Abstracts

Samar Abdel-Rahman

Labour, Female Stardom, and Ethical Dilemmas in the Wake of Islamic Conservatism in Egyptian Cinema

Egyptian female stars have been an integral part of the industry’s success since its inception. But by the 1980s and 1990s, the new wave of Islamic conservatism caused an upheaval with repercussions on Egyptian society and culture. The veiling phenomena began to take place throughout the country and the female body became a site for cultural struggle and a direct contention between Western capitalism and traditionalism (Abu Odeh, 1993). These contested ideological tensions were also translated into cultural domains, including cinema. The film industry faced pressure from Islamist groups, leading many female stars to adopt the veil and withdraw from the public eye in acts of repentance. While others actively became Islamic preachers, using their fame and platform to preach the conservative Islamic ideal that they have now embraced. Most notably, Shams al-Baurdi, a 1970s sex symbol became one of the first female stars to retire in 1982 and subsequently embraced an Islamic preaching role, denouncing her previous career and distancing herself from her films, even attempted to buy the copyrights of the film and to get it banned.

This paper aims to analyze the phenomenon of female stars in crisis, contextualizing their prominence against the backdrop of the evolving new conservatively religiously moral landscape that became the dominant ideology. More importantly, it focuses on ethical questions surrounding stardom and labour. How do we ethically deal with films featuring stars who have distanced themselves from their previous roles, expressing a desire for their work to be forgotten after this transformation?

Bio:

Samar Abdel-Rahman is a lecturer in World Cinema at the University of Liverpool. She holds a PhD in Film Studies from King's College London. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Middle East and North Africa cinema and socio-political history and culture.

Parnika Agarwal

Labour Futures and Auteurs: Raj Kapoor and the Bombay Working Class

Cinematic renditions of the working class in Indian cinema have often assumed forms that are influenced by the nation’s tumultuous working class history in postcolonial times. In case of Hindi cinema’s auteur Raj Kapoor (1924-1988), however, his craft also had its own sensibilities and politics in his early films like Aag (1948), Aawara (1951), and Shree 420 (1955), where the working class figure is at the forefront, migrating to the city, now losing, now finding its own self. Despite the leftist affiliations and political involvements of several studio artists of R. K. Films & Studios (est. 1948 in Bombay by Raj Kapoor), there was strong ideological variation in the performance of the working class figures in Raj Kapoor’s cinema. In this regard, this paper will look into the auteurist subjectivity of Raj Kapoor, which will help us to explore the genre possibilities that his imaginations of the working class opened up. The paper will extend to a consideration of the city’s labour which migrated to the R. K. Films & Studios itself, and its nature of work, while exploring the specific working class figure within the diegetic universe of Raj Kapoor. This is because even the future of the studio workers and the studio itself was tied to the life of Raj Kapoor, as the auteurist filmmaking process often demands. In consideration of the political context of postcolonial Indian cinema, this paper foregrounds the figure of the auteur, wading through his power and powerlessness, in the discussion of labour futures in cinema.

Bio:

Parnika Agarwal is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the School of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India. She researches on auteur studies, film history and urban history after independence. She has published her research on work and leisure in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. 

Pietro Agnoletto

“Among those who stay and those who depart, the happiest are still the tunas sailing the oceans”. Amateur cinema as a vernacular source for the ecocritical thought.

Can amateur films and home movies serve as valuable primary sources for the environmental humanities? If so, what insights can they offer? These are the main inquiries that guided my doctoral research, during which I analysed through an ecocritical lens more than 300 vacation home movies filmed in Italy between 1950 and 1980. To achieve this goal, I used a mixed methodology - both in archival research and in visual analysis - including tools from digital humanities and social sciences.

The focus of this contribution will be on one of the themes that emerged from the research, specifically, the relationship between tourists and fishermen during the Italian economic boom of the late second post-war period. It will be demonstrated how tourists from affluent and modern areas perceived and represented the labour of rural fishing in poorer areas. The narratives reveal a contrast between the perceptions of tourists and fishermen on the relationship between humans and non-human animals, specifically during dramatic scenes such as traditional tuna and swordfish fishing.

Bio:

Pietro Agnoletto is a PhD candidate in Urban Studies at Milano-Bicocca University. With a background in Film Studies (Padova University), he is working on amateur cinema from an ecocritical perspective. Member of the ‘Greening the Visual’ national project (Italy), he collects, analyses, and maps environmental film representations produced between 1950-2020.

Malavika Ajikumar

‘Asanghadithar’ and Women in Cinema Collective: The spectacle of women as workers in Malayalam Cinema

Women’s collectivisation in Kerala has had an intense association with the dynamics of labour exploitation since the 1980s with women’s issues within the working sectors being unacknowledged to emphatically construct the male labour/socialist worker. This paper tries to study the semi-fictional representation of the working women’s rights movement in the anthology section “Asanghadithar” (dir. Kunjila Mascilamani) in Freedom Fight (Jeo Baby 2022) featuring ‘penkoottu’- a community of women in the unorganised sector in Calicut, Kerala. The focus of the paper is to understand the creation of a spectacle out of the otherwise ignored movement of women’s collectivisation and rewriting the male ideas of labour. This will be studied in parallel to Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) as a significant paradigm shift in the cinematic structure for women, both in one way existing against the unorganised framework of their workplaces to resist, challenge and win the rightful conditions for working for women. This line of argument will be approached with the contention that fetishisation of women’s labour and resulting ignorance of their output stems from the inherent patriarchal structures of the Malayalee consciousness and the medium of oppression itself (in this case, site of workplace for Penkoottu and cinema for WCC) is used to display the convergence of ideology and pragmatics which is particularly relevant because of the director’s (Kunjila Mascilamani) role as the creator of the work and as an activist member of WCC as well.

Bio:

Malavika Ajikumar is a PhD scholar at School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore. Her research interests are Feminist film theories, mythology and performance studies. She has an MA in English from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi.

Lawrence Alexander

Workers Leaving the Chapel: Analogues of Film Work in Harun Farocki’s The Silver and the Cross (2010)

The German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s 2010 video installation The Silver and the Cross presents a ‘soft montage’ of Gaspar Miguel de Berrío’s 1758 painting of the Cerro Rico Mountain and surrounding city of Potosí in contrast to contemporary footage of the same region in present-day Bolivia. Questions of extraction (or, more specifically, extractivism) and histories of representation abound in relation to intersecting networks of capitalism, Christianity, and colonialism on the Latin American continent – and the depredations of the imperial silver mining trade in particular. This paper situates Farocki’s moving image practice within the broader media and technological genealogies and logics of extractivism.

The importance of ‘soft montage’ or ‘cross influence’, a signature of Farocki’s later oeuvre, to this kind of investigation is paramount. The compositional form of two-channel video installation entails a crossing between image tracks to frame the archaeological and the art historical across space and over time. Farocki presents a plea for an intermedial and media-archaeological moving image practice that enlists cinematography to perform a forensic examination of superficial representations. Farocki’s analysis sees the use of close-up, tracking shots, and static shots of de Berrío’s landscape to dwell on the class and racial hierarchies that might otherwise fall below the register of visibility on regarding de Berrío’s eighteenth-century rendering. I argue Farocki’s intermedial moving image practice reprises his abiding interest in the connections between film history and histories of labour. More specifically, the extractivist mining of silver and the dominations of worker and landscape it entails are imbricated in a broader history of colonial violence and genealogies of moving image reproduction.

Bio:

Lawrence Alexander holds a PhD in Film and Screen Studies from the University of Cambridge and is a Leverhulme Early-Career Research Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art (University of Oxford). His writing on topics ranging from BoJack Horseman to Wozzeck has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Frames Cinema Journal and Screen Bodies.

 Rosemary Alexander-Jones

Spaces of Creative Labour: The Class Division in Heritage Filming Locations

The image of the English stately home has permeated heritage media for the last fifty years and the lavish interiors of drawing rooms and great halls are iconic. A subject which is discussed less is the distinction between the upper-class spaces, which are often filmed on location in ‘authentic’ spaces, and servant’s spaces, which tend to be filmed in studios. With research drawing from twenty interviews with people working in the heritage industry, this paper will explore the different ways spectacular, authentic and studio locations are used in heritage media and how the representations of labour often relate closely to the film locations used. One of the greatest distinctions between real locations and sets can be seen in Downton Abbey (2010-2015, ITV), where the upper-class spaces were shot at Highclere Castle, whereas the servants’ spaces (the ‘below stairs’) were constructed in Ealing Studios. What does it mean for only upper-class stories to be shot in authentic spaces? How does it affect the interpretation of history and of the narrative? Is it directly related to production restrictions or is it more class-motivated? Whilst not only considering the inherent labour division in using ‘real’ historic spaces as opposed to designing and building sets, this paper will also focus on how spaces of labour, such as kitchens and sculleries are designed and used in comparison to their historical counterparts. This paper considers heritage media such as Gosford Park (2001, Robert Altman) to the more recent examples of Victoria (2016-2019, ITV) and Bridgerton (2020-, Netflix) and its use of stately homes and designed sets.

Bio:

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 was awarded her PhD from 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.

 Danai Anagnostou

Work, Reach, and Continuity in Feminist Film Collectives

This paper focuses on film collectives and ways of addressing persisting issues regarding documentation and accessibility. It examines how engaging an intergenerational dialogue between historical and contemporary practices can facilitate mutual knowledge creation and preservation of collective methods. 

Studying the methods and objectives of 1970s and 1980s feminist film collectives presents challenges due to the scarcity of sources and scholarly materials. A considerable amount of the films created within collectives remains unindexed and inaccessible. Likewise, research related to their work remains notably rare. Ironically, the obstacles encountered in researching collectives mirror the very power dynamics they sought to confront through their activism.  This research endeavor involves two pivotal collectives: the Yugantar Collective (India), and the Filmkollektiv (Switzerland), through interviews with Deepa Dhanraj and Gertrud Pinkus, to reflect on their work which challenged dominant production methods, considering how it formed structures and methodologies that were previously unrecognized in the context of film production, in different geographies and complex forms of marginalities.

Today's film collectives often participate more prominently in the standard film industry, responding to the increasing demands for broader labor and skill sets: many groups are involved in diverse activities like production, research, curation, and hosting. The paper assesses the potential of these multifaceted engagements for overcoming limitations faced by historical counterparts, e.g. by aiding contemporary collectives with documenting their work and gaining institutional recognition. This inquiry aspires to bridge documentation gaps, foster cross-generational conversations about alternative approaches to film work, and ultimately preserve the histories of independent filmmaking movements.

Bio:

Danai Anagnostou is a researcher in production studies. She studies film collectives and their influence on contemporary conducts and strategies for producing films; and works on her doctoral thesis at Aalto University. She has co-founded Kenno Filmi, a production company that hosts projects by international filmmakers, artists, and researchers.

Hannah Andrews

Labouring under the impression: the work of impersonation

The SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes of 2023 served to highlight the existential threats that a combination of Artificial Intelligence and tech-centred late capitalist business practices pose to the livelihoods of workers in the film and television industries. Though the unions secured significant concessions to their labour rights in the negotiations, the future of performer labour in the industries remains uncertain, especially the rights of individual performers against the AI impersonation of their image and voice in perpetuity. Existing legal and ethical frameworks around the ownership and moral rights of the individual against impersonation are ill-equipped to deal with an already-arrived future in which a hyperrealistic simulation can easily take the place of the performer persona.

These circumstances provide a strong staging ground for a reconsideration of the practice, process and work of impersonation. This paper aims to initiate this conversation by considering key elements that impact upon the working life of the impersonator, that is, the individual whose main role is in providing physical or vocal impressions of well-known individuals across media but primarily in television.  The paper will explore the opportunities for media appearances, and their limitations; the role of competition; the challenge of the impersonated person maintaining or losing relevance; the dependence upon events beyond their control; and the ethics of impersonation. Drawing on interviews with three television impressionists, and a study of two political impersonators, this paper will explore the specifically precarious labour of temporarily being someone else for a living.

Bio:

Hannah Andrews is Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of Lincoln. She is the author of Television and British Cinema (2014), Biographical Television Drama (2021) and the forthcoming TV and Caricature (EUP). Her work on British film and television has been published in journals such as Screen, Adaptation, Journal of British Cinema and Television, and Journal of Screenwriting. She is on the editorial board for Critical Studies in Television and was the principal editor for the 2022 special volume on the BBC centenary.

Bin Yee Ang

Crafting CG animals: the bond between an artist and animals

This paper draws on insights from my interview with animators in the visual effects (VFX) industry, i.e., Framestore and MPC London, to illustrate the craft of photo- and hyper-realistic computer-generated (CG) animals. I explore the bond between an artist and animals as part of my film and animation studies. I concentrate on animators’ labour in general, their personal experience, and their thoughts and feelings about animating CG animals for fiction films. I allude their animation labour to an anecdote about Rembrandt Bugatti (1884–1916), the Italian animal sculptor. The allusion to this sculptor is fundamental to catalysing philosophical inquiries, conceptual arguments, and dialectical discussion about the relationship between artists and animals. It galvanises questions of proximity between humans and animals and the technological effects between them. Both the animal sculptor and the animators illuminated the philosophical notion of “every separation is a link” by the French philosopher Simone Weil. The animation technology that separates humans and animals is exactly the link that could potentially reconcile the ontological divide between them. This paper aims to provide a window through which we can look beyond human exceptionalism and embrace the triad of humans, animals, and technology.

Bio:

I am a PhD candidate in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, looking specifically into the human-animal-technological relationship in film and animation. I was a Visual Effects (VFX) artist at Rhythm and Hues before embarking on the path to academia.

University profile:

https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/film-studies/people/postgraduate/profiles/bin-yee-ang.html

Jiri Anger, Veronika Hanakova

Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives

During the twentieth century, housework has become an endless cycle of work that usually goes without social recognition. The technological innovations within the household and the policy of a family wage individualised the reproductive workers and isolated them in the social form of the “housewife”. The housewife then lives in an endless loop of daily routines of caring for the house and family. However, are there any continuities between this reproductive labour and the cognitive labour we perform in the digital space, as Kylie Jarrett indicates (Jarrett, 2016)? And is videographic scholarship capable of not only showing but also analysing these continuities?  

In our paper, we aim to present and contextualise our videographic essay Cycles of Labour, which remediates the daily routines captured in the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) through a simulated video-game interface. The essay takes the viewer through three stages in the cycle of extending the housewife logic into the digital sphere. It proceeds from introducing the evolution of reproductive labour to a playthrough that foregrounds the connections between reproductive and cognitive labour in the datafied society to a demonstration of how this development of housework translates into the labour of NPCs (non-playable characters) in video games. As a result, the videographic essay highlights that the heroine of Akerman’s film is not alone in her repetitive endeavours. In the virtual space, we are all becoming “digital housewives” (Jarrett, 2016).

Link to the videographic essay (published in NECSUS):

https://necsus-ejms.org/cycles-of-labour-in-the-metaverse-we-will-be-housewives/

Bio:

Jiří Anger is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He specializes in early cinema, archival film, and videographic criticism. Anger is the author of two monographs, two edited volumes, and numerous journal articles (NECSUS, Film-Philosophy, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, etc.).

Veronika Hanáková is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. Her current research focuses on DVDs and early digital artefacts. Her articles and videographic essays have appeared in journals such as NECSUS, [in]Transition, or Iluminace.

 Emily Rose Apter

The Surface Will Not Hold: Invisible Extractions

The Surface Will Not Hold is a muti-media presentation inspired by “The Cloud” and the faux ecological metaphors of data storage.

“The Cloud” evokes something hovering above—immaterial and independent of the earth and its ecologies—while, in actuality, is housed in massive server farms and consumes immense amounts of energy, land, and resources. Nature metaphors abstract land use and resource-extraction, and obfuscate the scarring of landscape by these physical processes.

Drawing on texts such as “Theories of the Earth” (Leo Goldsmith), “Geological Filmmaking” (Sasha Litvintseva), and “A Geology of Media” (Jussi Parikka), The Surface Will Not Hold proposes a conceptual framework through which to read visual/sonic representations of labor, data, and precious metal extraction. Together, the featured films consider the interplay of sky/ground, digital/celluloid, immaterial/material, making/archiving—where data, images, and their ideologies are stored.

Filmography:

Vault, Bunker, Shelter from the Storm (Noa Ryan, 2020)

A found footage and animation collage about imperial history, deterioration, and the political dimensions of watching.

The Floor of the World (Janie Geiser, 2010)

Collage images and objects suggest narratives of burying, uncovering, building, destroying, longing, and loss.

Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road & 97th St. (Christina Battle, 2002)

Highlighting the repetitive nature of oil wells in northern Alberta, this hand processed film documents a sighting common to the Canadian prairies.

Ruisdael Clouds (James Thacher, 2020)

A man-made climate system with its own tidal movements of information.

Bliss.jpg (Emily Apter & Elijah Stevens, 2023) Bliss.jpg excavates and examines the geological and geographical sites that produce our virtual worlds.

Bio:

Emily Rose Apter is a programmer, filmmaker, and organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. She works as the Co-Director of Programming at the Maysles Documentary Center, a nonprofit microcinema and education center founded by Albert Maysles. She previously worked as the Assistant Director/Curator at the NYC Film-Makers’ Cooperative, where she assisted with the distribution, archiving, and curation of their 16mm experimental film collection. Emily has programmed at cinemas, museums, and schools around the country including: Maysles Cinema, Spectacle Theater, Peephole Cinema, Museum of the City of NY, City College, Harlem Stage, the Film-Makers' Cooperative, among others. She has written for Millennium Film Journal, Analog Cookbook, Cinémovil, and ScreenSlate.

 Emily is a graduate of Wesleyan University. Archives, cultural production, labor, landscapes, and collective struggle are core themes of her work.

Sarah Arnold

When the archive accepted the films I had, I didn't think that they'd be bothered”: Challenges of value and obscurity in women’s amateur film histories.

This presentation examines the various ways in which women’s amateur filmmaking labour becomes obscured in film archives and in scholarship on film and filmmaking. Recognising that amateur film is rendered marginalised and undervalued in relation to commercial and professional filmmaking and women undervalued in relation to men (Motrescu-Mayes & Norris Nicholson, 2018; Hill & Johnston, 2020; O’Connell, 2021), the presentation uses the case study of one Irish amateur filmmaker to identify the causes of her work and labour being obscured and overlooked. The filmmaker, Sr Maureen MacMahon, was a practicing amateur filmmaking from the 1960s to the 1970s. Investigation of Sr Maureen’s filmmaking drew from a variety of sources including the films and film materials held at the Irish Film Archive, film metadata recorded at the archive, newspaper archives, an archive held at Sr Maureen’s religious order and an interview with Sr Maureen. Analyses of these materials has resulted in three findings: firstly, the dispersal of materials and information pertaining to Sr Maureen across multiple sites, and in collections named after other men, posed challenges for locating her materials; secondly Sr Maureen undertook many creative activities beyond filmmaking, and, was reluctant to self-identify as a ‘filmmaker’, thus negating her own filmmaking labour; and, finally, the films are not easily categorised as they are generically and stylistically diverse, making auteurist approaches to her films difficult. Drawing from these findings I discuss the challenges this creates for foregrounding women’s contributions to film, especially when women’s contributions are already undervalued and poorly documented.

Bio:

Sarah Arnold is Associate Professor and Head of Media Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland. She researches women’s work and creative practice in film and television as well as workers early career experiences in the media industries. Books include Gender and Early Television and Media Graduates at Work (co-authors Kerrigan, O’Brien).

 Thomas Austin

Race and labour in two documentaries by Alice Diop

For more than a century, Black people have been required to provide physical and symbolic labour in white-authored films, from racist stereotypes of threat and criminality to supporting roles that validate and enable the aspirations of white characters. This paper considers how Alice Diop’s documentaries La Mort de Danton / The Death of Danton (2011) and  Nous / We (2021) challenge these racist tropes and traces two further interfaces between race and labour. The first is the work of the film’s diverse Black subjects, such as aspiring actor Steve who commutes from a poor suburb to a prestigious Parisian drama school in  La Mort de Danton and Ismael Soumaïla Sissoko, the impoverished mechanic sans papiers who sleeps in a Transit van in Nous. The second is the labour of Diop herself, claiming the licence of filmmaker to hear and broadcast these narratives of hitherto marginalised people in a country where, as T.D. Keaton et al (2012) put it, ‘race does not officially reside, even as racism and discrimination are long-term residents’. In the footage of a deer hunt in the ancient royal forest of Fontainebleau that bookends Nous, Diop appears as something of an interloper at a whites-only event. But she refuses to remain contained in her ‘right’ place. The act of filming gives her an armature and an authority (to look for herself and to create meaning) that would otherwise be denied a Black woman from les banlieues who has ventured into the woods of Fontainebleau.

Bio:

Thomas Austin is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Sussex. He is editor of The Films of Steve McQueen (2023) and co-editor (with Angelos Koutsourakis) of Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (2020). He is currently working on the edited collection Black on White on Screen.

Guy Barefoot

Cinema as Work: The View from the Drive-in

Looking at the space between production and consumption, this paper explores ways, challenges and consequences of examining cinema exhibition as work rather than entertainment. Films are, and present, the work of their authors, credited or uncredited, while film production exists as one part of an industry dependent on distribution, promotion and presentation. Film historians have extensively examined film production: the smaller (but increasing) number of studies that focus on cinema exhibition have opened up a wider field that includes cinema owners (from Major to neighbourhood operators) and audiences but has so far barely touched on the experiences and significance of the majority of the 136,987 men and 73,221 women that the U.S. Census calculated were employed in the U.S. theatre and motion picture industries in 1950, let alone examine the equivalent situation in other countries and at other dates. My own recent research on the 1950s American drive-in concentrated on cinema owners and audiences rather than employees but revisiting this can open up important questions about the role of individual workers within the less regarded reaches of the film industry. Reflecting on instances where archives and trade publications do provide evidence on cinema managers and workers, this paper does not set out to construct a detailed case study, but assesses what we can learn about mid-twentieth century cinema as work. It also illustrates how the drive-in cinema, often characterized as an industry outsider, was integrated into the business and communication networks of post-war America.

Bio:

Guy Barefoot is Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester. His most recent publication is The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Jesse Barker

Filming green extractivism: As bestas (2022) and Alcarràs (2022)

Highly-acclaimed 2022 Spanish films As bestas (Rodrigo Sorogoyen) and Alcarràs (Carla Simón) focus on local resistance to large-scale renewable energy farms. These local contexts reflect ‘green extractivism’: ecological transition integrated within the extractive logics of capitalist production, augmenting the exploitation of nature and labour. The films present two contrasting types of energy production: the arduous work of converting sunlight and soil into food, unfolding within a qualitative world of complex human and non-human interrelations; and the impersonal work of machines to convert wind and sunlight into quantified invisible energy that feeds urban areas, leaving the rural areas where they are located barren. However, the films themselves are labour products. Sorogoyen has been critiqued as an outsider to the rural context he portrays, while Simón is considered an insider, basing the fictional agricultural family on her own. They both draw from personal experiences and documentation of qualitative worlds, wishing to preserve them but also abstracting them into film worlds. Like large-scale renewable energy production, they aim to preserve life but depend somewhat on extractive logics and material practices.

Bio:

Jesse Barker is a specialist in contemporary Spanish film. He is Senior Lecturer of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Aberdeen and is currently developing a research project on ecomedia in Spain.

Melanie Bell

“We might only be women but, we do a valuable job”: Women’s screen labour and grade equivalence arguments in post-war Britain

The negative connotations attached to “women’s work” in the screen industries are well-known and documented, and range from dismissal to outright ridicule. Often authored by men, with ready access to the leading trade journals of the day, the labour performed by women in majority-female roles (continuity, negative cutting etc) has historically been dismissed as low skill and/or predicated on ‘natural’ abilities, and paid accordingly. This marginalisation has been replicated in the histories of British cinema, especially where auteur scholarship dominates. Moving away from male-authored accounts of work, this paper puts women’s words centre-stage to explore how women themselves understood the relationship between their labour and screen media. Through a focus on mid-20thC women working in make-up and continuity roles, it traces some early examples of grade equivalence arguments made by women, and contextualises them within a tightly-controlled grading structure with a specific understanding of technical labour and union-led claims of equal pay. Drawing on contemporary trade publications and later-life oral history interviews, this paper examines how historic women described and understood their labour at the time and subsequently, and opens out to a broader discussion of the specific contours of feminism in post-war Britain, a time famously characterised by Elizabeth Wilson as ‘Only Halfway to Paradise’ (1980).

Bio:

Melanie Bell is Professor of Film History at the University of Leeds, UK. She has written widely on women’s film history, especially in below-the-line roles, and draws across oral histories, labour records, photographs and ephemera in her scholarship. She is especially interested in women’s life narratives and how occupational identities are constructed. 

Eve Benhamou

“Made with Love Here in Kilkenny”: Cartoon Saloon and the Reframing of Traditional Labour Practices in the Era of Digital Animation

Kilkenny-based animation studio Cartoon Saloon has consistently stood out within the animation landscape since its creation in 1999. Praised for its stories drawing on Irish folklore and showcasing ‘retro 2D beauty’ through a ‘painterly hand-drawn aesthetic’ (Rooney, 2022), the studio’s Oscar-nominated output notably differs from computer-animated franchises and remakes dominating contemporary mainstream animation. The very creation of a studio relying on 2D animation in the late 1990s may seem surprising, at a time when competitors such as Pixar and Blue Sky Studios were set up and ‘geared specifically towards computer animation’, and others such as DreamWorks entirely retooled their 2D animation departments (Haswell, 2017). Yet, such positioning echoes 2000s trends within independent European animation, with critically-acclaimed filmmakers such as Marjane Satrapi and Sylvain Chomet explicitly distancing their work from computer animation.

