   

Andrew Watts, Sustainability, Survival, and (Mis)Remembering the Canon: Adapting Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)  

This paper explores the idea of sustainability in relation to the ongoing adaptation of canonical works of literature. More specifically, it considers how the ways in which we remember texts survive and evolve through the practice of adaptation. The paper focuses on Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and incorporates analysis of key adaptations of the novel in silent film (Huckleberry Finn, 1920, dir. Taylor), television (The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1968-69), and Japanese Manga (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 2017). My discussion places these adaptations in dialogue with the concept of adaptive memory first elaborated by James Nairne, Sarah, Thompson, and Josefa Pandeirada in 2007. In the context of evolutionary psychology, their research argues that humans use memory not simply to recall past events, but to improve their fitness for reproduction. This paper examines how adaptations of Huckleberry Finn have remembered the novel at different historical moments, often responding to debates around racism, censorship, and what Bourdieu has theorised as wider structures of power and social inequality. Moreover, it reflects on how adaptations can create ‘false memories’ of their source material, deliberate or unconscious ‘misrememberings’ of the text which help to perpetuate its artistic afterlife. In summary, this paper demonstrates that, through the mechanisms of memory, the practice of creative adaptation does not remain static, but sustains and reinvents itself over time.  

Andrew Watts is Reader in French Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). He is the author and co-author of several books on nineteenth-century French literature and its adaptation across multiple media, including Adapting Nineteenth-Century France (UWP, 2013) and The History of French Literature on Film (Bloomsbury, 2020), both with Kate Griffiths. He is currently working on a new monograph for Legenda entitled Darwinian Dialogues: Adaptation, Evolution, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, and a special issue of the Balzac Review / Revue Balzac on the theme of adaptation.  

Nick Webber, The paratextual past – relating histories of game experience to game texts 

What survives when a game is completed or set aside, or paused mid-play but (perhaps unintentionally) never resumed? Of non-digital role-playing games, Anders Drachen and colleagues (2009: 3) observe that ‘each participant has memories of the game from their character’s point-of-view, in addition to an assortment of props’. Souvik Mukherjee (2015: 104, 118) extends this, adding After Action Reports, Let’s Plays and reviews to the paratextual materials which preserve this ‘“disappearing” game narrative’, and are essential to the experience of video-game stories.   

This paper is concerned with paratextual material of this kind which is produced by players and which historicises game experiences. It reflects on a series of questions about the textual and paratextual nature of these artefacts, and their relationship both to the game text and a sense of the past. If history represents The Past as Text (Spiegel, 1997), how does paratextuality function between two equivalent textual authorities? As histories of game experiences are not usually produced by people we might think of as game ‘authors’, we might argue that they are not paratexts at all (see Genette, 1991: 262). Yet many game ‘authors’ subsequently integrate these histories into the text (or paratext): through a saved game which shapes a New Game+, an in-game marker which recalls an emergent event, or promotional media which retells players’ stories of their gameplay. This paper discusses these complexities, and offers insight into the relationship between games, history, text and paratext.  

Nick Webber is Associate Professor in Media, and Director of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, at Birmingham City University, UK. He is co-convenor of the Historical Games Network and his research focuses on (video)games, cultural history and identity. His recent work explores the historical practices of player and fan communities, the impact of games and virtual worlds on our understanding of the past, and the relationship between national cultural policy and video games.  

Guy Westwell, Sustainable Futures From Past Lives: Ghandi (1982), Rosa Luxemburg (1986), A Hidden Life (2013) and the Peace Biopic  

Certain films – what might be called peace biopics – tell the story of individuals seeking peace in a violent world. This paper focuses on three examples: Ghandi (Richard Attenborough, 1982), Rosa Luxemburg (Margarethe von Trotta, 1986), and A Hidden Life (Terence Malick, 2013). The films’ stories are varied, recounting lives devoted to religious pacifist activism, secular anti-war pacifism, and religious conscientious objection. However, what the films have in common is a desire to identify, depict and celebrate alternative, or against the grain, ways of living. The paths taken by the films’ protagonists, and the films themselves, point to the possibility of a more peaceful, and as a consequence, more sustainable future. Two key lines of inquiry are explored. First, how the films foster the imagination of a more sustainable future from the story of past lives while working within the significant limits of the biopic genre and its avowed commitment to individual human experience and the timeframe of a life. Second, how the films invite ethical thought via their varied cinematic engagements with individuals who refuse to be conform to social norms, inherited values, and the status quo, and instead seek alternatives, even in the face of imprisonment, violent repression, the seeming impossibility of change, and the threat of death.  