This paper explores Cartoon Saloon’s self-representation in relation to contemporary animation aesthetics and techniques, and more specifically its complex discursive relationship towards labour practices within digital animation. As Caroline Ruddell and Paul Ward point out, there is ‘no simple distinction in animation production between that which has been crafted by hand and that which has been crafted by technology’ (2019). However, 2D and stop motion animation studios tend to specifically foreground such craft-based elements. Drawing on paratexts including “behind-the-scenes” materials, interviews and reviews of Song of the Sea (Moore, 2014), The Breadwinner (Twomey, 2017), and Wolfwalkers (Moore and Stewart, 2020), this paper analyses how Cartoon Saloon relies on the appeals of hand-made aesthetics and discourses surrounding analogue technology and practices in order to foreground a distinctive studio identity.

Bio:

Dr Eve Benhamou is a Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. Her research explores the multifaceted relationship between animation and contemporary live-action cinema, with a focus on aesthetics, film genres and representations of gender. She recently published her first monograph, Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon

Everything’s Coming Together as Everything’s Falling Apart: Radical Hope for Filmmaking Educators

Collaborating on a range of filmmaking curriculum development and investing considerable effort in teaching has prompted reflection on our role as educators. We find ourselves questioning our objectives and contemplating how best to articulate our mission within the constraints of a flawed neo-liberal system. Our aim is to navigate this complex landscape and define our purpose while striving to achieve it, despite the challenges posed by the current educational paradigm.

The questions this paper seeks to ask, in the specific context of filmmaking education, are: 1. What are the alternatives? and 2. how might we go about encouraging a more radical agenda through our pedagogic practice? Few tools seem appropriate to the current climate but there are options that are important to imagine (or better still, to enact!) One of those is the notion of ‘radical hope’. For Bloch (1996), as for our purposes here, a condition of art is hope. Conversely, art is also a condition of hope.

Hjort claims that ‘the priorities and philosophies of institutions devoted to practice-oriented film education have a decisive impact on filmmakers’ creative outlooks, working practices, and networks, shaping not only the stylistic (visual and narrative) regularities that define distinctive bodies of cinematic work but the dynamics of a given film industry’ (2013: p.34). What’s left then, is to consider what impact such radical hope might encourage in educators and our students. We need to readdress, by encouraging others, the ways in which the work educators are doing in higher education spaces, is genuinely shaping the future of art, design, our creative industries and cultures.

Bio:

Lee-Jane 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. 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".

Joseph Bitney

Conceptualising Climate Change in the Hollywood Blockbuster

Abstract not published at the speaker’s request.

Bio:

Joseph Bitney is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. His research focusses on classical Hollywood cinema, film criticism and theory, and the modern novel, and he is currently writing a book on melodrama. His recent article ‘Rethinking the Family Melodrama’ appears in Screen.

Matthew Bosica

The Summer Job: The Representation of Post-High School Labour in HBO’s 1980s Sleepers

In the 1980s, ‘sleepers’ were defined as movies programmed on HBO to drive audience viewership and formed part of a wider industrial strategy by the cable network (The New York Times, 1985).  Sleepers were often youth-orientated films, focussing on late adolescence after high school. These coming-of-age pictures typically put great emphasis on the summer job as a rite of passage.  Storylines were concerned with the change that occurred across that seminal summer and demonstrated that what a summer job lacked in remuneration, clout, and prestige it more than made up for in that most valuable commodity of teen summer labour: experience. Well known teen movies from the 1980s (Sixteen Candles (Hughes,USA,1984) and The Breakfast Club (Hughes,USA,1985), on the other hand, focussed on the in-school experience of high school teens or even the academic labour famously avoided in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Hughes, USA, 1986). There is a dearth of scholarship on teen labour immediately after high school. This summer straddling youth and adulthood and the labour depicted were critical to sleepers like One Crazy Summer (Holland, USA, 1986), Welcome to 18 (Carr, USA,1986), Satisfaction (Freeman, USA, 1988), and Loverboy (Silver, USA, 1989). My paper seeks to understand how this representation of teen summer labour works within these sleepers and what meaning can be formed from what is often seen as just a throwaway job.

Bibliography

By ALJEAN HARMETZ Special to The New,York Times. "Ratings for Top Movies on HBO are Falling." New York Times (1923-), Apr 15, 1985. https://liverpool.idm.oclc.org/login?url?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/ratings-top-movies-on-hbo-are-falling/docview/111232147/se-2.

Bio:

Matthew Bosica is a 3rd year PhD candidate in Communication and Media at University of Liverpool. His research focuses on HBO and sleepers as an industrial strategy during the 1980s.  He presented at the 6th Annual PGR B-Film Symposium and was shortlisted for the BAFTSS 2023 Postgraduate Research Poster Showcase.

Lucy Brown

Not Just “CV pushers” - The Unseen Collaborative Creative Labour of Television Talent Managers

Talent Managers are fundamental to the recruitment of behind-the-scenes personnel in the television industry, yet little academic research has been undertaken in this area. Talent managers are a growing part of the British television ecosystem and this presentation will explore talent management labour practices by tracing their evolution with the rapid increase of independent production companies and a growing freelance workforce in the UK. It is easy to assume that this role, which is predominantly undertaken by women, often with caring responsibilities, is purely administrative. However, this presentation draws on in-depth interviews and close textual analysis of trade press to shed light on the hidden labour practices of television talent managers, exploring specific forms of collaborative creativity that arise from their position straddling the business and editorial spheres of TV production. It will argue that talent managers, who have typically worked at top levels within the production sector, are key agents in the creative collaborative process within the screen industries.  I will explore the intricacies and mechanics of the role and the ways in which talent managers build relationships with hiring managers and those they are employed to ‘find’, such as executives, directors, producers, and researchers, arguing that talent managers are more than facilitators of creativity, they are active collaborators in the creative process.

Bio:

Lucy Brown is Professor of Film and Television Practice and Head of the Film Division at London South Bank University. She is Founder of Women in Screen, co-author of The TV Studio Production Handbook and sits on the editorial board of Representology: The Journal of Media and Diversity.

Matthew Bruce

Monsieur Hulot and his ‘travails’: the portrayal of labour in the films of Jacques Tati

The character of Monsieur Hulot conceived by celebrated French filmmaker and actor Jacques Tati is an old-fashioned gentleman of simple living. A keen observer of society, he is comparable to a flâneur, minus connotations of wealth. In Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1954), Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967), and Trafic (1971), Hulot is a man for whom an increasingly technological post-WWII French society poses a threat to his traditional and implicitly valorised way of life. He can never maintain remunerative work despite good intentions. In Mon Oncle, Hulot’s brother-in-law instals him in a job at his plastics factory, whereupon Hulot precipitates an insidious production line malfunction. In Playtime, Hulot arrives at an office block for a business meeting that ultimately comes to naught as Hulot becomes confounded by the modern architecture. Finally, in Trafic, Hulot is now the designer of luxury campervans who encounters various problems with a vehicle en route to a trade fair.

While Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot omits the subject of Hulot and paid labour entirely, as its subject matter is the protagonist on vacation, I seek to show how it and the three aforementioned films demonstrate the more fulfilling character of Hulot’s voluntary work, that includes his efforts to help strangers as well as acceding to the requests of his relatives and neighbours. This voluntary ‘work’ appears to provide a social function as well as unintentionally promoting non-pejorative and guilt-free individualism that aligns with the theories of 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill.

Bio:

Matthew Bruce is a PhD student in French (Film) Studies at the University of Birmingham, whose project is entitled: “Les plaisirs démodés: the portrayal of anachronistic heroes in French comedy cinema”. His doctoral work follows completion of a MA thesis on Truffaut and silent cinema, under the same supervisory team.

Andrés Buesa

Labour, Mobility, and the City in Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop

Chop Shop is the sophomore feature by US-Iranian filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, the second instalment of what some critics have called his “American Dream” trilogy. Set in Queens’ run-down neighbourhood of Willets Point—commonly known as the “Iron Triangle” for its aggregation of auto-body repair garages—the film follows 12-year-old Alejandro, a homeless Latino kid who lives and works in one of the area’s chop shops. The child survives by hustling: he sells bootleg DVDs around the area, steals rims off cars at parking lots, and chases potential clients for the garage on the streets. His condition as a low-wage worker, then, implies that he is pushed to be perpetually on the move if he wants to succeed in a world run by individualism and competition—what Lauren Berlant calls the “time of not-stopping” (2011, 169). However, the hustle of the labouring kid does not translate into a greater ability to navigate the urban, nor it leads to greater social mobility. This paper explores the implications of such a representation of neoliberal labour for the film’s staging of New York as a cinematic city. By codifying labour as relentless but futile mobility, Chop Shop transcends the binarism of prevalent imaginaries of the urban—poverty associated to the static ghetto vs. the accelerated rhythms of the global elite—and presents New York instead as a space of unjust (im)mobilities (Sheller 2018), in which the interaction between fixity and flow creates the conditions for the perpetuation of social inequality.

References:

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press.

Sheller, Mimi. 2018. Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in the Age of Extremes. London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso.

Bio:

Andrés Buesa is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. His project explores the uses of the cinematic child, in 21st century world cinema, as a vehicle for discourses on contemporary mobility. His work has been published on journals such as Atlantis (2022), New Cinemas (2023), or Sociology Lens (2023).

Zoë Viney Burgess

‘Taken by my wife’: The problem with polarising amateur film practice, gender and seriousness.

Invisibility is conferred upon the work of women amateur filmmakers through sustained ineffectual attribution proliferated inside and outside of archives.  This ongoing failure to acknowledge women’s non-professional work is to the detriment of many cine-engaged women active in the first half of the twentieth century. The Wessex Film and Sound Archive (WFSA) holds a non-professional medical film, Plaster of Paris (1913), ostensibly attributed to Dr Henry Gauvain. New research has revealed that this film, and a collection of still photographs, were in fact produced by Dr Henry Gauvain’s wife: Louisa; yet documents reflect her presence only as a genitive pronoun and her name does not appear in the archive catalogue.My paper will examine how films produced before 1922 and the widespread introduction of amateur media, can be problematic to categorise within the amateur/professional binary. I will illustrate that the ways women and their work is spoken about has a direct impact on their invisibility in the film archive. I will explore how persistent application of conventional industry terminology in the non-professional sphere sets women’s work against a ‘gold standard’. Through analysis of several case studies, including the work of Louisa Gauvain and of a few autonomous women filmmakers, I will illustrate how a methodology deploying both quantitative and qualitative methods can effectively make the work of women amateur filmmakers more visible. I will argue that a reframing of women amateur fimmakers ’ labour is necessary if we are to effectively recognise female contributions to non-professional film in the UK.

Bio:

Zoë Burgess is a final year PGR in film at the University of Southampton,  works as Film Curator at Wessex Film and Sound Archive in Winchester, U, and holds the position of Research Associate on the UKRI funded ‘Women in Focus’ project at the University of East Anglia/University of Maynooth.

Joanne Butcher

Labour Trafficking in Film: Underreported, Unspectacular & Unrepresented

Narrative films about historical slavery, particularly the transatlantic slave trade, have empowered audiences to view labour as an expression of exploitation in a transnational system contingent on the work of the enslaved. However, narrative films about human trafficking – referred to as ‘modern-day slavery’ – seldom focus on labour trafficking despite the fact it is also a symptom of a global economic structure which equally relies on precarious labour practices and the exploitation of workers. Instead, contemporary films have concentrated on more easily sensationalised forms of human trafficking such as ‘sexual slavery’. This has framed human trafficking as an individualised and externalised problem of organised crime, alienating the audience from seeing themselves as participating in the economic system that precipitates the exploitation being represented. This disguises the complicity of governments in facilitating a hostile environment where labour exploitation is rife, as well as corporations for taking advantage of it. In cinematic terms, labour trafficking is rendered “unspectacular” (Sharma, 2005) and therefore unworthy of narrative cinema, having the effect of legitimising and naturalising labour exploitation in the eyes of the public. This paper will explore the current state of narrative films about human trafficking, examining the dominant themes and narratives that prohibit the discussion of labour trafficking. It will also consider a number of recent narrative films that have tackled the issue of labour trafficking such as It's a Free World… (2007), Ghosts (2006) and 7 Prisoners (2021), arguing the strengths of narrative cinema over documentary in bringing issues of complicity to light.

Bio:

Joanne Butcher is a PhD student from the University of Hull. She holds a BA in Politics from the University of Sheffield and a MA in Political Communications from Goldsmiths. She is a member of the Cultures of Incarceration Centre, exploring cinematic portrayals of human trafficking in 21st Century film.

Beth Capper

“I Couldn’t Get Any Anger Out of Her:” The Reproductive Worker as Political Subject in Fronza Woods’ Fannie’s Film

In a recent essay, film scholar Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky argues that critics have taken for granted the assumption that “to represent domestic service appropriately – progressively – one must ‘give voice’ to the domestic.” Skvirsky’s article brilliantly shows the limits of this assumption, asking whether faith in “the project of ‘giving voice’ as a political cure all” might need to be retired. In this talk, I extend Skvirsky’s arguments to consider how, in cinematic representations of reproductive work, the reproductive worker’s expressed unhappiness is often made equivalent to her political consciousness. Through a reading of U.S. filmmaker Fronza Woods’ Fannie’s Film (1979), a portrait film about a Black woman named Fannie who cleans a fitness studio, I explore how Fannie’s happiness has been regarded as a political problem for both the filmmaker and audiences alike. Indeed, the anticipation of Fannie’s unhappiness was central to Woods’ initial conceptualization of the film. As Woods recalls in a recent interview: “When I made the film, she was supposed to be my anger button. She was supposed to come out and say angry things. No matter how I approached it, I couldn’t get any anger out of her!” Ultimately, I argue that Fannie’s Film poses questions about the role of affect in making the reproductive worker legible as a political subject. I am interested in what must be expunged from cinematic representation to carve out a place for the Black reproductive worker within what Saidiya Hartman has called a received “lexicon of the political.”

Bio:

Beth Capper is an assistant professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her work considers how feminist filmmakers have engaged with and intervened in the representation of social reproduction and reproductive labour.

James Cateridge

Tackling precarity and disadvantage: an analysis of mentoring provision within the UK's screen industries.

How can the UK’s screen industries become better, more responsible employers in the face of continual challenges including endemic precarity, the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of living crisis? What roles can mentoring play? Studies have demonstrated the value of mentoring within creative enterprises in relation to both personal career development and increasing equitable access to creative occupations (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2012; NESTA, 2014). However, these accounts offer only a limited depiction of the huge variety of mentoring practice which exists across the variegated set of industries which constitute the UK's creative sector. This paper draws upon survey data generated in 2022 by an interdisciplinary research project which was supported by policy body Creative UK. Whilst data was collected from across all creative industries, the screen industries offer a particularly useful case study due to the often precarious nature of employment for workers in this sector. Our investigation offers a new understanding of the nature of mentoring programme provision and the challenges the screen industries face in developing sustainable initiatives since the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings indicate that while many mentoring schemes are designed to tackle the barriers of inequality for new entrants and existing employees, their outcomes are often compromised by sectoral precarity in the creative industries. This paper was co-authored with Dr Judie Gannon and Dr Silvia Dibeltulo of Oxford Brookes University and is presented by Dr James Cateridge.

Bio:

Dr James Cateridge is Senior Lecturer in Film at Oxford Brookes University, and Network Lead for the Creative Industries Research and Innovation Network. His research on British cinema, cultural policy and media tourism has been widely published. He is a board member for the Ultimate Picture Palace cinema in Oxford.

Lorena Cervera Ferrer

The Construction of Women Workers’ Voices in Latin American Documentary Cinema

Amid the radical film cultures that emerged during the 1960s, Latin American filmmakers began making films that exposed the effects of the rapid expansion of neoliberalism amongst the working class. The success of these films helped the constitution of the New Latin American Cinema canon, conformed in its vast majority by films directed by male filmmakers. Following these moments of contestation, from the 1970s, an increasing number of women filmmakers began making films that deployed feminist practices, politics, and aesthetics. In this paper, I argue that the study of political cinema has left out a number of films made by women about women’s labour that provide a different perspective on the class struggle. To do so, I explore four documentaries that, broadly, address the role of women in the revolution, the double day, the incorporation of women into factories, and the status of domestic work. These are: My Contribution (Sara Gómez, 1972), The Double Day (Helena Solberg, 1975), Love, Women, and Flowers (Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, 1984-1989), and Because I Wanted to Go to School (María Barea, 1990). The focus of my analysis lies on how the production practices employed in the making of these films allowed the creation of safe spaces that facilitated the act of speaking out amongst previously marginalized subjects. In addition, I explore how women’s voices were then constructed and interwoven within feminist debates that brought to the fore questions related to women’s role in production and reproduction.

Bio:

Lorena Cervera is a Senior Lecturer in Film Production at AUB and holds a PhD in Film Studies from UCL. Her first monograph, A Feminist Counter-History of Latin American Documentary, will be published by Routledge in 2025. As a filmmaker, she has directed Pilas (2019) and co-directed #PrecarityStory (2020).

Llewella Chapman

‘No-one had a costume to wear!’: The labour of costume and wardrobe workers in constructing Darling (1965)

In 1965, Julie Harris won the ‘Best Costume Design – Black and White’ Academy Award for Darling (1965). This was particularly well deserved, not least because Harris was employed as the costume designer just before production started, with director John Schlesinger admitting in correspondence, ‘I myself still feel guilty about having sacked a great personal friend of mine who designed the clothes for Darling, two days before it started’ (15 September 1965). As Schlesinger praised Harris following her win, ‘I was so pleased about it – if anyone deserved it, you did, taking on such a tricky job at the last minute’ (24 May 1966).

Drawing upon a range of sources held in the British Film Institute Special Collections and the Film Finances Archive including scripts, budgets, correspondence, costume designs, daily progress reports and weekly cost reports, my paper will outline the labour of Harris, as well as Schlesinger, Jackie Breed (wardrobe mistress), Eddie Silva (wardrobe master), and the lead actors on contributing to the costuming for this key film in British cinema history. By analysing these documents as a whole, we can understand the agency that Schlesinger initially had over making costume decisions, including notes taken at an early production meeting on 10 August 1964, for example re Diana: ‘Clothes very Quantish. Mad zany straw hat … NB. Julie Christie is very good in hats. When we first see Julie she must look stunning’. My paper will further analyse the labour of Harris, Breed and Silva in implementing the director’s vision for the costumes, analysing costume designs and the process of creating these costumes for the screen.

Bio:

Llewella Chapman is a visiting scholar at the University of East Anglia. Her research interests include British cinema, costume design and gender. She is the author of Fashioning James Bond (Bloomsbury, 2022) and her next monograph, Costume and British Cinema: Labour, Agency and Creativity, 1900-1985, is contracted to be published in 2026.

Mrunal Chavda

Colours of Love in Gujarati Cinematic Policy: a study of Meghdhanushya’s journey to the Supreme Court of India

Gujarati cinema began in the 1930s. Despite these 92 years of history, this cinema has revived itself recently. The film Meghdhanushya- the colours of Our Lives (2013) was the first Gay film in Gujarati cinema. The film, with adult ‘A’ certification from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), was produced in Gujarat by an Ayurveda practitioner doctor who addressed homosexual changes (body), realization (self), and acceptance and resistance (society). Although the film intended to raise awareness on LGBTQ issues in a society where discussing those remains taboo, the state did not provide tax relief to the producer citing a ‘national threat’. This article examines the state cinematic policy (2014) and its revision in 2022. With a brief background on Gujarati cinema and gender representation across Gujarati films, this paper argues why the state faces challenges to intervening at the policy level for the inclusion of LGBTQ representation in Gujarati cinema despite decriminalizing article 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 2018.

Bio:

Dr. Mrunal Chavda is an Assistant Professor in Business Communication 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 at national and international conferences. He has published his research articles in Dance Chronicle, South Asian Popular Culture, and conference proceedings, including the Association of Business Communication.

Ziru Chen

Sensory Aesthetics and Collective Creation Beyond the Auteur in Contemporary East Asian Art Cinema

Abstract not published at the speaker’s request.

Bio:

Ziru Chen is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. She has written about the participatory empowerment documentary in Jump Cut. Her thesis focuses on a regionalist sensory aesthetic of contemporary East Asian art cinemas. She currently serves as the grad co-chair of CinemArts SIG at SCMS.

Danielle Rae Childs

Murderous Managers and Migrant Maids: Representations of Motel Labour in American Cinema

The motel has been a ubiquitous, near constant architectural presence in the American film landscape for most of Hollywood history. Appearing across decades and genres, the motel has served as a hideout for noirish criminals, a shelter for forbidden lovers, and a pitstop for road weary travelers. Typically, we encounter the motel from the perspective of these protagonist-guests, whose desires and ambitions mark the generic, blank space of the motel room with refuse, wrinkled sheets, and bodily stains. However, this paper seeks to investigate the underexplored perspective of the motel worker in film, whose labour restores the motel to a semblance of sterility and whose presence disrupts conventional understandings of the motel as a temporary “stopping place” (Clarke, Pfannhauser, and Doel 2009).

Rooted in recent critical discussions concerning mobility, precarity, and place (Court 2020; Wojcik 2021), my investigation is two-fold. First, I trace the history of the motel manager on screen, marking the figure’s evolution from enterprising businessman in the budding roadside accommodation industry of the 1930s (It Happened One Night 1934, They Live by Night 1948), to murderous and marginalized staple character of the horror genre (Psycho 1960, Motel Hell 1980, Mountaintop Motel Massacre 1983), and, finally, to provisional patriarch of the hidden homeless in contemporary depictions of the motel as welfare housing (Florida Project 2017). Next, I examine how an atypical emphasis on motel maids in American indie cinema (Bottle Rocket 1996, The Motel 2005) spotlights the repetitive, banal, and often precarious labour associated with the increasingly marginalised American industry of motel accommodation—an industry dominated by migrant and first-generation American workers.

Bio:

Danielle Rae Childs is a third-year PhD Candidate in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Grounded in the historical development of the motel within U.S. culture, her doctoral project investigates the aesthetic utility and cultural significance of the motel setting in American cinema.

Louise Coopey

Representing Working Women in Complex Television: The Experiences of Sex Workers in Game of Thrones (2011-2019)

This paper is based on a chapter written for the collection entitled Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism and edited by Ellie Tomsett, Nathalie Weidhase and Poppy Wilde. Published in February 2024 as a part of Palgrave’s (Re)Presenting Gender series, the volume is concerned with media representations of women’s participation in the contemporary labour market. In the text, I explore the representations of sex workers in HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019). The show itself has been simultaneously praised for its strong women characters and heavily criticised for its sexual abuse and violence against women, but broader discourse concerning representation focuses on high born queens and honorific ladies. Little is written about its minor characters, including the three named sex workers - Shae (Sibel Kekilli), Ros (Esme Bianco) and Daisy (Maisie Dee) - who have a pivotal role in establishing narrative branches in the complex landscape of the storyworld.

Existing scholarship on the televisual representations of sex workers is relatively limited when compared with that of other typically female character types, so this paper makes a contribution to the body of work through the application of an inclusive feminist framework. It adopts a tripartite approach that considers the issues of precarity, exploitation and marginalisation and how they impact each of the women in the series. By treating Shae, Ros and Daisy as individuals, I highlight the problems associated with considering sex workers as a homogenous group and depriving them of the ability to tell their own stories.

Bio:

Louise Coopey is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on reading representation in complex television, exploring how identity manifests within character development arcs through the concept of layered complexity. She has contributed to several edited volumes, including a chapter for Manchester University Press’ Moments of Television series.

Nelson Correia

From Film Bang to Filming Boom: Fifty Years of Career Development Strategies in the Scottish Screen Production Sector

This paper demonstrates how the Scottish film and television production sector has evolved during the last half-century and discusses the strategies of Scottish-based freelancers to sustain and advance their careers. In the mid-1970s screen production in Scotland was limited and the local freelance workforce consisted of no more than seventy individuals across creative and technical roles. Keen to venture into bigger budget projects, freelancers came together to launch the Film Bang manifesto, campaigning for more funding and institutional support. This ignited a series of transformations in the local sector. Since then, screen production in Scotland has significantly expanded and diversified, with the country experiencing an unprecedented boom in filming activity in recent years thanks to the increased demand for high-end television content for the global streaming market. Based on analysis of career biographies and historical data from the annual Film Bang directory of Scottish-based freelance crew personnel, the paper describes how particular policies and developments over the years have helped with the training, skills diversification, and expansion of the Scottish-based freelance pool. The paper also draws on data from oral history interviews with freelance technicians employed in the local sector in the last few decades to understand how they managed to establish long-lasting careers while negotiating the challenges and opportunities of the times, brought by changes in sectoral policies, funding, and institutions. Overall, the paper will contribute to broader understanding of talent development strategies and career sustainability in screen production sectors of small nations and regions.

Bio:

Nelson Correia is a PhD researcher investigating the development of the screen workforce in Scotland over the last half-century. His project is a collaboration between Edinburgh Napier University, the University of Edinburgh, and the National Library of Scotland

Zoe Crombie

Women of the Bathhouse: The Intersection of Women's Labour in Spirited Away and Studio Ghibli

Spirited Away is often considered by audiences as an escapist text that transports viewers to another world, an isekai that posits a fantasy removed from contemporary reality. In actuality, the film reflects numerous problems and inequalities in the labour market in Japan and beyond, particularly in terms of how ‘women’s work’ has historically been treated. When considering the film through the lens of the intersection between feminism and Marxism, Spirited Away’s bathhouse can be viewed as a microcosm of contemporary Japanese society, representing how women come of age, enter the workforce, and are prohibited from experiencing career advancement, and Kaonashi becomes emblematic of how these structures influence the attitudes of individuals. Through this reading, characters like Chihiro, Lin, and Yubaba become even more compelling, and the film can be seen as a political statement that even comments (deliberately or otherwise) on some of Ghibli’s own practices.

Bio:

Zoe Crombie, an emerging researcher pursuing a PhD in Film Studies at Lancaster University, specializes in anime and adaptation studies. Alongside academic pursuits, she contributes critiques to publications like Little White Lies, The Skinny, and Vulture, affiliated with OAFFC and GALECA.

Gloria Dagnino

What is screen age? Theoretical and empirical insights from Italian screen production.

Screen age is an industry term worldwide used to signify the perceived age of an actor as they appear on screen. It is routinely referenced in above-the-line and below-the-line work materials, such as scripts, casting calls, talent portfolios, online professional profiles. Within the film and television production industry, screen age acts as an aesthetic benchmark, situating a character on the age spectrum, thanks to the actor’s display of certain outwardly features conventionally indicative of that age. Additionally–and consequently–screen age also functions as a segmentation criterion of the acting labour market, mapping and separating workers who, by virtue of their outwardly features, can aspire to, and compete for certain acting jobs. Screen age is a multilayered theoretical and operational concept that has yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. In this paper, I draw on sociology and cultural gerontology to account for various categorizations of age beyond chronological measurements, namely functional, subjective, and contextual age (Schwall 2012). Then, I rely on semi-structured interviews with Italian casting directors to argue that screen age is to be regarded as a distinct categorization of the age construct. Screen age is not so much shaped by an actor’s chronological age, nor by age norms prevailing in Italian contemporary society, as it is by industry labour practices (e.g. typecasting), as well as Italian film genre and format conventions. Finally, I discuss the (gendered, see Raisborough et al. 2022) implications of such theorization of screen age for actors’ access to the job market and career trajectories.

Bio:

Dr. Gloria Dagnino (PhD Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland), is research associate at the University of Udine (Italy) where works in the project AGE-C Aging and Gender in European Cinema. She is also adjunct professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. Her first monograph Branded entertainment and cinema. The marketisation of Italian film came out in 2020 with Routledge.

Ashley Darrow

Horrors, Wages, and Conditions: Labor Organizing and Conflict in Genre Film

The place of genre cinema is often overlooked when it comes to larger discussions of organized labor, but it is within the darkened chamber of the horror theater that the working people’s anxieties can not only be displayed, but fully explored. FIlms like Graveyard Shift (1990), My Bloody Valentine (1989), and Return of the Living Dead (1985) all become sites of not only cheap silver screen scares, but sites of working class history, memory, and awareness. The same cultural machinery that forces discussions of labor and organizing off of mainstream channels brings it into discussion with genre film. This paper will build on the central thesis that genre film remains a productive vehicle for labor’s cultural discussion and explore how these titles interplay with the actual working conditions from which they rise up while landmark labor films like Eisenstein’s Strike become absorbed into the stultified enclaves of “great cinema.” Genre flicks remain sorely overlooked despite their vitality and frank engagement with labor, union politics, and organizing—what are we so afraid of?

Bio:

Ashley Darrow is a writer and film critic whose work covers genre film, counterculture, and political theory. They are the author of the forthcoming book Negative Psychedelia and host of the podcast Horror Vanguard.

Rosamund Davies

Time, Space and Collaborative Creativity in Film and Television: Collaborative Chronotopes

The spatial and temporal conditions of collaboration are integral to its nature and fundamentally impact the forms of creativity it produces. In this paper, I will discuss both case studies and normative models of spatial and temporal conditions, which characterise different kinds of collaborative labour across different stages of film and television production (development, pre-production, production, and post-production). This will include an examination of how the necessities of the Covid-19 pandemic have come together with contemporary concerns about health, wellbeing and inclusivity in the workplace to engender an increased focus in film and television industry discourse and practices on the need to render film and television work environments ‘safe spaces’. Drawing on existing theorisations of time and space, including Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘chronotope’ as a particular configuration of time, space and human activity, which becomes charged with meaning, I will consider the role of time and space as both enabling and limiting factors in the collaborative processes under discussion and the forms of creativity they may produce. I will conclude by recommending that time and space might be both more deliberately and more flexibly considered in the design of collaborative processes, in order to successfully facilitate particular forms of collaborative creativity. I will propose some potential collaborative ‘chronotopes’ as indicative models.

Bio:

Rosamund Davies is Senior Lecturer in the School of Stage and Screen, University of Greenwich. She is co-author of Introducing the Creative Industries and co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Studies. Her research into the creative and cultural industries centres on screen production, writing and publishing, with a particular focus on collaborative practices.

Kaya Davies-Hayon

Reproductive and Creative Labour in a Postcolonial Space: Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022)

Alice Diop’s first fiction film, Saint Omer (2022), explores how the labour of reproduction is interwoven with processes of creative work, conditions of precarity, and modes of intersubjectivity between Black women in postcolonial France. Based on a fait divers, the film tells the story of a pregnant novelist of Senegalese heritage named Ramy (Kayije Kagami) who attends the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese woman accused of infanticide after leaving her 15-month old daughter on a beach to drown. In a direct challenge to the secular and rationalist logic of the French state, Coly admits to the crime but pleads not guilty on the grounds that she has been subjected to sorcery by her wider family members.

In this paper, I consider how Diop uses her representation of labour - and its intersections with race and reproduction - to frame the relationality between her two central protagonists, and to subvert norms around motherhood, the maternal bond, and cultural assumptions surrounding reproductive bodies. On the one hand, I mobilise feminist ethical work on gesture and response-ability (Schneider 2017) to think through the film’s layering of maternal and postcolonial identities. On the other, I examine the ways in which Diop’s creative labour is bound up with her status as a mother and as a Black woman, and I interrogate how my own embodied and emotional labour as a researcher relates to the film and the questions it raises.

Bio:

Kaya Davies Hayon is a Lecturer in Film & Media at the Open University. Her research investigates the intersections of gender, ethnicity and sexuality in contemporary Arab cinemas. She has recently co-authored, with Stefanie Van de Peer, an edited collection entitled Transnational Arab Stardom: Glamour, Performance and Politics (Bloomsbury 2024).

Maohui Deng and Sophie Everest

Applied Film: Making Films Post-Retirement

In 2023, we worked on a co-produced filmmaking project with eleven members of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre’s Elders Company, the theatre’s participatory arts outreach programme aimed at older people living in Greater Manchester. In the project, we offered the participants training on digital storytelling and documentary approaches using available technology. With the support of the research team, the participants made nine short films using their personal experiences as inspiration.

Unprompted, a number of Elders used the filmmaking experience to creatively explore the relationship between their previous working lives and their post-retirement selves. Sharing our learning from this project, we explore the role zero budget filmmaking can play in creative ageing, and make two claims. Firstly, an approach to participatory filmmaking that applies the methods of digital storytelling can be a productive tool for facilitating individual and shared reflections on the process of ageing-in-place. Secondly, this approach has the potential to foster an improved sense of wellbeing and fulfilment that allows participants to connect ideas of self and livelihood through the development of new creative skills.

In conclusion, we work towards articulating a framework of “applied film”, where processes of production, circulation and reception can facilitate rich creative discussion around collective and individual experiences in specific contexts of community engagement.

Bio

Dr 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). He has also published in the journals Asian Cinema and Dementia.

Julia Michelle Dessauer

Sousveillance Work and Patrimonial Relations in Hollywood

Abstract not published at the speaker’s request.

Bio:

Julia Dessauer is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation examines power and authorship in Hollywood in the age of #MeToo.

Oliver JL Dixon

Cleaners’ Dreams of the 1970s: Revisiting, Retranscribing and Reinviograting Struggles of Gendered Labour in Nightcleaners (1975) and ’36 to ‘77 (1978)

Since its 1975 release, Berwick Street Film Collective’s Nightcleaners has achieved a canonical status within the history of British political cinema. Whilst recent analyses have emphasised elements of this film missed by its initial Brechtian reception, the effects of the film’s new social-institutional contexts on our modes of looking and their continued power to generate new meaning and affect remain unattended to. By analysing contemporary exhibitions, home media releases, public screenings and Nightcleaners’ much lesser-known sister film ’36 to ‘77, I suggest two novel framings that first reconstitute the films as archival documents of historical labour, gender and cinematic struggles and secondly, position them as affective, pedagogical and political tools for use in the present.

I argue that these framings require we both eschew the pessimist hermeneutics which have rendered the films as melancholic visions of a failed political moment and open up to a search for the utopian, not-yet-conscious political visions they contain. Analysing the films vis-à-vis a critical reading of Jacques Rancière's Proletarian Nights, I consider moments of surplus in which cleaners momentarily escape the determinations of labour to enter the aesthetic realms of music or memory. My reading develops these moments as open aesthetic spaces for cleaners' dreams of different social relations beyond labouring to escape. To close, I ask how our return to Nightcleaners and its retransciptions might reinvigorate contemporary struggles for precarious labour and emancipatory cinema.

Bio:

Oliver Dixon is an AHRC-funded PhD student in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. His PhD research investigates histories of British film collectives. His writing has appeared in ViewFinder and his chapter on the collective Cinema Action is forthcoming in an edited collection from Edinburgh University Press.

Lucy Fife Donaldson

Friends in High Places: Social Networks and Creative Labour in Queer Hollywood

From 1953-1963, the photographer George Hoyningen-Huene worked as a colour consultant in Hollywood. Most famous for his pioneering work for Paris Vogue and Harpers Bazaar in the 1930s and 1940s, Huene’s move to Hollywood was the result of a long-standing desire to shift his career into filmmaking and his close friendship with director George Cukor. Drawing on archival material held in the George Cukor Collection at the Margaret Herrick library in LA, this paper will situate Huene as a case study for highlighting the significance of social connections in facilitating access to work in film. More particularly, by focusing on the friendship and collaboration of two gay men, both of whom were members of highly influential ‘gay cultural orbits’, to use Thomas Waugh’s phrasing (1996: 105), it will underline the importance of queer artistic cultures to creative labour above and below-the-line in Hollywood. Given that much of the detail of these networks and cultures is embedded in personal correspondence, rather than professional documents, the paper will further consider the close connection between creative labour and intimacy, and the question of how to capture this in academic research.

Bio:

Lucy Fife Donaldson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Texture in Film (2014), co-editor (with James Walters) of Television Performance (2019) and general editor (with Sarah Cardwell and Jonathan Bignell) of ‘The Television Series’ (Manchester University Press).

Jennifer Doveton

“I work in the kitchens” – Labour, embodiment and disposability in the Harry Potter film series and the His Dark Materials television series.

Fantasy media is celebrated for its feats of imagination, (Walters, 2011), and praised for its radical reconsideration of reality (Baker, 2016). Fantasy may “help us see the world anew and … engage responsibly in the creation of better futures” (Bould & Vint, 2012). But what does fantasy reproduce, distort or discard from our real world in its conjuration of new or ‘better’ worlds? And to what political ends?  By looking at popular fantasy adaptations that draw on a recognisably British mise-en-scène, this paper explores the symbolic functions labour serves when reintroduced to the fantasy world.In narratives that venture into the fantastic through a portal, a notable absence of working-class characters and locales raises questions about what our hero is escaping. In Harry Potter, magic and enchantment seem to have replaced the need for domestic labour; despite this we learn that this work is still being performed at the margins – by women and inferiorised subspecies. The His Dark Materials television series draws on a similar heritage setting in which one’s occupation and social position is fixed by an animal-soul. In both texts, characters with an identity formed around labour become disposable in service of the hero’s higher purpose. Do these fantasies imagine a new and better world, beyond exploitative labour relations? Or do they draw on the aesthetics of labour to reimagine class inequalities as biogenetically predetermined?

Through a close analysis of these emblematic examples of screen fantasy, this presentation uncovers the middle-class systems of value underpinning this dominant form.

Bio:

Jennifer Doveton is a third-year Techne scholar in film and television at Brunel University. Her research looks at British fantasy screen media for its reproduction of middle-class systems of value under neoliberalism. Her thesis is partially practice-based - taking the form of video essays alongside traditional essays and publications.

Corinna Downing

Doing it all: Single screen spaces, community building and labour 1900s and today

This paper examines the role of the ‘all in one’ film exhibition worker in coastal Kent at opposite ends of film industry history and argues that their labour gives them a unique role as builders of community. In the 1890s-early 1910s, the precarious labour of traveling film shows in the public gardens and variety halls of the seaside towns of Broadstairs, Margate and Ramsgate led to the development of film only spaces. Since the late 2000s the area has, once again largely in the absence of cinemas, returned to one in which it is the precarious labour of individual entrepreneurs creating the single screen spaces for film. Drawing on Gabriel Menotti’s description of film curation as ‘a matrix of reproductive labour tasked with the maintenance of media practices and institutions’ [1], I will explore how the labour of the ‘all in one’ worker does this in part as investment in local people and place.

Film exhibition is part of my research into the neighbouring towns’ linked histories of film, cinema and tourism/heritage, initially focusing on a definitive chronological industrial and social mapping including oral history interviews. I am co-owner of the last remaining cinema in the three towns and plan to incorporate grounded theory analytic strategies in an autoethnographic approach to provide insight into labour practices past and future.

[1] Gonring, G. M. P. (2021, February 10). Always already post: subaltern epistemologies in cinema curation. https://doi.org/10.33767/osf.io/ukah9

Bio:

Corinna Downing is a first year PhD student at Canterbury Christ Church University, researching the film industry, coastal communities and heritage in her area of Kent 1890s-now. She has always worked in the independent film exhibition industry, specialising in film education, and is co-owner of the Palace Cinema Broadstairs.

Rajinder Dudrah

The Dancing, Joyful Audiences in the Cinema Auditoriums of the Bollywood Film Pathaan'

Pathaan (Siddharth Anand, 2023) released amidst calls by right-wing socio-political groups in India to ban and/or boycott the film arising from some Hindutva groups who took issue with a Muslim actor dancing intimately onscreen with a Hindu actress. Pathaan, however, went on to create Indian cinema history by being the first Hindi film to surpass the ₹1,000 crore mark (around £97m) from national and global box office returns. Audiences up and down the country danced in their seats, in the aisles, and in front of the projection screen when songs played from the film.

Dancing in the cinema halls in India and beyond is not new, but these seemed special. The dancing in auditoriums was shared on social media and made viral quickly, leading to other national and international audiences dancing in theatres. Could it be that these are ‘A’ dance, an important dance of declaration, a public dance in the cinema, in the streets of culture as a joyous two fingers of victory to those who tried to ban or boycott the film? Could it be that India's contemporary social conservativism needed SRK more than ever?

This paper will explore such questions by considering the dancing Bollywood cinema audience methodologically. How might we usefully make sense of such an audience in media and cultural studies, not least as Bollywood audiences whom western observers have historically seen as simply chasing after escapist fare? How can we also think about an audience that is simultaneously present in the theatre and online?

Bio:

Dr Rajinder Dudrah is Professor of Cultural Studies and Creative Industries at Birmingham City University. He has researched and published widely across film, media and cultural studies and is currently a recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship working towards his next book, entitled ‘E-Bollywood: Popular Hindi Cinema in the Age of New Media’.

Souraj Dutta

Consumption through Production: Networked Digital Media Labour at the Peripheries'

Moving or dancing to songs is a common sight nowadays on the internet, especially on short-form video formats like reels on social media platforms like Instagram. Many among Instagram’s 332.2 million Indian userbase are not only consumers but are also content creators vying to enter the influencer marketplace in the country. As my examples will show, many reels feature users dancing and lip syncing to popular songs from Bollywood and other mainstream film music in India.

As more and more users join this fluid space of ‘the creator consumer’ in India, coupled with the aggressive boom in the number of internet users, we see an interesting comingling of “networked individualism” and “strategic self-commodification” (Shifman, 2014). Users are simultaneously part of a community of virtually networked media consumers and distributors while eagerly finding ways to express their own individuality and devising ways to commodify their cultural expression, underpinned by a proclivity to create and be in turn distributed by others in the digital space. This is what scholars have called “prosumer culture” in digital capitalism.

In Indian prosumer culture, media—especially film music—circulate both nationally and transnationally and find a multitude of forms, from aesthetic expression to political commentary. This paper looks at instances of “produsage" in Indian cyberspace to explore issues of digital labour in the era of platform capitalism. It seeks to interpret spontaneous expressions of networked digital labour methodologically to understand how media production has become a key aspect of media consumption in contemporary internet culture.

Bio:

Dr Souraj Dutta is a postdoctoral fellow at Birmingham City University, working in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research within Arts, Design and Media. He is currently working on a book project on digital public culture and internet memes in India.

Nia Edwards-Behi

Horror Film Festivals: Unseen Labour

In the past decade or so ‘women in horror’ - both as an organising concept and as a critical discourse - has increasingly gained visibility. In this context, a focus is often placed on horror filmmakers, and the role of critics and programmers is perhaps under-explored.

While more recently it appears that women horror critics and commentators are the subject of increasing visibility, the same does not seem true of programmers or festival organisers. This session will offer an industrial and personal presentation on the role of women in horror film festivals and events, particularly in the UK.

The perspective on offer in this session will be one of first-hand experience. As well as being part of the organisational team of Abertoir Horror Festival for around 15 years, in 2010 I organised a screening event for the first ‘Women in Horror Recognition Month’ – potentially the first of its kind in the UK.

This presentation will outline some history of women horror programmers and their contributions to the development of horror festivals in the UK, and offer examples of the, at times, unseen labour of festival planning. By its nature, this will also include a personal account of the ways in which that labour can, at times, be specifically gendered.

With horror festivals in the UK primarily being organised by volunteers, this presentation will highlight the seemingly invisible labour put into events which form a core part of horror film culture in the UK.

Bio:

Dr. Nia Edwards-Behi (independent) is co-director of Abertoir Horror Festival. Nia has over 15 years’ experience of working in film, the arts and media in Wales. With experience in programming, marketing, writing and public speaking, throughout her career Nia has specialized in issues of representation, inclusion and access.

Kate Egan

‘Do As I Say’: Jamie Lee Curtis, Laurie Strode and Performance in Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022)

In one of the few pieces of scholarship on horror film and performance, Peter Hutchings points to the lack of attention afforded to acting when thinking about the meanings and impact of popular horror cinema. As he argues, despite the sustained focus on the importance of the monster, the victim and their relations to gender in horror film studies, little attention has been paid to how ‘the process of acting’ and the ‘actor’s skills and abilities’ work to produce ‘expressions of fear and terror’ which are essential to the emotional impact of key characters and films throughout the genre’s history (2004: 150). Furthermore, and as he notes, such consideration of acting is also key to establishing a more nuanced understanding and appreciation of the representation of female characters within horror, beyond simply equating them with passivity and activity.  In order to build on Hutchings’ insightful arguments, this chapter will focus on the central importance of Jamie Lee Curtis’ performance to the Halloween franchise, and to the continued development of her character, Laurie Strode. In particular, it will map and explore Curtis’ performance across the recent David Gordon Green-directed trilogy Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022). While these films have received a mixed critical reception, the chapter will illustrate how Curtis’ acting choices – relating to her vocal delivery, gaze patterns, facial expression, and physicality – are absolutely central to maintaining and extending Laurie Strode’s status as one of the richest and most fully-realised female characters in modern horror cinema.

Bio:

Kate Egan is the author of Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (2007) and Cultographies: The Evil Dead (2011), and co-author of Alien Audiences (2016). She is currently developing further research on horror cinema and performance, and audience memories of horror film and television.

Jade Evans

Fashioning Valerie - Uncovering the hidden labour of Valerie Hobson in fan magazine Picturegoer

Valerie Hobson was labelled ‘Britain’s best-dressed film star’ in British fan magazine Picturegoer, featuring in a number of articles written by Enid O’Neill that detailed her style choices. Hobson’s status as a fashion icon led to her collaborating with O’Neill as Picturegoer’s fashion advisor. My paper conducts close analysis of a selection of the articles published between 1949 and 1950 to examine how the fan magazine functioned as a vital tool in promoting the stardom of Hobson. My analysis considers what O’Neill’s articles reveal about Hobson’s agency and star labour, both through the role of Hobson in the fan magazine herself, and through what the articles reveal about her hidden labour on film sets. I offer a comparative analysis with an article in American fan magazine Photoplay to consider the reception of Hobson’s stardom and form of British glamour in both America and the UK.

My research builds on film history, star theory, gender politics and archival research to shed light on a hugely popular British star of the 1940s who has received little scholarly attention, examining and discussing fan magazine articles that have not been previously written about. In my examination of Hobson’s stardom, I offer an insight into the gendered aspects of stardom and the agency and labour of the star herself.

Bio:

Jade Evans is an AHRC funded PhD candidate researching the creation, promotion and exportation of British film stars between 1920 and 1970. She is conducting research in the British Film Institute’s Special Collections, examining and revealing the labour of female film stars and industrial figures in building a national stardom.

Teale Failla

Tuning in: sustainable solutions for the wellbeing crisis UK television production

This PhD project is on the mental health and wellbeing crisis faced by workers in the UK television industry, the effects Covid has had, and sustainable solutions that create a more positive and productive work environment. Sexual harassment, bullying, systemic bias, work precarity, long hours and inequitable pay are relatively unregulated, providing a working environment no other industry would tolerate. A preponderance of studies in the last few years have shown the UK television industry to be a ‘hotspot’ for wellbeing issues, leading to over half of industry workers reporting wanting to leave the industry and many contemplating suicide due to these problems. Covid has exacerbated these pre-existing issues, which have produced a revolving door of talent in the industry.

Whilst report after report surfaces outlining the problems, my project investigates solutions from a managerial point of view, utilising interviews from industry professionals, particularly leaders who can speak to the barriers they face in improving wellbeing for employees. It will also draw upon case studies of production companies and networks that provide a nurturing work environment, resulting in more creativity and higher profits as products of better wellbeing. Industry initiatives intended to address these well-known problems tend to be reactive, treating instances of these problems as anomalies. However, researchers claim the problems are systemic. What is it about the structure of television production that itself creates these problems and what solutions can be implemented to responsibly address and prevent them from happening in the first place?

Bio:

Teale Failla (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Media Arts, funded by Royal Holloway University of London. Her background is in television production, primarily in New York City. Previous research includes her MBA dissertation from The University of Edinburgh entitled 'Leading Creative Teams: The Case of UK Television'.

Boglárka Angéla Farkas

The status of the elderly in the Romanian healthcare system: Revisiting The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu and Best Intentions.

According to the latest survey conducted by Eurobarometer from October 2023, population ageing is considered to be the most pressing demographic challenge the EU is currently facing. Although Romania still falls behind the EU average in life expectancy (Sala 2020), the elderly stand as the most prevalent subjects of the healthcare system – framing healthcare work as a ‘labour of age.’ At the same time, retired patients are struggling to pay for necessary healthcare services (Olaru 2013) and there is a traceable dissatisfaction towards these services among the population (Popa et al. 2017), articulated not only in surveys but in national scandals, as well. By analysing two hospital-based Romanian New Wave films featuring patients in their 60s – Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (Moartea domnului Lăzărescu, 2005) and Adrian Sitaru’s Best Intentions (Din dragoste cu cele mai bune intenții, 2011) – this paper aims to explore how (older) age relates to the reliability of healthcare services. As a ‘reaction piece’ to Puiu’s film – which heavily criticized the Romanian health care system through an elderly pensioner protagonist, labelled by medical care workers as societal waste – Sitaru’s film seemingly contradicts the former film’s view with an overprotective and paranoid son, who fears that her hospitalized mother might not receive the best treatment, even if reality suggests otherwise. Regardless of the more optimistic tone of Best Intentions, both films seem to posit retirement age as a dangerous liability even within the very system that is supposed to care for ageing citizens.

Bio:

Boglárka Angéla Farkas is a PhD student in Film Studies at Babeș-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania). Currently, she is involved in two research projects, AGE-C Ageing and Gender in European Cinema and Cultural Traumas in Contemporary European Small National Cinemas.

Richard Farmer

All work and no play? Sports and social clubs in British film studios

Film studios are sites of industrial and artisanal labour, populated by various types of employees undertaking specialist forms of work. But historically film studios have also been sites of socialisation, places where relationships between colleagues extended beyond the workshops, offices and sound stages that constituted the workplace. These interpersonal bonds might have been formed through shared labour, but were given a different form of expression in the leisure pursuits undertaken collectively by film-industry employees.

Exploring the history of sports and social clubs in mid-twentieth century British film studios, this paper will demonstrate that shared leisure activities were an important aspect of workplace culture in the UK film industry. It is, of course, possible to understand studio management’s provision of leisure facilities as a form of paternalistic capitalism, as a means of fostering a ‘happy family spirit’ that in turn might promote efficiency and productivity when workers clocked in for their next shift. Similarly, the formation of industry-wide leagues and administrative bodies gave shape to the sector as a whole, encouraging the formation of a common identity. But to those taking part in organised recreational activities – darts tournaments, works outings, cricket matches, charity balls, swimming galas, Christmas pantos – sporting and social events offered pleasure, friendship and the chance to demonstrate different kinds of physical and cultural prowess. To think about film studios solely in terms of labour – as being all work and no play – is to ignore a significant part of how they were experienced by the people employed there.

Bio:

Richard Farmer (University of Bristol) is a Research Associate on the STUDIOTEC project. He has published widely on British film and popular culture. His books include The Food Companions: Cinema and Consumption in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945 (2011) and Cinemas and Cinemagoing in Wartime Britain, 1939-45: The Utility Dream Palace (2016).

Yixuan Feng

Sinicising Girl Power: Jing Tian’s Transnational Labour in the Sino-Hollywood Coproduction The Great Wall (2016)

Chinese female star Jing Tian had a prominent presence in the Sino-Hollywood coproduction The Great Wall (2016). She played the female lead against Matt Damon with significant narrative function. Jing stood out as a marked exception to the way Hollywood exploited Chinese stars in the 2010s, where her contemporaries often had a perfunctory presence in Hollywood blockbusters, with little chance to gain transnational stardom (Yu, 2015). Despite this, she failed to attain stardom in Hollywood.