Guy Westwell is Reader in Film Studies and Head of Film at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of War Cinema – Hollywood on the Front-line (Wallflower Press, 2006) and Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2012), and co-author with Annette Kuhn of The Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies (Oxford University Press, 2020). His current research focuses on the war and anti-war film, and peace cinema.  

Abigail Whittall, Examining Guillermo Del Toro’s Monsters: Labour, Visibility and the Practical Effects Makeup Actor  

The practical effects makeup actor has a long history in cinema, with notable early examples including Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff. These actors have been deemed stars at least in part due to their ability to perform under heavy makeup and prosthetics as monsters with little to no human resemblance, posing an unusual form of stardom. While there has been a shift towards digital effects within contemporary cinema, practical effects are far from obsolete, and they remain particularly important within the fantasy and horror genres. The work of Guillermo del Toro provides a useful case study as he has been noted for his continued use of practical effects, and has employed the same practical effects makeup actors multiple times: Doug Jones, Brian Steele and Javier Botet.  

The discourse surrounding such practical effects makeup actors draws our attention towards recurring themes such as the (in)visibility of the actor, the value of performance and the physical discomfort of practical effects. This paper thus considers both the specific contemporary circumstances of these practical effects makeup actors and connects them to the legacy of earlier stars in order to understand better their working conditions and industry status. Underpinning this examination is an ethical concern surrounding the treatment of the practical effects makeup actor, and so this paper aims to bring to light how these actors may be exploited or mistreated due to their unique role.  

Abigail Whittall is a Post Doctoral Teaching Fellow in Film at the University for the Creative Arts. She completed her PhD at the University of Winchester where she has taught both Film and English Literature. Her research frequently considers horror and the Gothic across a range of contemporary media, and connects these genres to their cultural contexts.  

Christina Wilkins, Truth, Self-hood, and Adaptation in Westworld  

Despite the recent shifts to the digital, the physical matters more than ever. We see this in interviews with actors who voice animated characters, actors who voice CGI characters, and actors who voice other non-human characters. Many things present a challenge to the ways in which we understand the physical - the structures of meaning in the world primarily,  along with the specific filmic ways we understand star bodies. These combine to create barriers to 'seeing' the truth of a character we might think, but this is fixated on an approach that privileges a hierarchy of actor over character. Equally, it is one that privileges body over character. The recent series of Westworld begins to challenge this, thinking about the ways in which whilst the physical may be required, audiences are able to think beyond it. It functions as a way to consider the digital adaptation of the self, and the return to the needs of the physical to express character. Ultimately, this paper argues that although we cannot escape the physical, the hierarchies and boundaries we have in place for understanding the truth of the self remain as unfixed as ever, despite the recourse to adapting through non-physical means.  

Christina Wilkins is an early-career researcher in film and literature, specialising in adaptations. She has published on mental health, nostalgia, the body, stardom, and queer identities. Her book, Embodying Adaptation: Character and the Body, was released through Palgrave in August 2022. She currently teaches at the University of Birmingham.   

Megan Wilson, "I know about an all-woman world": Embodying equity and intimacy in Portrait of a Lady on Fire's lesbian imaginary  

This paper considers the future of lesbian visibility in popular cinema vis-à-vis the current prosperity of the “lesbian period drama”, a genre which might paradoxically entomb its screen presence in the past. In an interview promoting Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), writer-director Céline Sciamma criticised the avoidance of the term “lesbian” in popular discourse surrounding her film (Aguilar, 2020). This year, a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies posed the question: “Is lesbian identity obsolete?” (26:1, 2022). Indicative of more general apprehensions about the future of this identity category and the limits of its affective and political attachments, this question pushes up against Sciamma’s assertion of the specificity of “lesbian” as a legible marker in her filmmaking. To navigate this discursive tension, I propose a close reading of Portrait that explores the generative potential of Sciamma’s self-described “lesbian imaginary” to construct a cinematic time-space of refuge from, and resistance to, patriarchy. This reading approaches three integral constructs within Portrait’s “lesbian imaginary”: the dissolution of the artist’s male gaze; the slow temporality and environmental motifs that signify the “rise of desire”; and the embodiment of women’s community and caregiving within the film’s domestic and pastoral spaces. In doing so, I also draw out the tensions that proliferate around theories of the female or lesbian gaze, and troubling the very definition of lesbian “visibility” without yielding to the desire to naturalise it, a theoretical problem exacerbated by the demands of contemporary inclusion and representation politics.  