This paper accounts for Jing’s failure through examining the way her labour was exploited in The Great Wall. It uses intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) as an analytical tool to frame her industrial positioning which was complicated by Sino-Hollywood negotiations. It investigates how her triple identities as a woman, an Asian/Chinese and a Chinese star inform the way her character was constructed, with a focus on the negotiations between the gender and racial politics in contemporary Hollywood and the discursive power from the Chinese film industry. It examines how her intersectionality shapes the treatment she received in Hollywood, with a focus on how she as a transnational performer, rather than a star in Hollywood was negotiated, following China’s backup. It argues that Jing’s failure suggests a failed industrial negotiation between Hollywood and China, where her role as a sinicised girl hero fails to reconcile individualistic postfeminism and China’s collective heroism, and her labour is exploited in a disposable way owing to Hollywood’s commercial agenda to China, which offers little hope for her to attain Hollywood stardom.

References:

Crenshaw, K. W., 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. 1989, pp. 139-167.

The Great Wall, 2016. Film. Directed by Zhang Yimou. USA/PRC: Universal Pictures/CFGC.

Yu, S., 2015. Dancing with Hollywood redefining transnational Chinese stardom. In: A. Bandhauer, and M. Royer, eds. Stars in World Cinema: screen icons and star systems across cultures. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 104-116.

Bio:

Yixuan Feng is a doctoral student in Star Studies at the University of Liverpool, UK. Her research explores contemporary transnational Chinese female stardom in the wake of Hollywood and China’s changing relationship in the 2010s – using Jing Tian as a central case study to do this work.

Yuda Feng

A Life Worth of 30,000 Yuan: Labour Meets Money on the Postsocialist Chinese Screen

In Chinese cinema at the turn of the century, the lives and deaths of peasant workers provide striking cinematic experiences of being a labourer. One brutal yet prevalent scenario is when a labourer’s life has a money value placed on it. My paper studies how labour meets money on the Chinese screen. My case studies are The World (Shijie, Jia Zhangke, 2004) and Blind Shaft (Mangjing, Li Yang, 2004). Both films feature lives and deaths of migrant workers, and in both films, the compensation for their death is 30,000 yuan. In The World, a pair of rural parents travel to Beijing to receive the 30,000-yuan compensation for their son’s death in a construction accident, whereas in Blind Shaft, two coal miners make money by killing their fake relatives in ‘accidents’ down the mine.

Film scholars have studied the figures of the migrant worker in Chinese cinema and their experiences of the postsocialist condition. However, while migrant workers take the risk of leaving home to make money, no research has scrutinized how workers experience the tangible object of money itself. In political economy, money’s exchange-value originate from labour, such as Marx’s ‘socially necessary labour time’. Labour is the true source of value and wealth, but how is the process of abstracting labour’s time, toil, life and finitude into economic value experienced? And when money becomes a tangible object on screen that stands for a labourer’s life and death, is it still ‘money’ or does it become something else? While money and its function of abstracting everything into exchange-value contribute to the making of a market-driven society in PRC, my paper shows that labourers’ experiences of money as mediated on screen have affective qualities and social significances beyond calculation, exchange and economy.

Bio:

Yuda Feng is a second year Ph.D. candidate supervised by Professor Chris Berry in King’s College London. His Ph.D. thesis is about the experiences of money in contemporary Chinese cinema.

Gregory Frame

Romanticising ranch labour in Yellowstone

Presenting the ageing cowboy John Dutton (Kevin Costner) as an unyielding bulwark against the threats of gentrification, ecological collapse and First Nation claims to their stolen land, television drama Yellowstone (2018-24) has proved to be a hit with conservative audiences in the United States. It has been described by critics as ‘Red State TV’, and ‘anti-woke’, even though its attitudes and perspectives on often controversial political issues are not always as reactionary as has been suggested. Creator Taylor Sheridan uses the codes and conventions of the western genre in Yellowstone to explore American capitalism, individualism and exceptionalism in the contemporary period.

This paper will consider the representation of the group of ranch hands who work for Dutton as consistent with the politics of Sheridan’s other work in film and television. Though not always the main focus of the ongoing narrative, these characters (from troubled – often criminal – backgrounds) function as representatives of the ‘left behind’ working-classes in the rural United States. Abandoned and ignored by mainstream society, they find community, camaraderie and dignity in their work on the Yellowstone ranch. This paper will demonstrate how the show reinforces the neoliberal belief that the rigour of hard work and individual discipline can compensate for social and institutional failure. Moreover, through analysis of its structure around the seasonal rhythms of ranch life, and its use of a melancholy country soundtrack, it will also explore how Yellowstone romanticises ranch labour, delivering an elegy for a way of life that is facing extinction.

Bio:

Dr Gregory Frame is Teaching Associate in Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. This paper forms part of a broader investigation of American film and television in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which is currently under development as a monograph for Bloomsbury Academic.

Mark Fryers

Examining Creative Labour through the Ex-Military/Academic Machine

Part of the reason the British screen industry has seen a financial boost in recent years is through the availability and repurposing of ex-military installations and infrastructure, particularly decommissioned airfields and military barracks, to provide new spaces of creative labour where once military and cold war operations were conducted.

Both blockbuster cinema (Rogue One) and independent/art cinema (The Souvenir) have utilised former military bases as major sites of production. Likewise, the former RAF Coltishall airfield in Norfolk has become a production Hub for October Studios, producing screen media, and functioning in a similar way to traditional ‘vertically integrated’ Hollywood studios. In these instances, they have helped to revive areas and local economies affected by the closing-down of military installations.

Both military and creative labour require space, and this is often on a grand and expansive scale, which calls into question how we define labour in both cases. Likewise, it offers an opportunity to recalibrate our sense of ‘industry.’

This paper will provide an overview of the history and contemporary landscape of creative military re-purposing for the screen arts and the implications for the screen industries - their relevance, sustainability and growth, drawing on critical theories (Lefebvre 1974; Harvey, 2000) relating to the epistemology of space and labour. Additionally, it will consider from a self-reflexive perspective how higher education institutions are similarly re-purposing traditional sites of academic labour into virtual and XR spaces, which raises tandem questions of ethics, labour and participation.

Bio:

Dr Mark Fryers is Lecturer in Film and Media at The Open University. His research examines the intersection of maritime subjects, identity, and visual culture. He has published widely on a number of topics related to visual culture, including in the Journal of Popular Television and Gothic Nature among others.

Miguel Gaggiotti

Work in Gestures: The Manual Labourer as Nonprofessional Actor

This paper explores the embodiment of manual labour in fiction cinema and focuses on nonprofessional actors who perform manual labour on screen. Examining concrete gestures of work in films such as La Terra Trema (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1948), Ressources humaines (dir. Laurent Cantet, 1999) and La libertad (dir. Lisandro Alonso, 2001), this paper seeks to illuminate how different performance and non-performance details are deployed to present the manual labour gestures of nonprofessional actors as both authentic and significant.

Nonprofessional actors — first-time, untrained actors — have been part of cinema since the days of the Lumière brothers and are frequently associated with influential currents including early Soviet Cinema and Italian neorealism, and the work of celebrated auteurs such as Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson and Abbas Kiarostami, among others. Although filmmakers choose to work with nonprofessional actors for a wide range of reasons, a constant practice since the early days of cinema has involved recruiting manual labourers as (nonprofessional) screen actors. Filmmakers and theorists such as Jean Epstein, Lev Kuleshov and Laurent Cantet among others, agree that real manual labourers perform work in an inimitable way and that their bodily expertise necessarily registers on screen. For these authors, despite rehearsal and preparation, professional actors just cannot convincingly replicate the form, cadence and style of manual labourers. This paper seeks to examine what specific qualities and features are recognised as markers of such inimitable authenticity and how filmmakers and (nonprofessional) actors perform and present gestures of manual labour to achieve this highly desired impression.

Bio:

Miguel Gaggiotti is a filmmaker and Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Nonprofessional Film Performance (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) and his writings have been published in Screen, Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism and The Routledge Companion to European Cinema, among others.

Clara Garavelli

Stars on Demand: The Argentine Star System in the Age of Social Media Proximity

The contemporary shift in cinema distribution, such as the rise of streaming platforms, and ‘the theatres of stardom and celebrity (e.g., the rise of social media)’ (Shingler & Steenberg 2019: 446), generate new forms of interactions with the audience, further breaking down the boundaries between the private life and the public image of a star (Qiong Yu 2018; King 2015). For many critics, this shows that the stardom era is coming to an end. Following the work done in my monograph Ricardo Darín and the Construction of Latin American Stardom (Edinburgh University Press 2023) this paper will focus on the impact that the Covid-19 pandemia had in the construction, consolidation and preservation of film stars, with a particular focus on the case of Argentine film star Ricardo Darín and his son “Chino” Darín. How stars reinvented themselves during this period, when the private sphere became public and all productions where either put on hold or virtually redefined, will be explored with the aim to assert whether it is still possible to talk about stars and stardom and what role these “non-stars” play today in the local film industry. In this vein, the paper will reflect, in line with the conference topic, on changing labour practices of film stars in/from Latin America – in other words, how stars are now constructed and consumed in the age of virtual proximity.

Bio:

Associate Professor in Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester (UK), specialising in Argentine film and video. She has several publications on film and visual culture, including Video Experimental Argentino Contemporáneo (EDUNTREF, 2014) and Ricardo Darín and the Construction of Latin American Film Stardom (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

Joseph Garrard

Labouring Towards a Philippine Autohistory in the Films of Raya Martin

here have been numerous works discussing the arrival of film to the Philippines, and how the formation of a Philippine national cinema is inextricably linked to its colonial history (del Mundo, 1994; Deocampo, 2017; Tofighian, 2021). But with the arrival of film coming during such turbulent times in the country’s national history, nearly all films made by native Filipinx people before 1945 are lost, with less than five being known to have survived. Thus, what is left of the film culture of this period are the archives of newsreels, ethnographic films, and wartime reenactment films made by their colonisers from Spain and the United States, which by and large paint the image of the Philippines as a place to be easily conquered; the ‘natives’ are a mere obstacle to be overcome.

Now, with these colonial images consigned to history, something must fill the void left behind. This paper will explore how contemporary director Raya Martin uses his filmmaking practice as a means of redressing this lack of Filipinx visual history through a subversion of the colonial practices of ethnography. Through his films A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (2005) and Independencia (2009), Martin reappropriates and decolonises the film techniques of the Early/Silent Cinema period, as a means of establishing a specifically Filipinx cinematic history. Taking the image of the Philippines back from its occupiers and squarely placing it within the cultural imaginary of the ‘natives’, Martin articulates a new autohistory of the Philippines, created by and for Filipinx people.

Bio:

Joseph Garrard is an MA for Research student in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. His research focuses primarily on contemporary Philippine cinema and its invocations of trauma relating to the country’s history of colonialism, war, and martial law.

Liang Ge

Ambivalent Affective Labour: The Datafication of Qing  and Danmei Writers in the Cultural Industry

Abstract not published at the speaker’s request.

Bio:

Liang Ge (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Culture, Media and Creative Industries Department, King’s College London. Their doctoral project explores the body, desires and embodiment in Chinese boys’ love culture community. Their research interests include gender and sexuality studies, and East Asian popular media and culture. Their recent publications can be found in Media, Culture & Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Asian Studies Review.

Christine Geraghty

The Labour of the Actor: “So much attention to ‘The Look’. What about ‘The Content’?”

Alan Rickman (1946-2016) was a British theatre actor who initially found cinematic fame in Die Hard (1988), consolidated it for a different audience in Truly Madly Deeply (1991) and Sense and Sensibility (1995) and became part of the worldwide phenomenon of Harry Potter (2001-2010) in his role as Severus Snape. His diaries, which consist largely of notes and jottings, were published posthumously in 2022 to much acclaim. In this paper, which will use extracts from the diaries, I consider two themes which run through them. Firstly, Rickman, who worked with a number of successful directors, regularly expressed the view that the processes of filmmaking disregarded the work of the actor and thwarted his concern to dig deep into the script and create a performance. Secondly, and less consciously, the diaries reveal the rigours of the (literally) jet-setting lifestyle which was both a necessity for his work and a consequence of his success. The diaries thus give us something of the inside story of how Rickman negotiated, with a good deal of frustration, the fluid boundaries between being an actor, a performer and a star and are illuminating more generally about the experience of a theatre actor working in cinema.

Bio:
Christine Geraghty is Emeritus Professor (Glasgow) and Associate Research Fellow (Birkbeck). She has a long-standing interest in performance and was among the first to analyse diverse casting in period drama. She is on the advisory boards of several journals and is Book Reviews editor for Critical Studies in Television.

Gábor Gergely

Forced Labour and antisemitism on the Hungarian Screen

The notion of the Jew at work on the destruction of national wellbeing is a central plank of antisemitic discourses deployed in support of anti-Jewish measures implemented in pursuit of the Holocaust. It has remained a key element of antisemitic discourses since the war as the current Hungarian government’s reliance on George Soros as the personification of shadowy forces working to destroy Hungary exemplifies. This paper turns to the corollary of this antisemitic trope, the figure of the Jew made harmless-useful by being put to work for the national good. The paper traces this figure through wartime features made in support of the implementation of the Holocaust, such as Idegen utakon/Strange Paths (Apáthy, 1944), state-socialist reimaginings of the Holocaust as a Hungarian tragedy such as Apa/Father (Szabó. 1966) and Utószezon/The Late Season (Fábri, 1966) and recent and contemporary tellings of the Holocaust and its remembering, such as Saul fia/Son of Saul (Nemes, 2015) and 1945 (Török, 2017). It argues that each, in its own way, rhetorically forces the figure of the Jew to labour on screen to benefit the nation. Thus, the paper shows, Hungarian cinema continues to construct a narrative of national cohesion at the expense of the Jews, who are imagined as unassimilably apart, useful only when put to work as permanently outside therefore marking the contours of that which is autochthonously Hungarian.

Bio:

Gábor Gergely is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Lincoln. His work concerns belonging and racialization in national cinema contexts. In this vein he has published on migrant actors and stardom, whiteness and Jewishness on the screen, industry regulation, state funding and ideas of the nation.

Katharina Glitre

Working Night and Day (1946): Cary Grant, Star Labour and Performance

Biographies and archival materials provide ample evidence of Cary Grant’s perfectionism on set. While some praise his commitment, others gripe about his nit-picking ways. What do such tales reveal about Grant’s star labour and its impact on his acting performance?

Night and Day is an obviously flawed film with a notoriously troubled production history. Shooting was plagued by on-set tensions and delays, with both Grant and the director, Michael Curtiz, demanding changes. Grant’s contract gave him script approval, and he attended script conferences months before shooting began; the script continued to be re-written on set – right up to the final days of shooting. As Eric Stacey (the film’s production manager) reported to T.C. Wright (Head of Production), Grant was ‘raising objections […] all through the picture criticizing sets, costumes, actors, dialogue and everything else, and Mike [Curtiz] is nearly whipped on account of it’. According to Warner Bros.’ call sheets, there were only three days when Grant was not on set during shooting, and he almost always stayed all day.

My approach involves comparative analysis of the script, Stacey’s daily progress reports and the finished film. First, I will identify some of the changes made at Grant’s instigation. Closer analysis of an affected scene will then explore how his off-screen labour feeds into the on-screen performance and the film’s status as a star vehicle.

Bio:

Kathrina Glitre is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at UWE Bristol. This paper draws on AHRC-funded research on Cary Grant and acting; published outputs include ‘Cary Grant: Acting style and genre in classical Hollywood cinema’ and ‘Character and the star vehicle: The impact of casting Cary Grant’.

Michael N. Goddard

Labours of Mediated Love: Affective Labour on New Netflix Reality Shows

While most discussions of Netflix content focus on serialised comedy and drama as well as films, the recent expansion of its reality TV portfolio raise questions about the identity of the platform and the labour processes that it captures in its reality ‘content’. While some of this content is simply the rebooting of pre-existing shows or formats such as Queer Eye (2018-), more recently Netflix has been developing some new formats such as on Love is Blind (2020-), Too Hot to Handle (2020-) and in a different way The Circle (2020-) that in different ways feature innovations that at once highlight connections between television and social media, and modes of affective labour. This paper will argue that these shifts in Reality TV formats closely parallel the shifts brought about by streaming platforms like Netflix itself in their positioning between television and social media, as well as foregrounding of the affective labour of participants. This paper will also argue that this affective labour extends beyond the production of these shows to multiple responses across a range of social media platforms, focusing especially on some YouTube channels and Instagram pages that respond emphatically to these shows, often featuring further mediated performances of original cast members. This paper will examine the practices of affective labour on all these shows as so many instances of an algorithmic transmedia production of subjectivity.

Bio:

Dr Michael N. Goddard is Reader in Film and Screen Media at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published widely on international cinema and audiovisual culture as well as cultural and media theory. He is also a media theorist, especially in the fields of media ecologies and media archaeology.

Tamsin Graves

Secrets and silences: the hidden labour of caring for other people’s children in the Irish context with a case study of An Cailin Ciuin (Colm Bairéad, 2022)

This paper will consider the ways in which childcare as labour is represented when the caregiver is not the parent in the specific case of The Quiet Girl (Colm Bairéad, 2022). While the border between labour and love is necessarily porous in typical parent roles, the figure of Cait and her relationship with the distant relatives in whose care she lands encourages a closer look at the intimate and psychological role of care work within the domestic space. Implications of abuse in her previous home provoke a highly sensitive approach to her care, and the rehabilitative work undertaken by her distant relatives is presented through minute gestures within the cinematography.

This paper will contextualise this Irish language film against the backdrop of both the early 80s when the film was set, and the contemporary landscape of a changing Europe in which the film was released in 2022. In particular, through looking at film sound, with reference to Chion, Laing, and Dyer, this paper will highlight the ways in which what is left unsaid reflects the often hidden nature of care work in the case of neglected children without voice or agency. Highlighting moments within the film that clarify the synthesis of labour and love, this paper will hopefully complicate assumptions around traditional caregiving and provide a nuanced approach to the subtleties of labour undertaken within extended family networks, primarily by women.

Bio:

I am a final year PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, supervised by Professors Will Higbee and Fiona Handyside. My work focusses on marginalised voices in European cinema, and I have presented and published on discourses of migration and border crossing in film. I currently teach film studies at two higher education institutions.

Jon Greenaway

Necro-Neoliberalism, Vanishing Labour and the Problem of SAW-vereignty

The SAW franchise represents one of the most profitable series in contemporary horror. The films take place against the backdrop of American deindustrialization, with its settings of deserted factories, industrial estates and washed out, abandoned urban environments. The only people who inhibit the SAW franchise are law enforcement, the lumpen proletariat or the overeager middle classes that make their money through rent extraction and speculation. Labour -- in the traditional, productive sense of the term --  is gone in the SAW franchise as neoliberal economic conditions turn necrotic and the colonial power of capitalism comes to exert it’s own price on the very bodies of those left behind. This paper outlines a theory of neoliberalism as a horror story contingent upon the abnegation and nullification of labour -- all that’s left is the extraction of value and the price to be paid is all in blood. There is no possibility of collectivity in the SAW films as class consciousness is a fools dream liquified by neoliberal politics that replaces solidarity with the war of all against all. Moving from SAW to SAW X this paper argues that the franchise literalises the anxieties of the neoliberal condition, leaving us all in the position of a Jigsaw trap -- try as we might, all of us must live or die, and make our choice.

Bio:

Jon Greenaway is a writer and horror expert who researches the intersection of horror, politics and theology. He is the author of Theology, Horror and Fiction and the forthcoming Capitalism A Horror Story.

Joshua Gulam

The blue-collar superspies of Fast & Furious: Labour and technophobia in The Fast Saga films

Fast & Furious began life in 2001 as a mid-budget crime film set around LA's illegal street racing scene. In the 22 years and ten sequels that followed, the franchise has grown exponentially, morphing into a series of global spy-adventures in the Mission: Impossible mould. Despite this evolution, Dom and his family - the franchise's heroes - continue to possess the same strong affinity with working-class and street culture that they did in the first film. In the the most recent releases, Dom wears the same work shirts that he wore in The Fast and the Furious (2001), for example, while he is also routinely pictured in the garage tuning up his muscle cars.

This paper will explore the importance of blue-collar labour to the franchise. Scholars and critics tend to focus on questions of race and gender when analysing Fast & Furious, paying attention to how the franchise upholds a post-racial and hyper-masculinist ethos (e.g., Beltrán 2005). Yet, class is just as important to the films’ enduring success and legacy. Indeed, a key part of what has made Fast & Furious so popular is the way that it resonates with issues and debates around blue-collar work in post-industrial America. In this paper, I hope to unpack some of these complexities around class and labour in the franchise, by analysing the blue-collar credentials of the heroes and how these are expressed in terms of a curiously macho brand of technophobia.

Bio:

Joshua Gulam is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Liverpool Hope University. He has published widely on the on- and off-screen campaigning of stars such as Angelina Jolie and George Clooney. He recently co-edited a book on Fast & Furious for Bloomsbury. The book, Full-Throttle Franchise (2023), brings together a range of scholars to explore not only the style and themes of Fast & Furious, but also its broader cultural impact and industry legacy.

Lingping Guo

Feminist Analysis of the Leftover Women in Contemporary Chinese Film and Television

As China implemented the Reform and Opening-up policies at the end of the 1970s, which underwent significant changes in terms of social, economic, and political aspects, the job market thus hugely expanded due to the rapid modernization and urbanization, which had a profound influence on gender roles and family structures - encouraging women to pursue their own education and career paths. Consequently, it led to a delay in marriage, and some women chose to keep their singlehood. According to the report, more than 13 million couples registered their new marriage in 2013, but by 2021, there were less than 8 million newlywed couples, a 43.4% decline (Liang et al., 2022). Additionally, the average first marriage age in China was 24.89 in 2010 and increased to 28.67 in 2020 (Li, 2022).

At the same time, as Western ideologies saw a booming development in China, there was a growing emphasis on individualism and personal freedom, particularly among younger generations, which challenged traditional cultural values that placed a strong emphasis on marriage and family. As part of a plan to meet its demographic objectives of encouraging marriage, planning population growth, and upholding social stability, the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) and the Ministry of Education introduced the concept of “leftover women” in 2007, which refers to unmarried women over the age of 27 who are well-educated, highly paid, and independent (Fincher, 2014). My research aims to explore how leftover women are constructed in contemporary Chinese media. This research selects four movies - The Last Women Standing (2015), Send Me to the Clouds (2019), Begin, Again (2019), Delicious Romance (2023), and two TV series - Li Chuntian‘s Spring (2011), Nothing But Thirty (2020) - as case studies to investigate the difficulties and advancements of depicting women in Chinese media of the twenty-first century.

Bio:

Lingping Guo is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the film department, at the University of Southampton. Prior to her studentship at Soton, she obtained her BA degree in Media Arts and Studies from the University of Kentucky, the United States, and her MA degree in Media Industries from the University of Leeds, the United Kingdom. Lingping’s research interest is situated at the intersection of gender and cultural studies of Chinese film and television. She is currently conducting her research on the media representation of “leftover women” and the social phenomena of the increasing single population in Chinese society.

Leora Hadas

Doing sustainability work in the screen industries: Practitioners at the crossroads

This paper discusses the work and experiences of sustainability practitioners within film and television production. Scholarship has now begun to explore the macro-scale strategies of an industry-wide green transition (Kääpä, 2018; Kääpä & Vaughan, 2022), however, little attention has so far been paid to workers who carry out the on-the-ground work of designing and implementing greener practices. While productions now frequently incorporate such roles as sustainability coordinator, green steward and eco-runner, these roles are currently yet unstandardized and unregulated, largely ignored by professional bodies and unions, and often unrecognized even by crews on set.

Based on interviews with workers at Neptune Sustainability Solutions, a major UK based environmental consultancy, I explore the landscape for new screen sustainability roles: their characteristics, work culture, integration into the screen industries, and challenges faced in the field, The paper argues for the importance of examining green production practice within the screen industries through the lens of creative labour and production culture (Caldwell, 2008; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2013). Findings highlight the complexities of carrying out multifaceted work roles in the intersection of creative industry work, environmental management, and science communication, and explore the unique experience of working at the driving edge of the industry’s green transition.

Bio:

Leora Hadas researches creative industries and screen production cultures at the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies, University of Nottingham. She is PI on the BA-funded Eco-Roles in the Audiovisual Industries project.

Eleanor Halsall

Green leaves and clapperboards: staff magazines in occupied Dutch studios 

In May 1940 the Dutch surrendered to Germany following fierce bombing of Rotterdam; the Netherlands remained under German control for five years. Within this period the country’s two film studios – Filmstad Den Haag and the Cinetone Studios in Amsterdam – were requisitioned and integrated into the Ufa behemoth as Ufa Filmstad N. V. Between 1941 and September 1944, with studio space in Berlin becoming increasingly stretched, 18 German films were produced in these two studios. Inevitably occupation enforced an imbalanced power structure. Ingo Schiweck (2011) points out that German directors brought their experts to the Netherlands and that Dutch film workers gained considerable experience because of these exchanges. At the same time at least 200 Dutch film personnel were drafted into the German film industry as guest workers. Given this series of circumstances at a time of global conflict, questions arise about how the Dutch workforce at Filmstad reacted and responded to the Germans they worked with and the extent to which the Germans engaged with the local employees. Material in Amsterdam’s Eye Study archive includes copies of two in-house magazines produced in The Hague (Het Groene Blaadje, 1943, 1944) and in Amsterdam (De Klap, Nov 43-Aug 44). These documents provide a rich source of information about workplace social activities which included sports days, theatre, music and cabaret evenings, fishing competitions and board games, as well as personal notices about family life. This paper considers what these publications reveal about life in the studio under occupation.

Bio:

Eleanor Halsall (University of Southampton) is a Research Associate on the STUDIOTEC project. Her interests include the impact of employment laws on the studio system, with a special focus on women working below-the-line. Recent publications are in Mubi’s Notebook (2023); An Unseen History of Indian Cinema (2023); and Filmblatt (2022).