Megan Wilson (she/they) is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester. Her research maps the cinematic imaginaries and discursive formations of the “lesbian period drama” in film and television, amidst an apparently paradoxical moment for lesbian identity: feared obsolescence and heightened cultural visibility. Megan holds a BA in Film Studies from King’s College London, and a MA in Gender, Sexuality & Culture from the University of Manchester. Her first publication, “Food, Consumption and Queer Subjectivity in Contemporary American Cinema,” can be found in the edited collection Queering Nutrition and Dietetics: LGBTQ+ Reflections on Food Through Art (Routledge, 2022). 

Faye Woods, Death of a matriarch: EastEnders soap opera space and aesthetics  

This paper explores how EastEnders presented the deaths of its three major matriarchs, Pat, Peggy and Dot across the last 10 years. I’m interested in these events intertwining of deep narrative with the spaces of Albert Square, both public and domestic in episodes featuring and surrounding these matriarchs’ deaths. Here the layered memories attached to soap space are mobilised to produce an affective experience that hails long-time viewers and pays tribute to these characters’ and actresses’ impact. Long-running elderly characters embody soap memory, and through these deaths EastEnders revisited layers of its past and beyond. These episodes also saw aesthetic choices shift the soap’s conventional practices in ways that drew attention to the Square’s geography and domestic spaces.   

In long-running soap operas like EastEnders, with their standing backlot sets, both domestic and exterior public spaces become as familiar to viewers as their own homes. This familiarity and the programme’s ‘invisible’ continuity editing allows these spaces to fall into the background, servicing character interaction and emotion, the daily rhythms of soap narrative. The matriarch deaths were large-scale ‘event’ examples of EastEnders’ periodic disruption of established aesthetic and spatial conventions to heighten a moment’s emotional impact, heightening the melodrama of British soap’s social realist melodrama. This paper will explore how these episodes/arcs foreground soap memory’s intertwining of narrative and space. Here, these women’s multiple layers of narrative past were integrated with the spaces of the square. In doing so EastEnders refines the complex and unwieldy narrative history of its long-running characters to produce moments of closure in its ever-onwards narrative.   

Faye Woods is Associate Professor of Film and Television at the University of Reading. She is the author of Period Drama (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), British Youth Television (Palgrave, 2016), and co-author of An Introduction to Television Studies, 4th Edition (Routledge, 2022). Her work also appears in the journals Communication, Culture and Critique, Journal of British Cinema and Television, Critical Studies in Television and Television & New Media, as well as the edited collections Transatlantic Television Drama, From Networks to Netflix, Television Aesthetics and Style, Shane Meadows: Critical Essays and Multiplicities: Cycles, Sequels, Remakes and Reboots in Film & Television. 

Ellen Wright, Marilyn Monroe™:  The problematic promotional politics of sex aids, biopics and borrowed dresses.  

This paper will examine the complex ethical politics of utilising a deceased star’s ‘brand’, considering the specific example of the product marketing for the Womanizer Marilyn Monroe™ clitoral stimulator.   

Monroe’s persona, with its explicit focus on feminine performativity, is a multifaceted one. Whilst frequently discussed as a figure of female empowerment, her acute vulnerability is also a key element within this star’s public persona, with recent reappraisals centring upon Monroe as a victim of sexual and symbolic violence, labouring within a harmful patriarchal industry and larger cultural context.   

Furthermore, this year Monroe’s image has twice re-entered the public sphere, firstly, with the loaning of her nude illusion gown, famously worn to sing happy birthday to John F Kennedy, to the celebrity socialite Kim Kardashian and secondly, due to release of the speculative and deeply controversial Netflix quasi-biopic Blonde (2022). These instances have prompted vociferous debate around what constitutes appropriate and/or respectful use of her image.   

This paper will examine the rhetorical means through which Monroe has been strategically deployed in the marketing of this unique product. Whilst her famously unabashed embrace of her natural sexuality and sex appeal ("What do I wear in bed? Chanel No.5.") is clearly being co-opted into contemporary, popular and extremely profitable understandings of body and sex positivity, her star image has been appropriated by and attached to a vast array of products and services over the years, so just how problematic, if at all, is this product and its marketing?  

Ellen Wright is a Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University. She is a multidisciplinary scholar and her research expertise is in pedagogy and the leisure industries, consumer culture and broader social contexts surrounding Hollywood cinema in the early and mid-twentieth century, focusing, in particular, upon representations of gender and sexuality as found in the material culture of film. She has written on such topics as the media reception of Betty Grable in wartime Britain, the articulation of professionalism in the pinup self-portraiture and B movies of Bunny Yeager, fan engagement with film star gossip in 1930s fan-made pornographic comics, and 1940s British film stardom as evidenced in fan club publications. 

Esther Wright, The uses of “History” in Digital Game Paratexts  

Considering the paratextual context of historical games, and in particular areas such as developer branding and digital promotional content, is of vital importance if we are to contend with the uses (and abuses) of the past in the present. But this is complicated by the fact that we lack concrete methodologies for studying video game paratexts – both past and present practices of generating and consuming promotional discourses. Moreover, the nature and status of many of these paratextual sources as internet-based ephemera, as thus as born-digital, also compounds discussions around the collection and preservation digital game paratexts (Newman and Simmons, 2018; Staiti, 2019; Kaltman 2020), while speaking to broader concerns of digital historians about our methods and practices of engagement with these materials in a way that is future-proof and/or sustainable.   

This paper proposes ways of thinking about what game history is, and how it is used, in such paratextual discourses, past and present. By using recent examples of historical game promotion, this paper not only considers the challenges of locating and studying paratextual materials f​​or digital games, but to continue building an argument for why we need to think seriously about such challenges. To do so ensures that we can better understand the various ways that “history” is used to sell video games, and sustain the future of historical game studies as a varied and multifaceted discipline able to meaningfully shift certain peripheral aspects of games and gaming culture to its centre.  

Esther Wright is Lecturer in Digital History at Cardiff University, where she teaches and researches historical video games. Her work centres on understanding the role of paratexts and branding in the construction of video game histories, and the claims of “authenticity” that  circulate around them. Her book Rockstar Games and American HIstory: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity, was published by De Gruyter in 2022, and she is co-editor (with Professor John Wills) of the forthcoming volume Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth and Violence in the Video Games West (2023).  

Kiki Tianqi Yu, Cinema as the Dao: A Daoist approach to moving images as Decolonising Knowledge Production  

Like many non-Western philosophies, Daoism has been long excluded from the academic discipline of philosophy, and side-lined to subjects that deal with ‘otherness’. Decolonising knowledge production principally means recognising how modern knowledge is constructed, who determines the legitimacy of knowledge and knowability, and abolishing the prejudice that regards modern Europe as ‘the locus of serious, critical thought’ and the golden ‘standard for explanatory significance and epistemic value’ that also shapes the accountability of what is ethical and political. It also means positioning non-Western epistemologies as more than ‘other’ indigenous ideas to be analysed but as analytical frameworks in their own right. I argue that cinema as part of modern human history must be re-evaluated with the acknowledgement of how we define human, what we call nature, and human-nonhuman relationship are cultural constructs, and other genealogies of knowledges enable new ways of understanding what cinema is. As a form of naturalistic thought, Daoism is based on correlative and transformative cosmology, concerning ‘the onto-cosmological realm of Dao qua ultimate reality’, beyond the ‘human sphere’. I argue that since all things follow the Dao, which follows ziran (the creative process of self-emergence), cinema itself can be associated with ‘the model of the Dao’, and a Daoist approach posits moving images beyond a view to look at, or a brain that thinks, but a cosmological realm wherein dwells many myriad things. Enabling comparative dialogues with recent Euro-American posthumanist ecological reflections, a Daoist approach also resists theoretical enfolding that simply reasserts the latter.   

Kiki Tianqi Yu is a filmmaker, theorist and curator, committed to advancing dewesternised film theories and research-led practice. She is Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London, and works on cinema through Daoism, cinema and eastern philosophies; documentary, essayistic nonfiction and artist moving images in the global south; women’s cinema and localised feminism in East Asia. Her books include ‘My’ Self on Camera (EUP 2019), China’s iGeneration (Bloomsbury, 2014). Kiki’s award-winning films include Memory of Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019). She curated ‘Polyphonic China’ (London 2009) and ‘Memory Talks” (Shanghai 2017).     