Hannah Hamad

Frontline NHS workers and Covid-19 in the ‘Very Special’ Return of Casualty

On January 2, 2021 the BBC’s continuing medical drama Casualty returned to UK television screens for the start of its thirty-fifth series. It was the first episode of the show to have been produced and broadcast since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused production to stop suddenly in March 2020. Set during the spring (in flashback) and summer of 2020, the episode takes an in medias res approach to depicting the devastation that three months of COVID-19 has wrought at its fictional hospital on patients, the local community, and above all on NHS staff, from day 90 of the first lockdown onwards.

As a hospital-based medical television series with a long-established history of engaging with debates about provision of NHS services, it would have been a bold and questionable move for the producers of Casualty to avoid representing the pandemic in perpetuity. Unlike contemporaneously returning BBC dramas like Line of Duty that opted to present an alternate 2020 in which the pandemic was not happening, Casualty leaned hard into depicting the onset and aftereffects of COVID-19, especially in its representation of the working lives of frontline NHS staff, returning to viewers’ screens after this long hiatus with a hard-hitting depiction of the horrors of the first wave of COVID-19 as they manifested for the staff of Holby City General. This paper unpacks the stakes and contexts of Casualty’s ‘very special’ return with a view to arguing for its status as quiet radical television.

Bio:

Dr Hannah Hamad is Reader in Media and Communication at Cardiff University, School of Journalism, Media and Culture. She is the author of Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood (New York and London: Routledge, 2014).

Rhiannon Harries

Schoolwork: New Perspectives on Teaching in Contemporary Documentary

Popular cultural representations of teaching tend to elide the everyday, practical work involved in favour of dramatic potential. They figure the “good” teacher as a solitary and heroic individual, with an intense sense of vocation, who transforms the lives of particular, deserving students using unconventional methods and sheer force of personality. Prevalent in mainstream Hollywood cinema – for example, Dead Poets Society (1989) or Mona Lisa Smile (2003) – these idealistic tropes shape ideas about teaching both within and outside the profession and are even evident in recruitment campaigns for teachers in the U.K., despite a professional reality of high levels of stress, burnout and poor rates of retention. In this paper I turn to recent observational documentaries set in schools to consider how film might offer representations of the multi-faceted and laborious nature of teaching that are both realistic and compelling. I focus on Maria Speth’s Silver Bear-winning Mr Bachmann and his Class (2021), a three-and-a-half-hour portrait of a class of young teens that complicates the figure of the heroic teacher and the liberal individualism that underpins it. Through its patient accumulation of quiet and undramatic scenes of teaching and learning, the film builds a more complete image of the class as a group and education as a collective endeavour. Within this, Mr Bachmann’s charisma might be understood in sociologist Max Weber’s terms as a creative force that allows the deadening routines of work to be transcended.

Bio:

Rhiannon Harries is Assistant Professor of French Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her work focuses on ethics and politics in contemporary non-fiction filmmaking. She recently co-edited a special issue on the work of Gianfranco Rosi and she is currently editing a volume on education in French film for Liverpool University Press.

Rebecca Harrison

The Workers of Arts in the Age of Tyrannical Reproduction

In 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote about the impact that cinematography had on ‘art in its traditional form’ (p.5). A canonical text in arts education, the essay argues that the human impulse to technologically reproduce sound and image destabilises the ‘aura’, or genuineness, of the work of art by removing the object from its situation in time and space. Fast-forward to 2024 and our ever-increasing capacity for technological reproduction is one of many challenges facing us as Film, Television and Screen Studies scholars in the neoliberal academy.

From artificial intelligence to lecture capture, our work is copied, stored, replayed (often without consent) and devalued by a management class that prioritises bank loans and building projects over our working conditions. A class that defunds and closes Arts and Humanities departments in cost-saving exercises. And a class that often seems less interested in arts education than in churning out workers for the screen sectors.

How, then, can we, as workers in and adjacent to the arts, reclaim – or even reimagine – the aura of our creative practices within the university?

Drawing on scholarship, personal experience, and both institutional and trade union reports, this paper will make a case for collectively changing how we work in arts subjects in general, and screen-related studies in particular. Instead of meeting management demands on us for effective labour (which I frame as outcome/output-oriented) I will advocate for an affective form of labour that enables staff and students to remake things differently.

Bio:

Rebecca Harrison is a feminist academic and writer. Her research explores the histories and geographies of screen media, and asks questions about identity and power. Currently, she is employed by The Open University.

Nicolas Helm-Grovas

Social Reproduction, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Unconscious in Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977)

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s 1977 experimental film Riddles of the Sphinx emerged, in part, from the interaction of two currents in the women’s movement in Britain. On the one hand, socialist-feminism, as exemplified by the film’s scenes of housework, childcare and shopping, its attention to waged and unwaged gendered labour in spaces such as a call centre, a nursery and around the home. The film considers issues such as the role of the family in capitalism, the relationship between unions and feminism, and ‘the domestic labour debate’ of the period. At the same time, Riddles of the Sphinx’s interest in the Oedipus complex, symbolic order and the psychoanalytically charged figure of the sphinx indicates its position in an emerging feminist psychoanalytic discourse of ‘sexual difference’.

Although feminists of the time such as Juliet Mitchell and Ros Coward linked psychoanalysis to a Marxist account of ideology, these two currents were by no means easily reconcilable, as the disagreements at the Patriarchy Conference in London the year before Riddles of the Sphinx demonstrate. The film’s central topic of motherhood, as both labour and desire, provided a way to superimpose socialist and psychoanalytic feminism, yet productively articulating the relationship between the two was far from straightforward. This paper will examine how these political debates are inscribed as cinematic form in Mulvey and Wollen’s film. It will develop Mulvey and Wollen’s idea of ‘the politics of the unconscious’ as a way of thinking about these questions.

Bio:

Nicolas Helm-Grovas is Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. His writing has appeared in publications such as Oxford Art Journal, Radical Philosophy, and Trafic: Almanach de Cinéma, and in various edited collections. His book Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-cinema is forthcoming from Brill.

Christopher Holliday

Hollywood’s Ghost Protocol: Anti-VFX Fantasies in the Era(sure)

of Digital Labour

The pre-release marketing materials and industry narratives that surrounded Mission: Impossible –Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) and Oppenheimer (2023) has confirmed Hollywood still holds an aversion to digital VFX. Despite multiple computer techniques and credited digital effects vendors, the promise and promotion of each film’s practical ‘in-camera’ images hinted at fluctuating levels of acceptance towards computer-generated intervention. This paper argues the sidelining of digital involvement by A-list figures like Tom Cruise and Christopher Nolan comes at a crucial time for industrial and cultural perceptions of digital and digitised labour in Hollywood. It argues that the diminishing stakes of CGI and (misleading) championing of ‘doing it for real’ can be understood as mediating concerns around the growing threat of synthetic media production crystallised in the SAG-AFTRA dispute, which revealed top-down intentions to utilise AI to reproduce an actors’ voice and likeness without their input or approval. Yet the downplaying of CGI is equally framed by broader critical assumptions around the “fantasies of control” that support computerised image production (Mihailova 2013) and the “conglomeration of labour-power” that defines digital cinema’s workflow (Darlington 2018: 1247). Indeed, Hollywood studios remain under increased scrutiny for their exploitative working conditions and toxic creative environments, prompting recent walkouts by artists and the subsequent unionising of VFX employees at Marvel (Jackson & Tangcay, 2023). By identifying contemporary Hollywood’s continued ‘ghosting’ of VFX artistry, this paper reflects on the spectatorial connoisseurship of CGI today and what it means when the exposure of digital labour becomes an admission of guilt.

Bio:

Christopher Holliday is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London. His research is concerned with digital technologies and forms of computer animation in contemporary visual culture, and has published work on the computer-animated film, digital visual effects, Deepfakes, and digital de-aging.

Lisa Holloway

Work break? When bees and humans meet in Debra Granik's Leave No Trace

Apiarist Susan (Susan Chernak McElroy) passes on the skill of how to interact with a honeybee colony to teenager Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie). When Tom removes the protective garments she wears, bees crawl across her bare palms and move to her fingertips. This moment conveys a “fragility and finitude” (Pick 2011: 3) in a “complex entanglement of human and nonhuman” (Bennett 2010: 112).

Although we place the animal within a “network of cultural and social associations” (Burt 2002: 39), these winged creatures also exist outside of human interpretation. As symbols, the bees facilitate the inversion of a father-daughter relationship yet also exceed interpretation, rupturing the fiction to scrutinise the making of the film (Burt 2002: 30). If the insects sting, they die. Are they behaving ‘as usual’ or being cajoled into participating? Are they taking a work break or is their labour being disturbed? The bees are autonomous (they could fly from her, but many choose to stay) yet their work is exploited (honey is harvested as a resource for the community). They also throw us from the story in our concern for the actor playing Tom who seems vulnerable to this unpredictable cluster of potentially deadly insects; the human is not turned into prey yet there is a “play of agency” (Burt 2002: 31).

This paper will explore how the beekeeper passes skills to Tom, what those skills mean for her, whether the bees’ work is being disrupted, and how Granik’s work resists a metaphorical reading of these insects.

Bibliography

Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Burt, J. (2002) Animals in Film. London: Reaktion Books Ltd.

Pick, A. (2011) Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York, Chichester: Columbia University Press.

Filmography

Leave No Trace (2018) [film]. Directed by Debra Granik. USA.

Bio:

I’m a Doctoral Researcher/Film Studies Tutor at University of Sussex, have lectured at University of Brighton and UCA and was Head of Film and Media at University of Sussex International Study Centre. Research interests include: female filmmakers; genre re-vision; cinematic representations of the natural world, nonhuman animals, and material things.

Bella Honess Roe

Multi-Taskers? Understanding the Roles and Labour of Women in British Animation Studios in the Mid-Twentieth Century.

This paper presents the latest findings, and challenges, of an ongoing project that is researching women who worked in British animation studios in the mid-twentieth century. Contrary to existing and accepted histories of animation, in Britain and beyond, women were active in commercial and studio animation in this period. They worked not only as ‘inkers and painters’, but also as animators, directors and producers and they ran departments and studios. 

Recent research has revealed a far greater number of women than previously identified. However, one of the challenges is understanding who worked where when and in what roles. This challenge is presented in part by the lack of archival material that remains from animation studios in this period, and this is something I have discussed in previous conference presentations at BAFTSS and elsewhere. Another challenge is how different roles have been named in existing documents and a further one is how those who worked in these roles understood their own labour and that of the people they worked with. This is made all the more complicated by the nature of the animation industry at that time, which was small, with frequent mobility of personnel between companies and studios and a fluid sense of roles within a company.

In this paper, I will present the most recent findings from this project and reflect on how we can decipher the roles undertaken and labour carried out by women who worked in British animation studios in this period.

Bio:

Bella Honess Roe is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Surrey. She has published extensively in animation and documentary studies, including books on animated documentary, the voice in documentary and Aardman Animations. She is currently working on a project about women's labour in mid-century British animations studios.

Sharon Hooper

The Feminist Labour of Distribution: the Leeds Animation Workshop (LAW) in the 1980s and 1990s

Films made by women have often been excluded from theatres and, along with the presence and contributions of women filmmakers, from film history per se. Against the grain, Leeds Animation Workshop (LAW) have been making social and women-centred animated films since the Seventies and are still active today. Films need to be screened to audiences to become cinema (Dall'Asta & Gaines, 2015), and to generate discourse. Drawing on archival artefacts from the Eighties and Nineties, this paper focuses on LAW’s film premieres, publicity, distribution methods and their effects. LAW’s short, animated documentaries were not made for mainstream theatrical release but with specific issues and audiences in mind, normally connected with funding. LAW’s practice of premiering animations alongside a feature film, the choice of venue, guest lists, posters, press releases and contacts, evidence careful endeavour. Similarly, although LAW worked with distributors (such as Cinema of Women and The Other Cinema) the archive indicates that they did much of this work themselves, sending films to grassroots groups, organisations in the labour and women’s movements, to government offices and film festivals. Some of this activity can be seen as efficacy because of dwindling funds in the sector. However, this paper suggests LAW’s screening and distribution practices are not just needs-must actions to survive, but a result of collaborative practice within the Workshop and wider networks that transgresses traditional industry practices. It also considers LAW’s strategies in relation to the Workshop’s feminist politics and consciousness of occlusion, and as deliberate labour to control their own narrative, a labour often unaccounted for in film history (Clarke, 2018).

Bio:

I am a PGR at the University of Leeds. Within my broader interest in feminist filmmaking, my research focuses on the archive of Leeds Animation Workshop, their collaborative practice, skills sharing and aesthetics. I am also a Senior Lecturer and a filmmaker. Having had previous experience in television, I mainly make academic films and work with third sector organisations.

Lauren Houlton

Reproducing Labour, Understanding Sisters

Sisters! (2011) is a film by Petra Bauer and Southall Black Sisters, a London-based organisation dedicated to supporting women escaping domestic and gender-related violence. Offering an intimate insight into the organisation’s daily operations, the film illuminates the current challenges posed to political organising through their history of campaigning. This paper considers the influences of Nightcleaners (1974-5) by Berwick Street Film Collective (considered a key example of structural/materialist political filmmaking in 1970s British independent cinema) on the treatment of issues of social reproduction in Sisters!. The parallels and differences in the depiction of paid and unpaid labour through the optics of gender, race, and class, are discussed in relation to more recent socio-economic, political, and theoretical discourses, providing an opportunity to reflect on the productive aspects of British independent film cultures in representing current feminist labour struggles alongside their limitations. This is discussed alongside the labour involved in ‘reproducing’ the operations of Southall Black Sisters, which I explore through the collaborative development process of Sisters!. While not explicitly visible in the film, I suggest that it becomes possible to draw out a historical relation between conditions of production and the wider systemic structures that these films sought to capture through conditions of precarity and their impact on the working relationship between Bauer and Southall Black Sisters.

Bio:

Lauren Houlton is a Techne-funded doctoral researcher at the University of Westminster. Her project, Differentiated Publics: A Feminist Study of Collaboration in Artist Filmmaking, aims to develop a feminist theoretical framework for collaboration through case studies developed between artists Petra Bauer, Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Rehana Zaman, and community organisations.

Yidan Hu

Affective Labour Beyond the Human: Prosthetics, Countersexuality, and Post- Cinema in Her (2013)

How can human carnal needs be met in a technological environment when the digital body replaces the tangible body as a sexual provider? This question can be

modelled by the imagination of science fiction (sci-fi) films. The film Her (dir. Jonze, 2013) showcases an affective story where the humanoid protagonist Samantha as an

intelligent operating system (OS) provides intimate service to the human protagonist Theodore. My research employs Michael Hardt’s concept of affective labour to

address the issue of digital sex between the human and the humanoid, arguing that Her serving as a science fiction film implements an anticipatory role for a future-

oriented mode of affective labour. I expound on the instrumentality of prosthetics in sexual relations to answer the embodiment issue. Secondly, I explain the affective

distinction between pornography and eroticism in digital sexual performances. The first two sections are an analysis of the film’s story content itself. The presence of

digital cinematic apparatuses, nevertheless, allows affect to go beyond the screen. In the third part, I investigate how post-cinematic images allow for an affective

connection between the spectator’s body and Samantha’s body. I conclude that engagement with technological sex by sci-fi narratives advances the concept of

affective labour, which constructs a posthuman collective community among humanoid characters, human characters, and human spectators.

Bio:

Yidan Hu is a PhD researcher in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, whose research programme concerns the issue of affective economies in science fiction. She has studied at Utrecht University, the London School of Economics & Political Science, and Nanjing University of Science & Technology.

Bethan Jones

“The Fans can do an amazing promotion job”: Fanfluencers, unpaid labour and exploitation in media tourism

Media tourism, in particular film and TV-induced tourism, has become a well-established area of research given the role that these texts play in driving visitors to specific locations. Work on fan tourism, a sub-sector of media tourism, enables us to understand the ways in which audiences use sites of media tourism and what those sites mean to them. What is less understood, however, are the ways in which fans themselves can act as drivers to and mediators of these filming locations, and how the labour they undertake is being utilised by production companies, studios and other tourism stakeholders.

As studios like Warner Bros. and tourism agencies like Visit Scotland recognise the value of media tourism and the participatory nature of fandom they increasingly use ‘fanfluencers’ to encourage fans to visit filming locations. Yet what does this mean for the fans themselves, in terms of social, cultural and economic capital? This paper argues that the labour fans perform at these sites functions as a form of transmedia marketing, showcasing these locations to others in the fandom and encouraging them to visit. Furthermore, the use of social media mediates these locations through fan practices such as paratextual play, extra-diegetic performance and information sharing. Drawing on interviews with fans and stakeholders, I offer examples of how fan labour is used in media tourism marketing and explore the question of whether this practice is another form of exploitation or whether there are other benefits that fans receive when acting as unofficial transmedia marketers.

Bio:

Bethan Jones is a Research Associate at the University of York who has written extensively about fandom, media tourism and participatory culture. She is on the board of the Fan Studies Network, co-chair of the SCMS Fan and Audience Studies SIG and co-editor of Popular Communication.

Tina Kandiashvili

The Labours of the Knight of Faith:  Kierkegaard and Marx Meet Dancer in the Dark (2000)

When comparing Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx’s philosophies, Jamie Aroosi summarises the established scholarly outlook on the potential dialogue between the two thinkers as follows:“The closest Kierkegaard and Marx ever got to an actual intellectual conversation remains Kierkegaard’s attendance at Schelling’s 1841 Berlin lectures, at which Marx was absent”. Though entertaining, this interpretation seems inaccurate if Kierkegaard’s and Marx’s concepts of authenticity and labour are considered.

Kierkegaard criticises bourgeois normativity for ‘annihilating selfhood’; to this end, spiritual labour allows the progression through the hierarchical stages of existence (aesthetic, ethical and religious) to become the ‘authentic self’. Similarly, Marx argues that capitalism disturbs the authenticity that develops through creative labour by establishing a system that alienates humans from their creation – ‘estranged labour’.

In this paper, I look at Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) as a meeting point between Kierkegaard’s and Marx's philosophies. As I will argue, Selma’s (Björk) musical daydreams inspired by the factory, railway and prison noises refigure the mundane reality (estranged labour) into the work of art (creative labour), which results in her spiritual elevation through Kiekregaardian stages of existence. In other words, I suggest looking at Selma as a ‘Knight of Faith’ who transforms labour from material to spiritual.

This paper aims to initiate study of Lars von Trier’s oeuvre through the Kierkegaardian lens and more generally, highlight Kierkegaard’s importance to film studies. More importantly, however, it highlights film’s potency in overcoming the disconnect between philosophical ideas that are erroneously perceived as unrelated.

Bio:

Tina Kandiashvili is a PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh researching Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of Indirect Communication in Lars von Trier’s cinematic oeuvre. Her research interests include the intersections between film and philosophy and film and religion.

Dikshya Karki

Gendered spaces of film labor: women in the Nepali film industry

Women in the Nepali film industry are gradually making their mark as actors and filmmakers. The patriarchal parameters of gender binaries however dominate social life and affects their work and interactions. This presentation discusses film labor with connections to the gendered nature of public spaces in the context of Nepal. It identifies how women and men discuss their work as professionals in the film industry differently. What do evaluations of their own work entail? Based on my findings from multiple interviews and participant observation in Nepal’s film industry, I will showcase the gendered nature of film labor. Women professionals struggle to balance their domestic responsibilities while men have access to leisurely settings.

I met most of my male interlocutors in cafes and teashops. They were usually drinking tea and smoking and other male customers surrounded us. I met my female interlocutors in their workplaces (filmsets, production office, office lobby) as they spoke to me in between their work or as domestic responsibilities interrupted them. Their presence in respective spaces represents the larger concerns of women’s access to public spaces in Nepal and the gendered boundaries of private-public worlds. Although the interviews were set in their workplaces due to time-bound issues it allowed me an understanding of gendered familial responsibilities, struggles of women as they handled traditional roles as caretakers and interpreted their lives and work based on society’s restricted understanding of their experience and roles.

The women professionals I interacted with were thriving in their careers. Their understanding of their own work and contribution to the film industry, however, was influenced by the social constructions of patriarchy. Their perspectives and lived experiences reiterate the essentialized perception of women’s societal role as domestic, submissive, and inherently feminine as consolidated by patriarchy. This phenomenon extends to the screen images of women in Nepali films as well.

Bio:

Dikshya Karki is a film and media scholar with an interdisciplinary background in media anthropology and media studies. She writes, teaches, and conducts research in areas of cinema and urban studies.

Carla Mereu Keating

Citizen of the Studio: The Enemy Alien Who Produced ‘Quintessentially English’ Films 

My contribution seeks to historicise the ways in which national identity and citizenship impacted filmmakers’ status, employment and mobility within the European film studio landscape investigated by the STUDIOTEC team. It concentrates in particular on the transnational film activities of Mario Zampi, prolific director, production manager and producer born in Italy but active mainly in British studios between the 1920s and the early 1960s. Zampi is credited in Britain for having set up the production company Two Cities Films alongside the better-known Italian émigré Filippo Del Giudice (Street, 2000). Two Cities, according to the Encyclopedia of British Film, ‘produced a number of quintessentially English film classics’ forming ‘the backbone of the quality cinema’ that came out of British studios in the 1940s (Ryall, 2014, 773). In the Italian film press of the period, Zampi was described as the loyal fascist who ruled the ‘kingdom of Teddington City’ (Cinema Illustrazione, 51: 9, 1937); in the 1950s he became the film expat who brought honour to his motherland. Presenting for the first time recently declassified World War Two documentation available in the National Archives related to Zampi’s internment in a prisoner of war camp because of his status as ‘enemy alien’, the paper highlights the volatile relationship that existed, in the form of technical and artistic collaborations, production and distribution deals etc., between the two countries before, during, and after the war.

Bio:

Carla Mereu Keating (University of Bristol) is a Research Associate on the ERC-funded project STUDIOTEC. She is the author of The Politics of Dubbing (2016) and of articles and chapters concerning the production and circulation of film and media across national boundaries.

Laurence Kent

Blurring Work: From Chronophotography to Photo Unblur

The French scientist, Étienne-Jules Marey invented photographic means in the late 19th Century to capture the motion of bodies. His goal was to record and make legible movements that are imperceptible to humans using the method of “chronophotography,” and, as Anson Rabinbach examines, these “investigations into the dynamic laws of the body in motion created a new science of human labour power.” However, as Martin Jay explains, “blurs still occurred when movement exceeded the technical capacity of the apparatus.” For Mary Ann Doane, this “blurred image” becomes evidence of a “perfect representation of time” in modernist art by fact of its illegibility. A tension thus arises between that of the legibility of movement for analytic and pedagogical purposes and the limits of this technology that introduce noise in the desire for clean informational exchange, producing new forms of aesthetic insight.

My paper utilises this tension in the originary mechanisms of the science of labour to examine the place of the blur within contemporary digital image practices. In applications such as “Photo Unblur,” the process of ridding the image of noise and imperfections becomes a form of digital work: “computational labour” that Shane Denson reads as the index of a contemporary world of “discorrelated images” working behind the perceptible screen. If the blurred image formed an aesthetic representation of time for modernist art, it is a fascination today with the digital blur – its necessity in strategies of anonymisation and anti-surveillance, and its incorporation in glitch art and the valorisation of “poor images” online – that can bring to light micro-temporal processes forming and controlling human and digital working practices.

Bio:

Laurence Kent is a Lecturer in Digital Film and Television at the University of Bristol. He completed his PhD on metaphysics and cinema at King’s College London in 2020, and has subsequently published work on various topics within film theory and philosophy, including Deleuzian ethics, experimental cinema, Hollywood action film, archiving practices, and anticolonial aesthetics.

Su Kepsutlu

Affective Labour and Spaces of Precarity in Migrant Women’s Cinema

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of literature on the questions of neoliberalism, labour and precarity in European cinema (Brendan, 2013; Baer, 2013; Mennel, 2019). While these issues were also explored in various mappings of European cinema and migration (Ponzanesi, 2011; Ballesteros, 2015; Celik, 2015; Rings, 2016), Stehle and Weber’s Precarious Intimacies (2020) provided a closer analysis of filmic representation of precarity in migrant cinema. However, despite the broad scope of previous research, there remains an absence of attention to the work of migrant women filmmakers and the representation of migrant women’s labour. This paper considers films directed by women with migrant backgrounds, like Inch’Allan Dimanche (Benguigui, 2000), Fremde Haut (Maccarone, 2005), and I am Nasrine (Gharavi, 2012). Through the notion of affective labour (Hardt, 1999), this paper explores how these films articulate their migrant female characters as ‘active protagonists of migration’ (Morokvasic, 2014) and discusses diverse techniques the filmmakers employed to research the communities in which the films take place. Furthermore, by using Berlant’s (2011) conceptualisation of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival, this paper conducts a close textual analysis of the three films with particular attention to the framing of space and place and argues that migrant women’s films capture their protagonists’ hybrid identities and the challenges of living in-between through a gendered point of view.

Bio:

Su Kepsutlu is a PhD Candidate in the Centre for World Cinemas at the University of Leeds. Her thesis explores the representation of female migration in European cinema with a particular focus on migrant women’s filmmaking. Her research interests include transnational cinema, feminism, issues of identity and precarity in film.

Kyle Steven Kern

Hell Turned Loose: Class Violence and Modifying the Productive Body in Harlan County, USA

What should a body do? A question so rarely posed in the context of mining, but one that surely places the miner as the great horror subject of modernity. And no piece of media better captures the significance of this metahistorical question than Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA, a documentary that artfully adheres structural critique with individual histories via the horrors and urgency of real-life class conflict. For Kopple, the body, ravaged by coal dust inhalation, broken down through the repetitive tasks common of hard labor, and maimed by bullets and cars on picket lines, remains a social scheme on which the spectral forces of capitalist contemporaneity perform their experiments. This paper is an examination of Kopple’s documentary in light of a war over working class bodies — individual bodies that act as the extension of machinery, instrumentalized and subjectivized by structural forces, as well as the larger, social body on which the limits of capitalist exploitation can be tested through generations of economic, environmental, and political attacks.The horror of Kopple’s film serves as an important reminder of the miner as an underdeveloped historical image in postindustrial capitalism’s popular imaginary, as well as the political potentials of confrontational documentary filmmaking in the present day.