Kiki Tianqi Yu, Cultivating a Sense of Oneness Through Cinema and Sustainable Filmmaking Through Daoism  

Engaging with Daoism as an analytical framework, Kiki explores two recent documentary films, Yangtze landscape (dir. Xu Xin, 2017) and All that Breathes (dir. Shaunak Sen, 2022). Both illustrate the interconnectedness and interdependence between the human and the nonhuman worlds, yet do not diminish the socio-political problems of the human sphere in their specific contexts. She will analyse how both films lend themselves to a Daoist understanding of ‘human-nature Oneness’ through their aesthetic choices and ethical positionings of humans and nonhumans that are all connected by ‘qi’, vital energy. She will then turn her attention to discussing what it means to be ethical and political in sustainable filmmaking. Documentary has for a long time taken a humanitarian responsibility, highlighting the politics of representations, identity crisis, and socioeconomic inequalities in the human sphere. Recent eco-documentaries reveal ecological crisis, climate injustice and humans’ intensive exploitation over nonhumans based on posthumanist reflections within the European intellectual genealogy. She argues that political filmmaking for sustainable futures carries dual duties of de-human-centrism and decolonisation, meaning to go beyond a critical catastrophic or an educational rhetoric, but to give more agency to, while not othering, non-western relational worldviews. A Daoist approach to sustainable and ecological filmmaking embraces the sense of Oneness through the aesthetics, ethics and ‘effortless’ action.  

Kiki Tianqi Yu is a filmmaker, theorist and curator, committed to advancing dewesternised film theories and research-led practice. She is Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London. Kiki works on theorising cinema through Daoism; documentary, essayistic nonfiction and artist moving images in the global south; and women’s cinema and localised feminism in East Asia. Her books include ‘My’ Self on Camera (EUP, 2019) and China’s iGeneration (Bloomsbury, 2014). Kiki’s award-winning films include Memory of Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019). She curated ‘Polyphonic China’ (London 2009) and ‘Memory Talks” (Shanghai 2017).   

Misha Zakharov, Detoxifying the archive: remakes, revisions, reenactments   

In the recent years, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, American critics Claire Dederer and Emily Nussbaum have on two separate occasions asked what is essentially the same question: What do we do with the art of monstrous men? (Dederer, 2017) and What should we do with the art of terrible men? (Nussbaum, 2019). It is not just the filmmakers who are being cancelled: filmmaking methods, genre tropes, and entire film genres and movements are deemed to be problematic, toxic, or unacceptable. This fact opens up an enormously broad set of questions and ethical dilemmas for filmmakers, programmers, archivists, and viewers: Is deplatforming the same as gatekeeping/censorship? Should the viewers have access to all the films, or should the works of art be put on trial and imprisoned, just as their disgraced, de-canonised makers? What are the ethics of curating that which can be called the toxic image? Can an archival filmmaker work with the toxic image without getting their hands dirty, i.e. reproducing or reinforcing previous toxicity? What are the subversive (and, indeed, decontaminating) ways of reading the toxic image? In this paper, I will turn to my own previous encounters with the toxic image as a writer and programmer (and more specifically to the case of Shūji Terayama’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, 1971), as well as to Elisabeth Subrin’s recent short film Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022), to examine the possible avenues of dealing with the toxicity of the archive and traumatic events of the past by means of remaking, revisioning, and reenacting.   

Misha Zakharov is a Russian-Korean author, translator, film critic, and curator. Upon leaving Russia after the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Misha has embarked on a PhD project at the University of Warwick, as part of which he researches the potential of film to affect social change while simultaneously working at Screening Rights, the West Midlands social justice film festival. His work as a translator includes Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2020) and On Freedom (2021) and Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind (2023). His first book, a collection of autofiction titled Doramaroman, has been released in 2022. 