Bio:

Kyle Steven Kern is a writer and historian from Boston, Massachusetts. His work primarily examines the intellectual history of labor and politics in the twentieth century United States. He is the author of Flash Up: Class Struggle and Future History (forthcoming, Repeater Books).

Paul Kerr

Some Like it Freelance: Precarity as Industrial strategy and cinematic homology

‘Precarity’ is a 21st century concept, identified with today’s so-called gig economy and zero hour contracts But the Mirisch Company, set up in 1957, was among the pioneers of casualization, outsourcing, downsizing and other strategies celebrated by neo-liberals. Indeed, it was not only among the first independents to deploy freelance labour on an industrial scale, but also made such precarity the narrative subject of several of its earliest and most celebrated films.

The company’s permanent staff at its foundation was in single fingers, but among its first film productions were Some Like it Hot and The Magnificent Seven, two classics which dramatized the exploits of freelancers, in the latter its eponymous guns for hire and in the former, two ‘jobbing’ musicians looking for gigs. And this in the context of Hollywood strikes by the Musician’s Union and the Screen Actors Guild in the wake of the studio lay-offs and ensuing insecurity felt by ex-staffers suddenly exposed to the market. Such films and the ‘agency’ of their protagonists, contrast with the bloated, soulless, corporate cultures depicted in The Apartment and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (also Mirisch films) which paint a picture of stultified corporations, not dissimilar from the old major studios on the one hand and the new talent agencies on the other) implicitly distinct from the nimble, small scale, independent (in every sense) Mirisch Company. In SLIH and Magnificent Seven precarity becomes a moral choice.

Bio:

Paul Kerr teaches BA Film at Middlesex University. His latest book is Hollywood Independent: How the Mirisch Company Changed Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2023). Before becoming an academic, he spent 25 years producing programmes for BBC TV and C4, including creating and running the award-winning cinema series, Moving Pictures (BBC2 1990-96).

Min-Kyoo Kim

Labour in the Nuclear Apocalypse – Motherhood in Testament (1983) and Threads (1984)

This paper explores how the labour of motherhood extends into the nuclear apocalypse in Testament (dir. Lynne Littman) and Threads (dir. Mick Jackson). Both films were produced in the 1980s, amid heightening anxieties of nuclear conflict between the Cold War superpowers. Simultaneously, second-wave feminists, such as the Wages for Housework campaign, were criticising the essentialisation of ‘domestic labour’ as a feminine activity. Through the representation of Carol in Testament and Ruth in Threads, I observe how nuclear war enforces this gendered division of labour. Upon the outbreak of nuclear war in both films, the male protagonists die at their workplace: Carol’s husband, Tom, never returns from his work trip to San Francisco; Ruth’s fiancé, Jimmy, is unable to escape from his joinery in Sheffield. As single mothers, Carol and Ruth confront the physical and emotional labour of raising their children in a nuclear wasteland. I contend that Carol and Ruth’s labour in the apocalypse reflects on the exploitative, as well as existential, implications of nuclear proliferation. Indeed, as Ruth dies, her daughter’s last words to her are “work, work, work” – as though the nuclear apocalypse has entirely reduced the maternal body to a vessel of labour. Moreover, through the films’ rejection of reproductive futurity, I perceive that the very labour of motherhood in the apocalypse is not only tortuous, but also futile. I conclude that this pessimism of the filmmakers’ forecast in Threads and Testament should move us to consider the gendered consequences of ongoing nuclear proliferation today.

Bio:

Min-Kyoo is a PhD candidate in Film and Screen at the University of Cambridge. He studied for a BSc in International Relations at LSE and a MPhil in Film and Screen at Cambridge. Drawing upon this interdisciplinary background, Min-Kyoo’s research project explores the visualities of nuclear violence in the archive.

Wesley Kirkpatrick

United Artistes: Fascism, Trade Unionism, and the Struggle for Fair Labour Conditions in the 1930s British Film Industry

In 1937, the British Union of Fascists' (BUF) official newspaper, Action, published a list of official fascist parliamentary candidates for the upcoming local elections; which included a candidate for Streatham, named Maurice Lee Braddell. Among his many accolades, Action cited his role as co-founder of the Film Artistes' Association – a collective body intent on protecting the interests of British film extras/artistes. BUF ranks housed numerous British film studio and cinema employees. S.M.W. Brogden for instance utilised the BUF's various propaganda outlets to rally collective action; penning attacks targeting his wealthy, and dictatorial employers.

Whilst Braddell's activism was deemed praiseworthy, this was not true of the American comedian, Eddie Cantor, whose continuous, and more pronounced union activism was neither commended nor mentioned amidst the BUF's uniquely vitriolic, anti-Semitic campaign against Cantor. Braddell was a fascist; Cantor a rich Jewish profiteer. Braddell and Brogden would find a home in the fascist ranks - as cogs in an exploitative, and opportunist political machine intent on securing greater influence, and a cleaner public image within 1930s British society.

However, by peeling away Braddell's whitewashed tale of a once-'brief' and 'marginal' fascist affiliation, this paper offers an alternative history of interwar British film trade unionism – as told through various interactions with interwar British fascists. This timely analysis offers to argue that unrest plaguing the industry in the 1930s offered fertile ground for fascist/far-right ideological infiltration. Targeting overworked, underpaid, and disenfranchised industry members, the BUF promoted itself – and fascist corporatism – as a viable, alternative trade union substitute.

Bio:

Wesley Kirkpatrick is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. His thesis explores cinema and mass media's {ongoing) influence over the history of interwar British fascism. His research is funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.

Elisabeth Korn

The Sensuous Labour of Watching

"Sensuous labour" is a concept used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology (1845–46) as a counterweight to what they criticise as the dominant form of “alienated” wage labour necessitated by the capitalist mode of production. Contrary to the exploitative conditions of the latter, the former is celebrated as a liberating activity, in whose self-purposeful execution subject-object relations are forged, feelings of community are negotiated, and the products of one’s labour are appropriated with sensory pleasure. Marx and Engels point to theatres, ballrooms, and pubs as isolated manifestations of this idea(l) of labour as it awaits its social generalisation after the self-cannibalistic downfall of capitalism. This contribution seeks to examine the concept of sensuous labour in terms of its applicability to the consumption of audiovisual media, particularly film. Under what circumstances can watching be regarded as a form of labour? Seen as a performed bodily routine, image consumption controls the bundling of affects, modulates the conditions of sensory access to the world, adjusts the framing of cognitive processes, and represents a historically situated arena for the negotiation of collective and individual identities. To examine these media functions as elements of sensuous labour, a set of shared characteristics will be extrapolated from Marx’s early work that combines in a novel way his socioeconomic criticism with a phenomenological understanding of film reception as a creative co-production carried out by both image and viewer.

Bio:

Elisabeth Korn is a lecturer for Media Studies at the University of Television and Film Munich. After a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature and Film Studies in Berlin and Paris and an M.A. in Critical Theory in London, she is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Bonn.

Karolina Kosińska

Polish social realism and the cinematic narrativization of labour migration

Poland joined the EU in 2004. Since then, more than 2 million Poles have emigrated to Western European countries, most of them to the UK. This exodus has had complex consequences, including the breakdown of families and social ties. Those who left had to face loneliness, the crippling pressure of living in an unfamiliar environment, vulnerability to systemic abuse and anxiety about the instability of life and work. Those who stayed became Euro-orphans, financially dependent on income from abroad.

Polish cinema responded to this situation, creating a specific kind of social realism. These films have often been described by critics in terms of the British model of social cinema (with the term “Loachian” being an obvious reference). It is clear, however, that these films form their own distinctive model, which stems not only from the socio-political specificity of Poland, but also from its cinematic tradition.

In my presentation, I would like to focus on three films that use the conventions of social realism to process the trauma of labour migration: Wild Roses (Dzikie róże, 2017) by Anna Jadowska, I Never Cry (Jak najdalej stąd, 2020) by Piotr Domalewski, and Bread and Salt (Chleb i sól, 2022) by Damian Kocur. By asking questions about specific narrative and stylistic features that convey local issues, and by drawing on (and countering) British writings that reflect on social realism (Raymond Williams, Samantha Lay, David Forrest), I aim to outline the space for discussion of alternative, Eastern European modes of cinematic social realism.

Bio:

Dr. Karolina Kosińska, Associate Professor at the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Science (ISPAN), specializes in British cinema, particularly the history and aesthetics of social realism. She is the editor-in-chief of the academic film journal "Kwartalnik Filmowy” published by ISPAN.

Sarah Lahm

Split Selves in the Multiverse: Emotional Labour on US TV

This paper investigates current women-centric streaming series that articulate the emotional labour that goes into relating to others and oneself. Tropes of the fragmented self and the double are particularly persistent in recent popular cultural products, from Everything Everywhere all at Once (2022) to Naomi Klein’s most recent book Doppelganger (2023). They also shape the narratives of recent TV shows such as Undone (Amazon Prime, 2019-2022), and Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019-present). This fragmentation within multiple realities expresses their female protagonists’ complex psyches and dramatizes the contradictory demands on women to practice self-management and self-care while performing the bulk of the emotional labour that goes into nourishing relationships. As fragmented characters navigate possible worlds, they repeatedly work through difficult moments in their relationships and on themselves, which brings to the fore the labour that goes into making sense of one’s place in the world. The emotional labour that women perform on television also intersects with questions of race and class, and viewers are invited to consider these complex dynamics within and outside these complexly rendered storyworlds. This paper will analyse Undone and Russian Doll’s fragmented women who must work through their relations and sense of self in a multitude of realities. To contextualise the trope of the split self in women-centric television and consider its role in the articulation of women’s emotional labour, I will draw from recent scholarship on neoliberalism and neoliberal feminism, affect and culture, and television.

Bio:

Sarah Lahm is writing up her PhD thesis at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her research is concerned with complex female characters in contemporary US TV, particularly the ways in which recent half-hour dramas articulate the contradictions of feminist discourse's current junctures.

Yung-Hang Bruce Lai

Participatory Filmmaking as Empowerment of Precarious Workers in Hong Kong: A Case Study of Fredie Chan's Independent Films

Abstract not published at the speaker’s request.

Bio:

Bruce Lai obtained his PhD in Film Studies at King's College London in 2022. He is a member of the Hong Kong Critics Society.

Lies Lanckman

The Twelve Labours of Mrs Thalberg: The Hollywood Star as Society Matron

As my previous work has noted, Norma Shearer occupied a fairly unique, sometimes contradictory position within 1930s Hollywood; she was a major star, famous for her roles as sexually liberated women in pre-Code films, but also simultaneously embodied a more conservative persona, as the wife of MGM Head of Production Irving Thalberg.

In this paper, I wish to unpack this complex position further, looking specifically at the kinds of labour involved in these different roles played by Shearer. In particular, I will focus on the offscreen part of this equation: Shearer’s position as a society matron, including the kinds of heavily feminised social labour she was asked to perform in this context, and the ways in which popular fan magazines incorporated this into the wider discourse about her star persona.

I will focus particularly on three forms this labour took, firstly investigating the publicity rhetoric on Shearer as society matron in the broadest sense, including the emphases on both unearned privilege and social responsibility which resulted from it.

Secondly, I wish to look at Shearer specifically as Mrs Thalberg, since upon her marriage, she also assumed a – very public - responsibility for the preservation of her famous husband’s fragile health, which led to several well-publicised screen absences in the mid-1930s.

Thirdly, I will consider how, after Thalberg’s premature death in 1936, Shearer’s star persona included a major emphasis on carrying on and preserving the legacy of her husband’s work, demonstrating that – as ever – women’s work is never done.

Bio:

Lies Lanckman is Senior Lecturer in Film at UWE Bristol. She is the co-founder of NoRMMA, the Network of Research: Movies, Magazines, Audiences, and editor of Stars, Fan Magazines and Audiences: Desire by Design (2022). Her research focuses primarily on stardom, fan magazines, and the career of Norma Shearer.

Michael Lawrence

Laborious, Carnivorous: How to Eat a Hamburger in Hollywood.

This paper considers a specific component of screen performance, namely how films, but also actors, use scenes involving the eating of food to establish character. Focusing on several examples from classical Hollywood, the paper addresses the representation of eating in relation to the construction of femininity. How do films present as spectacle a character engaged in the act of eating? And how might actors invest the act of eating with meaningful gestures that guide the audience towards a particular perspective regarding the character they are playing? The performance of eating has not yet received the critical consideration it deserves in scholarship on screen acting, despite the prevalence of scenes involving the consumption of food across most film genres. This paper focuses on the opportunities and challenges presented to the actor by the labour involved in consuming the hamburger, and examines scenes in which women (the actor and through her labours the character) engage with the hamburger in ways that suggest specific character traits. Due to the specificity of the hamburger as a meal—a meal one eats with one’s hands, a meal comprising various removable elements, a meal one can really make a meal of, as it were—actors can exploit the hamburger in various ways as a prop that can be made to communicate the character’s appetites and desires. The status of the hamburger as an American meal par excellence, as a democratic convenience food, and as a popular way to consume the flesh of cows, means that eating hamburgers in Hollywood is never without special significance. This paper looks at four films from the 1940s/50s—Fallen Angel, Tension, The Blue Gardenia and Some Came Running—in which the actor’s/character’s consumption of the hamburger—this laborious and carnivorous activity—relates to other instances of violence and death in the film which, unlike the hamburger eating scene, can and must be recognised as such.

Bio:

Michael Lawrence is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Sabu (BFI, 2014), and the co-editor of Animal Life and the Moving Image (BFI, 2015) and The Zoo and Screen Media (Palgrave, 2016). He is completing a monograph on beef in American cinema.

Ming-Yu Lee

Suzuki Shiroyasu, Extremely Private Core, Diary Film, Labour, Self-Portrait

This paper aims to discuss Suzuki Shiroyasu’s diary film, Extremely Private Core (2008), as a case study to elaborate how diary film-making becomes a metaphor of daily creative practice. And by using hand and camera as an extension of film-maker’s mind and thoughts, this daily labour can be seen as a manifestation and embodiment of film-maker’s self-portrait. 

In Extremely Private Core, Suzuki Shiroyasu is a diligent gardener who records the changes in his home garden over the course of 365 days with a movie camera, starting from January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2008. During these 365 days, Mr. Shiroyasu meticulously cares for his secret garden, while also nurturing his ideas about art and cinema. In his daily filming and gardening, Mr. Shiroyasu transforms his consciousness and thoughts into art through labour, while also embodying his own existence in his diary film.

Bio:

Dr Ming-Yu Lee is an Associate Professor of Radio, Television and Film at Shih Hsin University, Taipei, Taiwan. He is the editor and author of 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). His research interests include personal cinema (the diary film, the essay film), home movies, documentary and experimental film. 

http://leemingyu0912.wixsite.com/mingyulee

Molly Leeming

A Taste of Honey: Writing, performing and reading Northern women

This paper will look at A Taste of Honey (1962), directed by Tony Richardson and adapted from Shelagh Delaney’s play, to explore the way that acknowledging the gendered nature of creative labour allows for a richer, more dynamic range of readings. This paper is part of a wider reading strategy in my work which reads gendered labour and creativity across a range of Northern stories.

The bulk of British New Wave criticism has historically had an auteurist focus, resulting in Delaney’s creative labour being sidelined in favour of centering Richardson. However, there has been an increasing critical move to acknowledge Delaney’s crucial role, which has produced a variety of readings of the film.

Building on Williams (2023), this paper will argue that by not viewing the film as shaped by the dominant, organising gaze of the auteur director, but instead acknowledging Delaney’s creative labour, alongside that of other women such as the actors Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan, the mother-daughter relationship at its core becomes far more complicated. Viewed in the context of lived experience and female creativity, these ‘restless’ visions of northern womanhood resist neat categorisation, requiring the viewer to utilise considerable interpretative/emotional labour to follow the characters’ shifting, complex points-of-view and to grapple with ideas of family, belonging, and womanhood.

Finally, this paper will argue that acknowledging the creative labour of (in particular working-class) women, opens up the text, allowing for a rich array of feminist readings, rather than restricting the film to a homogenising male-centric reading.

Bio:

Molly Leeming is currently undertaking a PhD in the depiction of northern women in post-war British film and television at the University of Sheffield, funded by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH).

Morgan Lefeuvre

WWII: A Specific Period in the History of French Studios' Work Organization (1939-45) 

In August 1939, shortly before France entered the war, hundreds of film professionals left the studios in Paris, Nice and Marseille to join their military units, halting film production. Once the shock of this ‘phoney war’ had passed, the film industry began to reorganise, resuming slowly around the many constraints – economic, social and material – that war imposed. This precarious balance was shaken once again barely a year later when the French army capitulated in June 1940 and the German army occupied half the country. Over the following five years, war and occupation radically altered how work was organised in French studios. Facing a drastic drop in feature film production (between 1940 and 1944 productions dropped to half the number produced between 1936 and 1939), additional shortages of manpower, film, coal, electricity and building materials impacted heavily on the studios. The studios had to learn to operate in a completely new way, their working status influenced by location (whether in the occupied zone or the Vichy zone), requisition (whether it was occupied by the Germans), and by forced labour migration to Germany. Drawing on a wide range of archives including many unpublished documents, this paper explains how the war impacted on studio activities and on the working conditions of studio employees. Beyond the material restraints, it will also document how during this period the studios regained a central role in the daily lives of its employees, a place they had gradually lost since the mid-1930s. 

Bio:

Morgan Lefeuvre (QMUL) is a Research Associate on the STUDIOTEC project. She published widely on socio-cultural history of the French film industry, including a book on the history of French studios, Les Manufactures de nos rêves (2021), awarded ‘best film history book of the year’ at the Pessac International History Film Festival.

Mingkun Li

Remembering and re-remembering socialist-era labour through remediating socialist film archive.

In 1970, a documentary film called Xiangyu Railway documented railway labourers and their labour during the Cultural Revolution, and over the next fifty years, it was treated as an archive and remediated by three different television projects. Using archives and cultural memory theories, this paper argues that archives are not static preservations of knowledge, but rather dynamic cultural and political practices through which people memorialise and rememorize socialist labour. The research examines the process of remediation of film archives in various contexts, and while the indexical images of labour remain constant, the discourses in which they are embedded shift dramatically.

The study begins by examining the representation of labourers in the archive who are portrayed as proletarian heroes who fought for the principles of socialist revolution and performed innumerable miracles under Maoism's direction. The archive footage was then used in a television project made by the Shaanxi province government in 1996, but the labour was no longer considered as part of the socialist revolution, but rather as the reason for their ultimate personal achievement after economic reform. Then the archive was remediated in a 2009 television project produced by China Central Television (CCTV), with labour fashioned as the subject of nostalgia for their youth by de-political romantic narrative. Ultimately, the railway labour in the archive footage was reimagined in a CCTV-produced television project in 2017, which linked it to the construction of railways as part of Xi Jinping's Belt and Road policy, and portrayed it as a major contributor to China's strong economic achievements and great renaissance today

Bio:

Mingkun Li is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Film Studies department at King’s College London. His PhD project discusses how different social actors over the last fifty years have remembered and imagined the Third Front, a Mao-era mass migration and war preparation movement, through screen media. He has attended and presented his work at the following conferences: Memory Studies Association Annual Conference, Mnemonics: network of Memory Studies, and British Association for Chinese Studies Annual Conference.

Tim Lindemann

Return of the Rural – Deindustrialised Landscapes and Precarious Bodies in Recent US Indie Cinema

This paper analyses the reemergence of the rural as place in recent US indie cinema. In the last two decades, US indie cinema has given rise to a significant number of films that are closely focused on rural America, its deindustrialised landscapes, and the precarity their inhabitants experience. The paper argues that this reappearance is closely connected to various crises – from the 2008 financial crash to the Covid-19 pandemic – that have exacerbated the wide-spread rural poverty in many regions of the United States.

Labour is largely absent from the places these films imagine: the characters in films such as Winter’s Bone (2010), Ballast (2008) and Nomadland (2020) dwell in the impoverished wastelands left behind by the neoliberal “creative destruction” of agriculture, mining, and other rural industries. When labour plays a role, it appears in the form of precarious employment which confirms the characters’ positioning at the margins of post-industrial US society.

The films of this loose cycle often direct their attention to the bodily interaction of the inhabitants with the land itself. The paper closely analyses these interactive, tactile depictions of the environment in several case studies by drawing on the writings of the cultural geographer Kenneth Olwig and the anthropologist Tim Ingold who understand landscape primarily as a social concept. The paper argues that these interactions between inhabitants and their environments stand for a more substantive, communal understanding of rural landscape that emerges from the ruins of traditional labour-centred communities and serves to counter neoliberal atomisation and precarity.

Bio:

Tim Lindemann is a lecturer and ECR at the University of Portsmouth and Queen Mary University of London. His first monograph New Rural Cinema, based on his PhD thesis, will be published by DeGruyter in 2024. His research interests include US indie cinema, film geography, genre cinema and film curation. He has previously worked as a curator at Interfilm short film festival and as a research assistant at Deutsche Kinemathek, both in Berlin.

Dario Lolli

The Ghost in the Archive: Anime Intermediate Materials and the Spectre of Dead Labour

Anime is today one of the most successful Japanese cultural exports and a rare example of non-Western media with a truly global audience. A by-product of this global popularity is the widespread dissemination of anime production materials as collectible objects for fans, museums and cultural institutions, even though they have remained long neglected as research objects. Anime intermediate materials such as design sheets, storyboards, cel layers, and background illustrations, however, offer unique windows to anime creative labour and production culture, including the ambiguities and contradictions that commercial animation often implies. This paper approaches anime materials in two archives – the Watanabe Collection at Niigata University and the Durham University Oriental Museum – through the lens of what Marx called ‘dead labour’, human labour abstracted and objectified in raw materials, commodities and machines. It argues that dead labour submits these materials to intellectually stimulating ‘hauntings’ that challenge what we know about anime as a creative and industrial practice. Here, the ‘congealed labour-time’ of unknown animators takes material forms in errors, unfinished strokes and leaks that remain as spectral traces of a disciplined productivity otherwise lost on the screen. Bringing these ghostly forms back to life is proposed as a way to release our obligation to the past generations of unknown animators that produced them.

Bio:

Dario Lolli is Assistant Professor in Japanese and Visual Culture at Durham University. His recent research project, funded by the Daiwa Foundation and the BAFTSS Animation SIG, has examined the current state of anime intermediate materials in private and public archives in Japan and beyond.

Katerina Loukopoulou

The Artist at Work: ‘Tacit Knowledge’ on Screen

Since the early days of cinema, ‘the artist at work’ emerged as a screen narrative that persists up to our days. Scholarship now recognises that the ‘golden age’ of this trope’s popularity can be located within mid-twentieth century art documentaries (Jacobs, Cleppe and Latsis, 2020). Less well-known, though, is the parallel extensive use of the ‘artist at work’ screen narrative in the educational sector and the public imaginary.  For this paper, I build on my recent publication’s findings about the dispositifs of ‘projecting creative processes’ (TMG Journal for Media History, 2023) and I propose to reconceptualise the long and fascinating history of creative labour on screen and its pedagogic uses. Specifically, I will theorise on the medium’s cinematic materiality that fragmented and reassembled creative labour, often with unexpected and unparalleled insights into technique, materials and creative processes, entangled with novel spatio-temporal registers of communicating about art making and its ‘tacit knowledge’ (Polanyi, 1958). Through interdisciplinary enquiry informed by public pedagogy and public history methods, my paper will identify ‘artists at work’ narratives as a cinematic ‘attraction’, novel and radical enough to lure artists, such as Pollock, Picasso and Henry Moore, whose ground-breaking forms changed the notion of modern art and what art schools are for.

Bio:

Dr Katerina Loukopoulou is a media historian and Senior Academic Developer at Middlesex University London. Katerina completed her PhD in Film History at Birkbeck College and has published on the educational uses of cinema and the creative process. This research now feeds into a new project on 'public pedagogy' and media history.   https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9410-7500

Victoria Lowe

Adapting Manchester: Bridedshead Revisited (1981) and the ‘performance’ of place.

‘It’s a basic imperative for producers to find locations which do not demand too much time or money spent on travelling. Those are expenses which show in the budget but do not show on the screen’ (quoted in Cooke,2004:91)

This paper comes out of initial research conducted into the Granada Television archive, newly acquired by the University of Manchester in 2022. Granada Television, established by Sidney Bernstein in 1955, developed a reputation for innovative and highly acclaimed drama during its tenure. The paper will examine papers relating to the studio’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, particularly those that relate to the often-hidden artistic and craft labour involved in adapting locations in and around Manchester and the Northwest. The paper will refer to documents in the archive which trace the production journeys of these settings from identification by location managers to call-sheet information which give details of adjustments made to fit production briefs. I will argue that looking at collaborative craft labour as revealed by archive materials avoids privileging individual conceptions of the artist in the adaptation process and also has implications for representations of Manchester. Locations in the North of England have often been understood in terms of how they underpin social realist notions of identity (Hallam and Marshment:2000). However, this paper demonstrates instead how Granada were able to utilise locations in the North West to ‘perform’ place, thus demonstrating the medium’s capacity for a different kind of ‘place-making’.

Dr Victoria Lowe is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Screen Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research interests lie in British cinema, performance and stardom and adaptation. Her monograph Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen (2020) looked at adaptations between theatre and cinema. She is currently editing a book on acting and performance in Hitchcock and has just started exploring the Granada Television archive.