Polina Zelmanova, Mediating representations of Sex and Consent on Screen after #MeToo   

In the context of #MeToo, visual media scholars have demonstrated the importance of thinking about film and television as socio-cultural texts which have the potential to resist rape culture. Whilst most film and television scholarship on #MeToo addresses issues related to the representation of sexual violence, there is an emerging interest in thinking about resisting rape culture via alternative models of sexual intimacy. These models have a new significance in the critical discourse of thinking about mediated intimacy within the context of sex education (Barker et al. 2018). Within these models, the representation of consent has become a central aspect of challenging rape culture as it allows to subvert dominant sexual scripts, particularly related to women’s sexuality (Wilz 2020; Meek 2022). This paper looks at a recent teen television drama, Heartbreak High (2022), reading the show as a negotiation of the proliferation of film scholarship which celebrates positive models of affirmative consent. Through close textual analysis of specific scenes this paper reads the show as a site for negotiating both the importance and shortcomings of the centrality of consent within the wider #MeToo cultural discourse on sex and pleasure. By thinking about the negotiation in Heartbreak High, this paper raises a wider critical question relating to the sustainability of reading film and television as a search for positive models of sex after #MeToo. Instead, it proposes an urgent need to maintain a generous, sex critical approach towards reading sex and intimacy, which both accounts for consent but also looks beyond it towards more nuanced and complicated negotiations of vulnerability, ambiguity and mutuality.   

Polina Zelmanova is an AHRC Midlands4Cities funded PhD student in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis is titled 'Sex in Contemporary Film and TV: Power and Pleasure after #MeToo'. She is interested in the representation and politics of sex and sexuality in popular culture, the #MeToo context, as well as broader frameworks of queer and feminist screen studies. Outside of her research, Polina has worked in film festival project management and as an audio-visual practitioner including for projects funded by IATL Warwick and Coventry City of Culture.  

Poppy Qian Zhai, What is a sustainable city? To brand Copenhagen as an attractive destination in China. 

Taking a China-Denmark co-produced short tourist film, Hu Ge x Copenhagen: Power of Serenity as a case, this paper explores concepts of the sustainable city, lifestyle, and tourism from a cross-cultural perspective. In this short documentary, the city of Copenhagen is constructed as an attractive destination where people can find a sense of tranquillity, allowing them to find their inner peace and then recharge their minds and bodies. So, why is Copenhagen represented in this particular way? What has influenced the storytelling and process of filmmaking? How are the film texts selected and organised in order to attract more Chinese visitors to Copenhagen? This paper will answer the above questions by analysing Denmark’s tourism policy first. The policy wants to build a sustainable tourism industry in the city of Copenhagen by creating an emotional relationship between the visitors and the locals, so-called “people-based growth.” It means that visitors as “temporary locals” are invited to be part of the destination and to co-create a sustainable city with the locals. The second part centres on the film analysis, discussing how this film combines Denmark’s cultural values and sustainable lifestyle and Chinese aesthetics, such as the ideas of Kongqi (air) and Vipassana, together to deliver the power of serenity that is rooted in the Danish way of living to the Chinese audiences. 

Poppy Qian Zhai is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University College London. Her doctoral research project focuses on the circulation, exhibition and criticism of New Danish Cinema in China since the 1990s, examining the South-North cross-cultural dynamics between a small nation and a big country under globalisation. Her research interests include transnational cinema/screen, small nation cinema, Nordic cinema, nation branding and film production.  

Shiqin Zhang, (Un)gendering the Dump: Waste, Body, and Affect in Plastic China and When the Bough Breaks 

This paper focuses on the intersection between waste and gender in two Chinese documentary films Plastic China (dir. Wang Jiuliang, 2016) and When the Bough Breaks (dir. Ji Dan, 2011), both of which feature people who live in the dumps on the outskirts of megacities. It begins by examining how female bodies in the films become simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in the sense that they are either de-gendered or over-sexualized. Such ambivalence, I argue, showcases the film directors' hesitancy to confront gender as a category of political and ethical analysis in their narratives of waste and the environment. The paper then moves on to contextualise the depictions of women in the dump in historical narratives that for a long time treat female bodies as exploitable and disposable. While Wang Jiuliang and Ji Dan foreground the experiences and voices of teenage girls, their portrayals of other women as silent and passive reduce the female bodies to a deep, ineffable fusion between thingness and subjecthood. Failing to perceive and capture the female body in its everyday materiality, the films, like many other Chinese wasteworks, are subsumed under the hegemonic gendered muting and eradication. Finally, drawing on the concept of unity in Chinese philosophy and theories of affect, this paper suggests that representations of waste in Chinese films should attend to broader experiences of gendered oppression and subordination.  

Shiqin Zhang is a PhD candidate in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her current research project combines textual analysis and visual ethnography to study waste, gender, and everyday memories in China.