Ann (Sihui) Luo

In-between the Backstage Musical and the Rock Documentary: Singer-Actor Identity and the Ideology of Authenticity in A Star is Born (1976)

The Hollywood musical has always been a multicultural and vigorous site that involves versatile creative labours and personnel, ranging from stars initially discovered from other entertainment industries to directors, choreographers, and songwriters. Especially in the backstage musical – a highly formulaic subgenre marked by sexual stereotypes (of women as the ‘clay’ and men as the ‘sculptor’) and the equation between heroine’s romantic relationship and stage triumph – the relations between identities of the creative personnel and the self-reflexivity of entertainment come to further revelation. As Hesmondhalgh and Baker observed, popular music’s discourses have offered “challenges to capitalism, permitting a certain amount of conflicts in workplaces”. The permeating of popular music discourses (such as music authorship, stardom, audience identities, and authenticity particularly) has allowed changes to take place, where musical stars are empowered by their musicianship and become capable of reversing such power structure settings and gain more autonomy in their own voice. Using the 1976 remake of A Star is Born (a classic backstage text) as the case study, this paper focuses on the multiple creative identities of the singer-actors (from singers, and performers, to songwriters) and the ideology of authenticity the film borrowed from rock documentaries. Drawing on Allan Moore’s tripartite typology of ‘authenticity’ and discussions on the spatial construction of rock documentaries by Donnelly and Romney, I argue that the film blurs the boundaries between film musicals and musical documentaries, as well as that of fabulation and realism, which in turn, reversed the gender roles and bridged the gap between Barbra Streisand’s lyrical ballads persona and the film’s intended rebellious musical identity.

Bio:

Ann (Sihui) Luo is a fourth-year PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Southampton. Her doctoral research explores the changing musical styles and discourses of popular music in contemporary Hollywood musicals. She presented a recent paper on concept albums and cross-media song adaptation in film musicals at the Music and the Moving Image conference at NYU in 2023.

Iris Luppa

‘Realist means ..’: the collectivist principle in Weimar Germany’s proletarian film art:  Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness (Piel Jutzi, 1929) and Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe (Germany, 1931).

The focus of this paper is on two films made by Prometheus Film, Weimar Germany’s only proletarian film production company, which positioned itself in conscious opposition to the ideological dominance of UFA, Germany’s colossal film production company propped up by the capital of the republic’s influential right-wing media conglomerates. Founded by socialist publisher Willy Münzenberg, Prometheus promoted a collectivist artistic approach to making films for and about Germany’s working class, seeking to show not a bourgeois idea of a romanticised ‘Lumpenproletariat’ but the real struggle of workers competing for paid work in a volatile market. Conceived by eminent leftist artists, such as Otto Nagel and Käthe Kollwitz (Mutter Krause) and Brecht, Dudow, and Hanns Eisler (Kuhle Wampe), both films engage with topics of mass unemployment, suicide and revolutionary versus reactionary politics, with each 'Künstlerkollektiv' (collective of artists) seeking ways of addressing a proletarian audience with the aim of raising political consciousness. Both films grapple with questions of style, experimenting in social and political realism, in order to convey a remarkably similar content with opposing and opposed ideas of how to position the audience cognitively in relation to what is shown on screen. Drawing on close textual analysis and the critical reception of both films by the communist press at the time, this paper seeks to examine the political urgency of the left to reach out to a working class courted by the increasingly powerful rhetoric of national socialism in the final years of the Weimar republic.

Bio:

Iris Luppa is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at London South Bank University. She is the author of several publications on Weimar Cinema, with a focus on films by Fritz Lang and cinema during the pre-fascist period in the final years of the Weimar republic.

Charles McAllister, Jr

Surviving the American Dream, Capitalism, and Labor In Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland

The tumultuous start of the twenty-first century has shown a steady decline in the belief of the American dream and the ability to achieve it. Louis Althusser writes in “On the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production” that all social formations arise from a dominant mode production, which cause the reproduction of productive forces and existing relations of production (124). If we turn to recent American cinema, we can see how the limitations of American mobility and labor power are reflected in the films of Kelly Reichardt and Chloé Zhao. Made in response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis, I examine Reichardt’s 2008 film Wendy and Lucy and Zhao’s 2020 film Nomadland. These two films demand introspection from their audiences to contemplate the financially strained plights of the protagonists Wendy and Fern, as they travel the American road. Through close reading of Althusser’s concepts of the state apparatus and ideological state apparatuses, Wendy and Lucy and Nomadland approach American capitalism antithetically. While Reichardt’s film reveals a pessimistic vision of American indifference that isolates Wendy from society after her car breaks down in rural Oregon, Zhao portrays the U.S. with optimism as Fern develops a found community with fellow nomads as she works odd jobs across the U.S. I argue that Reichardt’s and Zhao’s portrayals of the unachievable American dream are marked by oppositional binaries: pessimism and optimism, constriction and expansion, isolation and camaraderie, mobility and immobility, unemployment and employment, lack of agency and agency.

Bio:

Charles McAllister is a second year PhD student from University of California, Riverside. Pursuing an en-route MA and PhD in Comparative Literature, his research areas include audiovisuality in film and media studies, 19th and 20th century Asian American poetics, and fin-de-siècle French literature.

Robert McKay

Animals, Labour and Political Aesthetics under the Blacklist: The Case of The Brave One (1956)

Wolf Chases Pigs (1942), Lassie Come Home (1942), My Pal Wolf (1944), The Brave Bulls (1951), The Brave One (1956), Torero! (1956), The Misfits (1960), Hud (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), Born Free (1966), Planet of the Apes (1968), Watership Down (1978). These films, in all of which morally-fraught human–animal relations are crucial, share something surprising: the creative importance of artists subject to Hollywood blacklisting after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In this paper, I explore why blacklisted film-makers might be so interested in animals, and why their portrayals of animals matter, by focussing on the most significant film here in terms of this history—The Brave One, for which Dalton Trumbo won the Motion Picture Story Oscar under the pseudonym of Robert Rich, a ruse whose exposure fatally weakened the blacklist.

The Brave One (1956) is a cinematic fable about the exploited emotional labour of farming families, the objectified animal labour of blood sport performance, and the fruitless moral labour of political resistance. A tenant-farmer’s child, Leonardo (Michel Ray) befriends a bull, Gitano (uncredited) whose mother dies in labour. After Gitano is misappropriated by the landowner and sent to fight in the corrida, Leonardo petitions unsuccessfully to save his life, which is eventually reprieved, at the hands of a captivated public, on account of Gitano’s own bravery and forbearance. I interpret the film as a case study of the interpenetrating issues of animals, political aesthetics, and labour that complicate both the aesthetics of the blacklist and the history of the popular cultural representation of animal protection. These are:

1. How does the animal labour of evading, resisting or suffering violent treatment emplot the moral and political values (indefatigability, determination, sacrifice, honour, dignity) prized by blacklisted artists?

2. How does the ethical labour of protecting animals from violence express the progressive political labour of defending fundamental democratic principles in an era of state repression?

3. How does critique of the human appropriation of animal labour, as a violent expropriation of animal life to be resisted by animals and their human defenders alike, allow for the continued (if complicated) cinematic circulation of leftist thought under the blacklist?

4. How is our understanding of pro-animal agency—its moral impulses, mundane practicalities, and revolutionary horizons of political labour for animals—itself shaped by portrayal under the aesthetic conditions of the blacklist.

Bio:

Robert McKay is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield. He has published widely on the cultural representation of animals and human-animal relations, including an essay on The Misfits in the book Animal Life and the Moving Image (2015).

Shelllie McMurdo

Monsters, she made: The hidden labour of women in horror’s special effects history

An increasing amount of attention has been given in recent years to the contribution of women within the horror genre. Martha Shearer’s chapter in Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre (2020), for example, details the previously minimised involvement of Daria Nicolodi in the authorship of Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977), while Women Creators of TV Horror (Abbott and Jowett, forthcoming) will detail the roles that women have fulfilled within televisual horror both in front of and behind the camera. A strand of the horror industry that has thus far remained resolutely perceived as a masculine space, however, is that of practical makeup effects design and creation.

When asked to name key special effects makeup artists in the horror genre, there are certain names that might instantly come to mind: Tom Savini, Rick Baker, and Rob Bottin, perhaps. This paper will demonstrate that the presumption that horror makeup effects is a masculine field is due to several factors, including the centring of male makeup effects artists in the 1980s through fan publications such as Fangoria and the canonisation of key male creators as practical effects auteurs. After outlining the conspicuous absence of women from the canon of special effects makeup in horror history, this paper will highlight the work of those both purposefully excluded – such as Milicent Patrick – and those whose contributions have been minimised. Overarchingly, this paper will argue that until the accepted canon is widened to acknowledge the labour and contributions of a broader sample than simply men, our horror histories will remain incomplete.

Bio:

Shellie McMurdo is the author of Blood on the Lens: Trauma and Anxiety in American Found Footage Horror Cinema (2022) and Devil’s Advocates: Pet Sematary (2023). Her current research includes a project with Dr. Laura Mee on the analogue in contemporary horror, and solo research on practical effects in the horror genre.

Cat Mahoney

The Matt Mercer Effect: Twitch Streaming, Critical Role and the Creative Labour of Playing Dungeons and Dragons

In 2015 Critical Role began as a live stream of a group of LA-based voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons (DnD). In the 8 years since the stream began, Critical Role has gained 1.32m followers and produced 2,615 hours of streamed content (mostly consisting of their weekly DnD games), which is watched by an average of 17,622 viewers each week (twitchtracker.com). As well as Critical Role characters, actors and content appearing in other DnD-related media products (eg. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Critical Role Pack (Obsidian 2018), Explorer’s Guide to Wildmount (Wizards of the Coast: 2020)) in 2019 a kick-starter launched by the cast to fund a one-off animated special raised $11,385,449 (kickstarter.com) and resulted in the production of a 12 episode animated seriesThe Legend of Vox Machina (Amazon 2022) which was picked up by Amazon and subsequently renewed for 2 further series before a second animated series The Mighty Nein (Amazon forthcoming) was also commissioned. The unprecedented success and popularity of Critical Role stems almost entirely from the creative labour of the central cast and particularly the series Game Master Matthew Mercer. This paper will consider the creative and emotional labour involved in planning, performing and streaming Critical Role. Considering Kowalczyk & Pounders’s discussion of authenticity and celebrity, it will explore how the performative labour of the central cast in playing the game weekly on camera is crucial to fans’ continuing engagement with the series and its unprecedented success and evolution across media forms (2016: 347)

Bio:

Cat Mahoney is a Lecturer and Derby Fellow in the Department of Communication and Media, at the University of Liverpool. Her research focuses on the evolution of television as a cultural form, postfeminism as a cultural phenomenon and how our understanding of society and the past is shaped by media.

Dan Martin

After the Last Dance: The Decline of Northern Working-Class Community and the Structuring Absence of Labouring Masculinity in The Full Monty (Hulu, 2023)

The Full Monty (1997) is emblematic of the paradoxical constructions of working-class masculinity during New Labour’s era (Kaplan, 2004). While rooted in an iconography of post-industrial Northern English decline and male redundancy reminiscent of the fatalistic film and television narratives of the 1980s (Hill, 1999), The Full Monty's comedic portrayal of men regaining dignity through stripping has been read as aligning with the entrepreneurial spirit of late ‘90s “Cool Britannia” (Farrell, 2002). The film’s central paradox lies in the symbolic value of the traditional image of working-class masculinity as industrial labour, an image which is difficult to adapt to the demands of a changing neoliberal economy but which, residually, remains tethered to the cultural imaginary of Northern working-class identity. This paper reflects on the legacy of the film and the nostalgic attachment to images of labouring masculinity by examining the television sequel The Full Monty (Hulu, 2023). Airing 25 years and (as the opening credits declare) ‘8 Northern Regeneration policies’ after the film, the series explicitly comments on the deepening decline of Northern communities. Through textual analysis, the paper explores the classed and gendered logics shaping the show’s critique. It argues that industrial labouring masculinity remains crucial to symbolically valuing the working-class. However, in the series, labouring masculinity operates as a structuring absence, highlighting the film’s unfulfilled promises of life after industry. As New Labour’s envisioned creative neoliberal economy transforms into a neoliberalism of technocratic governance and state withdrawal, the series is unable to imagine working-class identity beyond nostalgic terms.

Bio:

Dr Dan Martin is a Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, working on the project ‘Public Service Media in the Age of Platforms.’ His research also explores class, gender, and regional identity in British media and has appeared in the Journal of British Cinema and Television and Political Quarterly.

Jacopo Francesco Mascoli

Absent Spaces and Dead Work. Outsourcing and Delocalisation in contemporary Italian fiction and non-fiction cinema.

From the explosion of the call centres as quasi-Taylorist and post-Fordist spaces of data selling and production to the predatory phenomena of deindustrialisation and factory outsourcing in the economies of the global North, globalisation has progressively absorbed and ruminated on the well-established spaces of the industrial and manual labour and its imaginaries of assembly lines, alienation and psychophysical malaise.

Both fictional and non-fictional world cinema, whether it be the emerging South American New Wave that exposed the relationship between care work spaces and exploitation (Skvirsky 2020), or the now cult wastelands of factories in Wang Bing's West of the Tracks (Smith 2016), have turned their attention to the relationship between space and labour.

Following this world cinema trajectory, this paper will focus on how contemporary Italian cinema has represented the transformation of labour spaces in the crucial years leading up to the Global Financial Crisis. I will analyse a corpus of two films, La stella che non c’è (The Missing Star, Gianni Amelio, 2006) and La fabbrica dei tedeschi (The German’s Factory, Mimmo Calopresti, 2008), which have particularly represented how labour spaces embody the progressive tertiarisation and deindustrialisation of Western economies. This will be considered by examining interrelationship between factory spaces and death - conceptualised as the death of the worker and the death of the factory, i.e. dismission/outsourcing. I will conclude that the factory is understood both as a real place of labour and as a more abstract apparatus of logic for ordering labour, machines and infrastructures.

Bio:

Jacopo Francesco Mascoli is a 2nd-year PhD student in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick. His research project is tentatively entitled “The Working Class Goes to Hell: Visions of Labour in Contemporary Italian Cinema”. The project looks at how contemporary Italian cinema visualise issues such as deindustrialisation, financialisation, the crisis of the factory and precarity. He is particularly interested in questions of the visual representation and representability of labour as such in film and media studies.

Dalila Missero

Showcasing Women’s (Media) Labour as Global Empowerment: Two Documentaries about Women’s Work in the UN Decade of Women (1975-85)

The World Conference of the International Women’s Year (Mexico City, 1975) officially opened the United Nations Decade of Women, a period marked by the institutionalisation and internationalisation of the struggles against gender discrimination, seen as a decisive factor of global inequality.

The conference set a Plan of Action to ensure that women had equal access to education, employment, housing, and family planning, while assigning to the media a strategic role in promoting policies and new images of empowerment.

By connecting gender equality with the participation to production, the Plan also called for a greater engagement of women media professionals and for a diversification of representations of women’s economic role, particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

In this context, organisations like the UN, but also NGOs, broadcasters and independent filmmakers made several films on women’s labour addressing the priorities of the Decade.

By looking at these productions as examples of feminist “useful media”, this paper analyses two case studies: the UN sponsored film Women in Mass Media (Claire Taplin, 1980) and Channel 4’s A Veiled Revolution (Marilyn Gaunt, 1984) which concentrate on India, Dominican Republic, and Egypt. With their global focus and understanding of media labour as a means for individual and structural development, these films offer both institutional and situated perspectives on the nexus between gender and modernisation, while calling for a series of reflections around the politics of representation and location. Indeed, while these films are somewhat representative of the liberal agendas prevailing in US and European feminisms, the stories of the women in front of the camera suggest a more nuanced history of encounter and exchange that exceeds their educational purpose.

Bio:

Dalila Missero (Lancaster University) is lecturer in film studies. Her research interests include feminist filmmaking, critical archival studies, digital humanities. She was awarded the 2022 Media Studies Grant by the International Federation of Television Archives to explore the feminist productions during the UN Decade of Women preserved in the BFI Television archives. In 2022, she published her first monograph Women, Feminism, and Italian Cinema. Archives from a Film Culture (Edinburgh University Press), which won the runner-up award of the BAFTSS 2023 Publication Awards.

Laura Minor

Creator/Craft/Context: Conceptualising Televisual Labour in (Semi)Autobiographical Comedies

This paper considers how three distinct but overlapping areas – creator, craft, and context – can be used to provide a holistic analysis of the TV comedy author’s labour practices. More specifically, it argues that this methodological approach provides a richer understanding of their intentions and background (creator), writing and/or performance style (craft), as well as the social, political, and cultural conditions in which their series were made (context).

Building on Kathleen Rowe’s notion of the ‘unruly’ woman (1995), which focuses predominantly on women’s comedic excess via performance and the body, I argue that we must more explicitly foreground the female comedy author’s labour of production. This paper will focus on the (semi)autobiographical comedy, a significant genre in considering the relationship between creator/craft/context, as the performance of the self is integral to comedians and is exemplified in this form of programming (Mills, 2010). In other words, the link between the creator of a TV show and their craft is further pronounced.

While they can be examined in isolation, I argue that a combined analysis of creator/craft/context provides an understanding of women’s visible power (on-screen) as well as their invisible labour (off-screen). Though somewhat disorderly, thorny, and knotty, these three modes of inquiry reflect the complexities of contemporary women in UK TV comedy. Using Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Michaela Coel as case studies, I outline how their personas can most fruitfully be explored with this approach.

Bio:

Dr Laura Minor is a Lecturer in Television Studies at the University of Salford, UK. She is currently completing a book entitled Reclaiming Female Authorship in Contemporary UK Television Comedy. She is also writing a monograph with Dr Anthony Smith - Television Goes Back to the Future: Rethinking TV's Streaming Revolution.

Maria Fernanda Miño Puga

From the Projection Room: Mellinton Casañas and the Shifting Landscape of Neighbourhood Film Exhibition in Guayaquil

Don Mellinton Casañas is a 35mm film projectionist based in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. 

His early beginnings can be traced back to 1969, when Mellinton got his first job at Cine JJ, out of the need to support his mother.  Mellinton was only 16 years old then.  Job duties included managing the food stall, selling tickets, or even serving as a security guard during crowded film premieres.  Film projection would arrive later, almost by chance, by assisting the main projectionist team and gradually learning the trade by doing.  However, despite decades of experience in both analogue and digital formats, Mellinton struggles to secure a stable job due to the numerous economic, technological, and societal changes in the local film exhibition sector.

This paper seeks to recover Mellinton’s personal history while giving visibility to film exhibition cartographies and moviegoing practices now lost in the city.  Employing John Thornton Caldwell's 'cultural-industrial' approach (2006), this paper relies on testimonies, anecdotes, and ethnographic observation of film exhibition spaces.  It also complements initiatives like Ruta Sin Cine, a route designed by Guayaquil Analógico Collective to revisit former cinema sites in the city centre (Gills and Bauss, 2019-2021).  The microhistories uncovered in this paper confirm a noticeable shift towards market consolidation and multiplex exhibition, as smaller city theatres turn into either adult entertainment venues or evangelical churches.

Bio:

Dr María Fernanda Miño is film scholar and practitioner, specialising in Latin American/Ecuadorian Cinemas.  She served as an Associate Lecturer at University of St Andrews and Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) in Ecuador.  She holds a PhD from University of St Andrews, and two master’s degrees from Lindenwood University.

Carleigh Morgan

Abject Labour: Enduring the Execrable in Phil Tippet’s Mad God

Mad God is a grotesque spectacle of cinematic endurance: hailed as animator Phil Tippet’s magnum opus, it is a horrifying stop-motion masterpiece over 30 years in the making. In development since the early 1990s, the film’s belaboured production and commitment to stop-motion cannot be appreciated without situating it alongside changes in filmmaking catalysed by computer animation, virtual production, and digital workflows. Drawing together labour, materiality, production studies, and animation theory, in this talk I argue that Mad God articulates a double preoccupation with labour to offer a meditation on the work of filmmaking itself.

First, it foregrounds its cinematic labours in the abject materiality of its stop-motion figures. Composed of textiles like coiled lint, they bristle and judder from frame to frame with discomfiting effect. Through complex contraptions littering their hellscape settings, these figures are dismembered, incinerated, exsanguinated, eviscerated, liquified, and exploded. Their abject lives and abrupt endings adumbrate the excruciatingly slow and painstaking labour of their cinematic creation as products of stop-motion filmmaking.

Second, the film allegorises animation as a process of belaboured procreation. In a mise-en-abyme sequence in an operating theatre, human actors perform Caesarean surgery on an animated puppet to extract a new-born creature from its womb. Existing as both ‘petrified unrest’ (Esther Leslie) and ‘putrefied restlessness,’ this squirming creature—among many others—exudes a ‘liveliness’ that is never long-lived. Mad God subverts animation’s enlivening impulse. With its execrable imagery, abject materiality, and grotesque allegorisation of labour, the film regards animation as a work of Hobbesian cruelty.

Bio:

Dr Carleigh Morgan, PhD (Cantab) is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Birmingham. Her work crosses disciplinary and methodological boundaries to sit at the intersection of film theory and new media studies. She theorises how representations of labour, lens-based and digital technology, and industrial histories of filmmaking collide.

Alexandre Moussa

‘La Vie en gris’: French female stars and the labour of (un)performing age.

Since Marion Cotillard’s Oscar-awarded turn in Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en rose (La Môme, 2007), French cinema’s knack for biopics has led to a more a frequent use of ‘grayface’ performances (Shary & McVittie, 2016), in which a younger performer impersonates an ageing character. While the grotesque aspect of those performances is often criticized for strengthening a fourth age imaginary that associates old age with social and personal waste and displaying the ‘abjection’ of feminine decay (Dolan, 2017), their ostentatious artificiality also helps bringing to light the performative nature of age onscreen (Lipscomb & Marshall, 2010) as they tend to draw attention to the often-invisible labour accomplished in most films to preserve the stars’ youthful appearance. In this paper, I will discuss how the techniques used to blatant effect in order to artificially age actresses mirror those used in order to make themselves look (more or less) imperceptibly younger: makeup, hairstyle, costume, use of prosthetics or CGI, and acting itself. After identifying how this ‘labour of age’ is displayed in the context of ‘grayface’ performances such as Cotillard’s or Elsa Zylberstein’s in Dahan’s Simone: Woman of the Century (2022), I will examine various embodiments of female old age onscreen by three of France’s leading female stars approaching or reaching 70 years old: the mask of agelessness of Isabelle Huppert, the masquerade of youthfulness (Woodward, 1988) of Isabelle Adjani and the ‘honest’ ageing of Yolande Moreau.

Bio:

Dr. Alexandre Moussa holds a PhD in Film Studies from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris, France). He’s the author of a thesis dedicated to French actress, director and activist Delphine Seyrig. His work focuses on the study of screen performance and star images, and gender representation in film. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher for the AGE-C project, teaches at the University of Poitiers and also works as a film critic and a film programmer.

Orson Nava

Diaspora Academics and Black Film Practitioners: An examination of the dialogic relationship between analytical and creative labour in a British context.

This conference paper seeks to investigate the dialogic relationship between the academic labor of diaspora academics and the creative work of Black film practitioners in the United Kingdom. It will focus on a comparative analysis of two distinct eras, examining the contributions of key diaspora academics such as Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, and Coco Fusco, and their connections to the Black independent film sector of the early 1990s, composed of production companies such as Sankofa and Black Audio film Collective and filmmakers such as Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah. It will counterpoint this historical moment of intersecting creative and intelectual labour to the current context where a new generation of diaspora academics, including Clive Nwonka, Anamik Saha, and Sarita Malik have made significant contributions to the study of contemporary Black cinema and television in the UK. The paper will investigate the dialogic relationship between these forms of analytical and creative labor, exploring the way academics and filmmakers of the diaspora have influenced and responded to each other's work, and in doing so shaped the trajectory of Black cinema and cultural studies in the UK.

Bio:

Dr Orson Nava is a senior lecturer on the digital film BA at Ravensbourne University. He has a background as a freelance director making dramas and documentaries for the BBC, C4 and ITV. His fully funded PhD research at the University of East London focused on Race, Innovation and the Creative Industries lead regeneration of East London. Orson is a graduate of the Northern Media School and The National Film and Television School.

Jack Newsinger

From ‘Duty of Care’ to Working Protections: Analysing the labour processes of reality TV 

The recent regulatory protocols and changes to the Broadcasting Code in 2021, mandated by Ofcom the UK broadcast regulator, have created a new environment for unscripted TV where production must demonstrate due care to the welfare of contributors (Wood, 2022). At the same time a report derived from a survey of unscripted production crew outlines serious concerns about the working conditions in reality television (Wallis and Van Raalte 2021). This paper outlines the framework behind the AHRC-funded project, ‘ReCARETV: Reality Television, Working Practices and Duties of Care’ (2023-2026), which aims to take a holistic approach to analysing the relations of care in the labour practices of production.

Whilst some of the regulatory changes have come about through a more public conversation about mental health outcomes, which has led to prioritising risk management approaches, this project argues for a necessary shift to an ‘ethic’ of care rooted in the principles of feminist philosophy (Held, 2006). Such an approach is taking account of all the working practices of production: from policy, commissioning, production work, through to contributors and the new care roles. The project is working with the unions Equity and Bectu to support a conversation about better working protections (including the possibility of increased unionisation) through the analysis of interdependencies and relationships in the labour practices of production.

Bio:

Jack Newsinger is Associate Professor of Cultural Industries and Media at the University of Nottingham. He is co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project 'Re-CARETV: Reality Television, Working Practices and Duties of Care' (2023-2026) and co-author of ‘Locked Down and Locked out: Locked Down and Locked Out: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mothers working in the UK television industry’ (2021). He has published widely on policy and labour in the creative industries.

Jennifer Nightingale

Knitting Frames: The Making of the Knitting Pattern Film Series

This paper presents a series of 16mm landscape film animations from my PhD by practice

completed in 2023 that use a single-frame production technique and a unique editing system to translate Cornish guernsey knitting patterns. The production of the films creates a

structural relationship between a stitch of knitted textile fabric and a frame of film, in this

methodology, gesture, landscape and film are ‘knitted together’ as a material object, reembedding the knitting patterns into the location that inspired them. Employing them on

location speaks directly to their heritage and contemporary value, creating new visual

representations of women’s work alongside that of the Cornish landscape. The presentation

will draw on the above to highlight analogies between my film production with the knitting

patterns production—for example in my use of the historic position of a contract knitter Jane Joliff that informs my camera position.

The films build on the legacy of single-frame modes of filmmaking in the context of experimental cinema (for example Kurt Kren and Rose Lowder) and produce new visual phenomena and motion effects. One way in which they do this is in my use of filming charts and the use of a self-instigated time-lapse technique hiding the labour of production in a material object of the film. The presentation will account for this as well as how instructional methods associated with filmmaking and knitting can produce templates for iterative processes of production that are unique and premised on the role of individual practitioners.

Bio:

Jennifer Nightingale graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art. A Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and Associate Lecturer in Visual

Communication, Royal College of Art, London, her films have screened at international venues including Tate Modern, London; The LUX, London; and The Film-Makers Cooperative, New York.

Daniel O'Brien

The Computer on Screen: Invisible Labour and Digital Hoarding

This fifteen-minute video-essay will explore the concept of virtual and invisible labour through real and representational depictions of computerised work. The first part will utilise a supercut approach, showcasing a range of onscreen computer work to demonstrate how human and digital labour have coalesced. Far from computers removing the burden of work from the organic body, the video will explore how we have become more machine-like in our approach to labour, and in contrast how machines, particularly systems like AI, are deemed as appearing more lifelike through their ability to seemingly replicate creativity, empathy and error.

The second part of this video expands the idea of invisible labour into the realms of data-hoarding.  This is something I experienced when working upon my PhD from 2012-2017 in which I kept over one hundred versions of my thesis at different stages. These were stored across a range of ten external hard drives, for fear of losing the work on a malfunctioning device. Even to this day there remains a reluctance of deleting some of these records of labour which may hold value from such an intense period of research in isolation.

The practice of the desktop documentary serves as an appropriate method to consider this idea, as its very essence (unlike narrative film or most elements of completed work) is a process of revealing the labour (the working screen and files) as part of the finished output. This is what William Brown has discussed as non-cinema (2018); a methodology of filmmaking that emphasises the labour and rough cuts that are normally erased and kept out of view. Applying Brown’s ideas, this video-essay will consider the impact of invisible labour of computational work in both real and fictional displays.

Bio:

Daniel O’Brien is a Lecturer in Film and Digital Media at The University of Essex. His teaching and areas of research span across film, video game studies, interactive media art, and video essaying. He is working on a monograph titled Postphenomenology and Narrative Across Cinema, Interactive Art and Gaming with Edinburgh University Press.

Jules O'Dwyer

Hotel Labour in the Service of the Cinematic Image

Prior to his entry into filmmaking in the 1980s, Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan worked for five years sorting and cleaning linen at the Empress Hotel, in Victoria, British Columbia. While this job was a means to an end, the director has spoken about being “fascinated by the process of preparing a room for someone to come into, so that the guest would believe it was virgin territory.” Proposing a homology between filmmaking and hotel work, he states: “both professions involved the creation of illusion.” What might it mean to approach the mise-en-scène of the hotel suite as somehow akin to the labour of cinematic production and editing? Does the “touching up” of cinematic images have anything in common with the “turndown” service that typically transpires in an upmarket hotel? This presentation takes as its point of departure the suggestive parallels between domestic housekeeping and cinematic labour to explore how both forms of work entail processes of self-effacement. Drawing on the film theory of Jean-Louis Comolli, and recent writing at the intersection of aesthetic theory and the critique of political economy, I explore how the hotel room—much like the on-screen space of cinema—is, to invoke Elena Gorfinkel, “in some sense a spectacularized product of a labor that reminds constantly off-screen.” Offering a journey through cinema by way of its hotel interiors—ranging from early silent cinema to contemporary diasporic filmmaking—this paper explores the hotel as a privileged space in which questions of aesthetic and affective labour are negotiated.

Bio:

Jules O'Dwyer is a Research Fellow in Film and French at St John’s College, Cambridge. His work has been published in Screen, Discourse, and Studies in French Cinema, and he is the author of two forthcoming books: The Seduction of Space: Cruising French Cinema (University of Minnesota Press) and Cinema’s Hotels (Fordham University Press). Jules is co-editor of World Picture.

Robyn Ollett

Queer Currency, Community, and the Carnivalesque in What We Do in the Shadows (2019- Present)

What We Do in the Shadows follows a group of vampires who invite us, in the style of a serial mockumentary, into their home and culture. We accompany them on their various endeavours, loosely geared towards colonising America beginning in their home location of Staten Island. We learn about their economy, social organisation, and their labour ethics. In the latest season we follow the vampires to the Night Market after their indentured servant wraiths begin to unionise. Long-suffering familiar, Guillermo, guides us through his day-to-day double life as a servant/companion and bodyguard of his queer vampire family. Colin Robinson, the energy vampire who lives in the basement, has an equally interesting character arc when it is revealed he regenerates every century, busting out of the chest cavity of his deceased adult self as a baby. This paper will discuss the various representations of labour and exchange in the show, using Bakhtinian theories of the grotesque and carnivalesque to argue that it effectively challenged the mores of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism.

Bio:

Dr Robyn Ollett is an English Studies Lecturer and PGR Supervisor working between Teesside University and the University of Stirling. She completed her NECAH-funded PhD in 2020 at Teesside and her first monograph 'The New Queer Gothic: Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film' is due for release in April 2024 with University of Wales Press’s Gothic Literary Studies Series. Robyn has published chapters in edited collections like 'New Queer Horror Film and Television' (ed. Darren Elliott Smith) and in international journals like Girlhood Studies.

Catherine O’Rawe

Italy’s Ghost Studios: Re-examining Wartime Production in Venice (1944-45) 

In late 1943, following the Allied invasion of Italy, film production in Rome largely stopped. However, the government of the Republic of Salò, the puppet government of the Nazis, decided to move some production to Venice, distant from the areas of Allied control. In recent years this ‘ghostly’ period (Brunetta, 2003) has been the subject of more attentive examination, with some attempts to reconstruct the production histories of the films made there between early 1944 and the liberation of northern Italy in April 1945. This paper explores the complex political and logistical negotiations involved in a) the appropriation of some of the pavilions of the Venice Biennale for studio space for the production company Cines, drawing upon documents in the Biennale archive, and b) the adaption of a smallholding on the island of Giudecca in Venice for the use of the Scalera company, for which I use materials from the Venice city archive. The difficult planning and execution of these studios will be situated in the context of the broader war events in Venice, including Allied bombings, lack of electricity, and partisan sabotage. Finally, I will discuss the legacy of this period of production once the war ended, and attitudes towards those (producers, directors, actors, technicians) who had gone to Venice while others remained unemployed in Rome. The repression of the Venice ‘parenthesis’ is part of a critical desire to erase the ‘cancer’ (Brunetta, 2003) of Salò, in favour of the triumphant, and antifascist, moment of postwar neorealism.

Bio:

Catherine O’Rawe is Professor of Italian Film and Culture at Bristol University. She is the author of The Non-Professional Actor. Italian Neorealist Cinema and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2023) and other works on Italian cinema, stardom, and audiences.

Chris O’Rourke

Dream Worlds: The Film Designs of Oliver Messel

This paper examines the film work of the British artist and designer Oliver Messel (1904-1978). While he is better known for his stage work, Messel’s film career lasted from the 1930s to the 1960s, spanned the UK and Hollywood, and included commissions to design sets and costumes for several high-profile productions. Emerging during an interwar moment that was increasingly fascinated with celebrity, Messel became one of the first ‘star’ designers working in British cinema, nurturing a glamorous public image as a cultured but gregarious bachelor, who was part of a rarefied, transatlantic social scene. Associated especially with lavish historical dramas, his designs typically combined meticulously researched period detail with romanticism, camp wit and baroque flights of fancy. Drawing on material from Messel’s recently catalogued personal archive, this paper uses his career as a case study for thinking about queer labour in the British and American film industries, and the interplay of queer social and professional networks behind the scenes. It asks how Messel’s sexuality affected his choice of film projects and collaborators, and how it informed his ways of working. Focussing on his designs for Alexander Korda’s 1930s costume dramas and MGM’s Romeo and Juliet (George Cukor, 1936), the paper also explores links between Messel’s queer social and artistic milieu and his design style. It proposes ‘dreaminess’ as a queerly inflected aesthetic that marks Messel’s early screen work, characterised by a playful evasiveness, a deliberate blurring of reality and fantasy, and a sense of escape into an imaginary, romanticised past.

References:

Chávez, Ernesto (2011) ‘“Ramon is Not One of These”: Race and Sexuality in the Construction of Silent Film Actor Ramón Novarro’s Star Image’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 20:3, 520-544.

Slide, Anthony (2010) Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Waugh, Thomas (1999) Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bio:

Chris O’Rourke is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Acting for the Silent Screen: Film Actors and Aspiration between the Wars (2017), co-editor (with Pam Hirsch) of London on Film (2017), and a convenor of the BAFTSS LGBTQIA+ Screen Studies special interest group.

Martin O’Shaughnessy

Narratives of Precarity and precarious narratives: the decentring of the male Fordist worker and the loss of the future

This presentation starts with two observations: on the one hand, there has been an obvious rise of a thematics of precarity across French and Francophone Belgian cinema since at least the mid-1990s; on the other, the films which centre on precarity are tremendously diverse. This diversity is multi-faceted. It relates to their style, genre and budget, the kinds of stories they tell and the figures at their centre (from the older male worker to the younger woman worker, the homeless person, the banlieue resident or the migrant). But crucially, it also relates to their politics and their capacity to open some sense of a future that is not simply a decaying repetition of the present. Drawing on thinkers such as Maurizio Lazzarato, Isabell Lorey, Ronaldo Munck, Wendy Brown, Lauren Berlant and Judith Butler, the presentation will seek to make sense of this diversity. It will suggest that because precarity functions to create a continuum of positions differentially exposed to vulnerability, and because it relates not simply to the workplace but to an assault on systems of care and social reproduction, it necessarily produces a diversity of figures and narratives. It will also discuss how films centring women workers, immigrant workers, migrants or other figures can provide an implicit critique of the previous centrality of the white male worker and of a spatio-temporal understanding of precarity that too easily extends a Eurocentric, Fordist-Welfarist narrative to a global frame. Turning to the films’ politics, it will ask how, if at all, they are able to move beyond the temporality of nostalgia, the impasse or the dead end which they themselves reveal, deliberately or inadvertently, as their narratives struggle to open a sense of futurity.

Bio:

Martin O’Shaughnessy is Professor of Film Studies and research leader for Media and Communications at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Jean Renoir (2000), The New Face of Political Cinema (2007), La Grande Illusion (2009) and Laurent Cantet (2015). His research focuses mainly on the politics of cinema. His book Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022). He is also part of a European Union funded project on cinema, hospitality and migration.

Odin O’Sullivan

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Body Work, and Somatic Hegemony

The ideology of male body building is intrinsically connected to notions of masculinity, productivity, and utility. As Michel Foucault (1977) articulates, in contemporary society “the object of the control” is no longer the “signifying elements of behaviour or the language of the body, but the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organisation…the only truly important ceremony is that of exercise” (181), working towards creating a “docility-utility” (181) which is integral to neoliberalism. I argue that in the age of social media it is particularly visible and accessible contemporary icons of masculinity, such as film star/influencer Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who assist in the creation of this docility-utility in the populace. Johnson performs the active building of his body on screen and thus enacts a sort of productive labour which produces not only a muscular body but also a culture of somatic improvement in his fans. This culture, assembled through Johnson’s films, television appearances, and social media posts, works to inscribe the muscular body as a sort of physical “common sense” (Gramsci). I argue that the dominance and pre-eminence of the muscular and fit body in popular culture is integral to the construction and maintenance of the hegemony of neoliberal capitalist society. Participating in fitness, in an attempt to mimic or build these star bodies for the self, supports the maintenance of hegemony in the same way Raymond Williams notes education or work does. It is a somatic hegemony which assists in the conforming of all things to capitalism’s movement.

Bio:

Odin O’Sullivan is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Media Studies at University College Dublin. His research analyses and critiques cycles of cultural and somatic remasculinisation with a focus on popular media. He has published work in Celebrity Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Luodeng Ouyang

Tibetan non-professional child actors in contemporary Tibetan cinema, a case study of Pema Tseden’s The Silent Holy Stones (2005)

The use of non-professional child actors in Tibetan cinema has not yet attracted much scholarly attention. This may be due to the fact that for a long time after the 1950s, films with Tibetan themes were largely used by the Chinese government as a propaganda tool to promote policies and build a ‘national image’ in ethnic minority areas. Therefore, the function of Tibetan non-professional child actors was limited to represent the suffering of Tibetans in the old society. In Tibet-themed Hollywood films, too, non-professional child actors are merely used to add credibility to the stereotypical portrayal of adult Tibetans. These are usually one-dimensional characters who are religiously devout and simple-minded. They serve the purpose of satisfying Western curiosity about traditional Tibetan culture and reincarnation in particular. This paper will argue that the Tibetan non-professional child actors in Pema Tseden’s films break through these paradigms designed by Han Chinese directors and Hollywood directors. They are complex and meaningful agents in representing the role of traditional Tibetan Buddhism amidst the encroaching forces of globalisation and commodification via the seemingly innocuous lens of a child’s perspective. This paper will take Pema Tseden’s film The Silent Holy Stones (2005) as example to explore the idiosyncratic contribution of Tibetan non-professional child actors to a more nuanced representation of contemporary Tibetan subjectivity.

Bio:

I am currently a Film Studies (PhD) student at the University of Liverpool with a strong focus on Tibetan cinema and digital cinematography. Outside academia, I've worked as a director of photography for several years.

Funke Oyebanjo

Unearthing new 'fluid' collaborative digital working practices within Cinematic Virtual Reality

Technological developments in game engines, such as UnReal, have created production channels for filmmakers to develop stories within cinematic virtual reality (CVR). CVR storytelling places the viewer in omnidirectional viewpoint as opposed to a 'flat picture frame' view utilised by traditional filmmaking techniques. As a result, CVR storytelling disrupts traditional filmmaking practices, such as the story development process, which is integral to the progression of the screen idea.

These new film production practices provide a springboard for new knowledge. In addition to research into the specific production methodologies, and techniques of CVR, it is important to understand more about the fluid collaboration processes involved. In this paper, I argue that story development for the filmmaker working within CVR production is still emerging and, therefore, more open to the fluid process of collaboration, thus creating an active process of discovery. Relating my analysis to my own pre-visualisation project E go Better (2022), I employ a practice-led research methodology and draw on Margaret Gilbert's Plural Subject Theory (2006) to evaluate and illustrate the collaborative process between creatives on the project. Most importantly, I suggest a reconsidering of principles and methods for practitioners willing to reimagine their own roles within the conception and realisation stages of screen production, to put more emphasis on the creative collaborative process relating to the screen idea.

Bio:

Funke Oyebanjo is Senior Lecturer at UAL: London College of Communication. Her research interest is in the body and new screen story forms. She works with the BBC World service and the BBC writers’ room as script and story consultant.  

Silke Panse

Labouring Relations and Having had Work Done: Affect and Botox with Deleuze and Spinoza in Married at First Sight Australia

Despite Spinoza’s writing about affect as a part of ethics and not of images, this paper argues that Spinoza is more conducive for acknowledging affect in Married at First Sight Australia than Deleuze. According to Deleuze, the intensive micro-movements of affect liberate the immobilized platform of the face in the affection-image. Because the immobilization of facial micro-movement through botox blocks the liberation of the intensive movements from the immobile platform of the face of Deleuzean affect, this paper suggests that— given its autonomy of affect—it does not work in terms of affective labour. This paper explores if Hardt and Negri’s notion of immaterial labour, which they developed in reference to Spinoza and Deleuze, applies to MAFSAU. Spinoza has been used both as an example for the pursuit of egotistic individualism through conatus as well as for a democratic multitude by Negri. For Spinoza, individuals are composites and compositions. Such individuals can be humans or series. Whereas Reality TV is about individuals in competition, this paper explores how its individual bodies labour the body of the series in terms of affect. A composition is caused, Spinoza argues by affecting and being affected mentally as well as materially.Spinoza’s post-Cartesian parallelism of the body and the mind—in which neither has the upper hand—has led to his being regarded as a materialist philosopher by Marx and an immaterialist philosopher by Negri. This paper suggests that MAFSAU encourages the understanding that Spinoza seeks, although it errs with respect to the gendered distribution of body and mind. In MAFSAU (S10) it is painfully apparent how the participants as well as “the experts” distribute the mind-body split across genders into passionate femininity and rational masculinity. This paper nevertheless idealistically argues for MAFSAU not as an example for human bondage, but as in pursuit of what Spinoza would support as knowledge of the second kind in its educational understanding of the affects across the body and mind split.

Bio:

Silke Panse is Reader for Film, Art and Philosophy at the University for the Creative Arts. She has recently edited the forthcoming collection Ethical Materialities in Art and Moving Images and previously co-edited A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television. She has written about the material labor of the documentary protagonist in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film and about their immaterial labor in Marx at the Movies and Rethinking Documentary.

Kayla Parker & Stuart Moore

Talking Tides: Where Words Flow

This paper concerns the authors’ research focused on the post-industrial landscape of the River Plym estuary to the east of Plymouth Sound, the UK’s first National Marine Park. Their essay film reveals the accumulation of hidden labour that has produced this waterway over centuries: silting up due to run-off from tin-streaming on Dartmoor from the medieval period, its embankment for capitalist commerce and land-stewardship in the 19th Century, and reclamation during the modern era to reconstitute these environmentally impaired resources for productive uses.

The unseen labour of Moore and Parker’s embodied engagement and intra-actions with the material specificities of this place through their repeated explorations of this tidal waterway by kayak are embodied in the filmic outcomes and emphasize the agency of the more-than-human in shaping human experiences. Using an innovative method of ‘speaking in place’, developed in their essay film, Father-land (2018), they return to the estuarine filming locations to record unrehearsed dialogic exchanges that draw on their memories of this place and its materialities, and interactions with the human and other entities of this watery environment.

Grounded in the scholarship of Laura Rascaroli and Nora Alter, the presentation draws attention to the hybridic and transgressive form of the essay film. It explores correspondences between this unruly documentary form and the shifting boundaries of the estuary and finds correspondences between the creative labour of the essay film and the confluence of salt and fresh water flows as the estuary’s tidal rhythms reveal and conceal what is below the surface.

Bio:

Dr. Kayla Parker. Artist film-maker whose current work centres on watery places such as rivers, estuaries and coastal zones. She uses a process-based dialogic methodology informed by écriture féminine to explore the interrelationship between bodies and forgotten, liminal spaces framed around subjectivity, place and memory, embodiment and technological mediation, from posthuman feminist perspectives.

Stuart Moore. Practice research examines the affect and interplay of film and memory. An accomplished filmmaker and sound artist, he is an experienced cinematographer, having worked professionally on television wildlife and natural history series. His work screens internationally, with awards from London Short Film Festival and two SW Media Innovation Awards. sundogmedia@plymouth.ac.uk

Alice Pember

‘Get off your ass and slam!’: Aspirational Anthems as Critique of the Gig Economy in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016)

This paper examines Andrea Arnold’s sprawling US-set road movie American Honey (2016) in light of the aesthetic critique of neoliberal labour practises staged in its song and dance sequences. In the paper, I examine how the film’s emphasis on the music and dance that binds young runaway Star to a freewheeling troupe of magazine sellers functions to critique their role in the neoliberal economy. Viewed in this context, the corporeal bonding that mag crew leader Krystal incites through singalongs at the start of the working day are shown to function as neoliberal anthems which sustain the exhausted crew through their daily work. The paper’s close look at the film’s musical sequences highlights these scenes’ aesthetic critique of the function of popular music in the biopolitical structures of neoliberalism and its associated precarious working practises. The final part of the paper moves from a consideration of the limits of mag crew’s function as an alternative community to moments in the film which emphasise Star’s embodied encounters with animals. These moments of inter-species bonding punctuate the film, offering the viewer a glimpse of the possibilities for community and connection that exist beyond the capitalist present. The paper will ultimately suggest that American Honey’s haptic register and soundscape of country, pop and hip hop are inseparable both from  the film’s critique of neoliberalism and its imagining of possibilities beyond it. 

Bio:

Dr Alice Pember is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her work on dance in contemporary cinema has been published in French Screen Studies and Modern and Contemporary France journals and is forthcoming in the edited collection Cinematic Spaces of the Working Class, and Film-Philosophy journal. Her first monograph The Politics of the Dancing Girl in Contemporary Cinema will be published with EUP next year.

Anat Pick

Luma’s Labours: Affliction in Andrea’s Arnold’s Cow (2021)

In her essay “The Love of God and Affliction” Simone Weil’s defines “affliction” (malheur) as “a thing apart, specific, irreducible. It is wholly different than simple suffering. Affliction grips the soul and marks it to the depths with a mark belonging only to itself: the mark of slavery” (Waiting for God 31).  Weil developed the term between 1934 and 1935, during her year of factory work to describe the total and totalizing nature of the oppression of industrialized labour. In the faces of her co-workers Weil saw a “profound weariness, spiritual rather than physical” and “the looks and attitudes of caged beasts” (“Factory Work”).  With its fateful and spiritual overtones, affliction was partly intended to critique the Marxist concept of “alienation,” and though Weil never considers animals as anything other than a metaphor for the conditions of oppressed human workers, her writings on factory work are striking when read with animal labour in mind.

This paper explores how affliction might inform our understanding of the harms done to animals as “lively commodities” (Haraway 2008; Collard and Dempsey 2013), as both workers and the products of work. I ask how affliction is imagined cinematically, and what the aesthetics of affliction can tell us about the potential and limitations of films about animal agricultural labour (including Frederick Wiseman’s Meat [1976], Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda [2020], or Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo [2022]). I focus on Andrea Arnold’s Cow as a recent attempt to capture the reality of affliction that “grips the soul” of farmed animals. Shot over a four-year period at a medium-size dairy farm in Kent, Cow follows the daily routines of a Holstein-Friesian cow named Luma.

Affliction is well-suited to animal ethics in a number of ways: (1) the afflicted are “voiceless,” making their inarticulate cries difficult to heed; (2) affliction exceeds utilitarian concerns for reducing (unnecessary) animal suffering. As afflicted, animals suffer much more than just physical pain, they suffer injustice; (3) neither animal welfare nor even animal rights can fully address affliction. For Weil rights were insufficient for confronting profound injustice (Thomas 2020). 

As inarticulate, expansive, and profound, affliction poses a challenge to representation. Arnold’s film, I claim, illustrates some of the difficulties that representing affliction entails. In attempting to make affliction seen—and, crucially, heard—Cow illuminates but also occludes our understanding of the degradations suffered by Luma. Cow directs our viewing through a careful curation of affect, visually by cinematographic immersion and audibly through the film’s use of music. Pop music is nearly always playing in the cowshed, providing a commentary on what we see. The playlist, including “Lovely” by Billie Eilish, Kali Uchis’ “Tyrant,” and the closer, “Milk” by Garbage, was selected by Arnold. Affliction is envisioned via the camera’s embeddedness in the action, through which the viewer partakes in Luma’s painful labours.

As filmic affect affliction invokes the discourses of trauma and grief as privileged idioms of contemporary left politics. I ask whether and to what extent the aesthetics of affliction lends itself to a political critique of animal labour. At the end of the paper I consider Cow’s mobilization of affliction in light of Dinesh Wadiwel’s materialist analysis of animal labour in Animals and Capital (2023). 

Bio:

Anat Pick is Reader in Film Studies at Queen Mary Univerity of London. She is the author of Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2011) and the coedited volume Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (Berghahn, 2013)

Thomas Pillard

Educational work and social struggle in the face of precariousness:

It All Starts Today (Bertrand Tavernier, 1999)

Inspired by the testimony of Dominique Sampiero, a teacher invited by the filmmaker to co-write the screenplay, Bertrand Tavernier's It All Starts Today (1999) depicts the daily struggle of a teacher and nursery school director in a depressed area of northern France. I propose to reflect on two aspects of the film that bring the question of labour into play in both complementary and reflexive ways. First, I'll look at the collective writing and creative process that anchored the film in a local reality, based on the experiences of teachers, families and amateur performers confronted with precariousness. I will then turn to the film's portrayal of the social and pedagogical work carried out in and around the school in a context of extreme poverty, which has been accused of miserabilism by some of the press. I will try to connect these aspects to show that the issues at stake in the film, right down to the limits inherent in its melodramatic and documentary approach, need to be put into perspective with regard to its reception in terms of class and gender, within a community hard hit by unemployment and poverty. In this respect, we will see that while the states of despair and suffering are not easily portrayed and have not failed to expose the film to controversy, the collective experience of working on the film helped to combat them. In addition to the analysis of specific sequences, the proposed reflection will be based on interviews with creative collaborators and on the study of production and reception archives.

Bio:

Thomas Pillard is a Lecturer at Sorbonne Nouvelle University and a member of the IRCAV research centre. Combining cultural history and cultural studies, his research explores the history and archives of French cinema, the relationship between popular cinema and media culture, as well as cinema and television audience reception practices. He is the author of Le Film noir français face aux bouleversements de la France d’après-guerre, 1946–1960 (Joseph K, 2014), Bertrand Tavernier – Un dimanche à la campagne (Atlande, 2015) and Le Quai des brumes de Marcel Carné (Vendémiaire, 2019). Since 2020, he has co-edited the journal Genre en séries: cinéma, télévision, médias along with Gwénaëlle Le Gras.

María Piqueras-Pérez

Film and Video Workshops as Spaces of Collective Creative Labour: the Case of Ceddo, Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa.

During the 1980s, several film collectives emerged in the United Kingdom, notably Sankofa, Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), and Ceddo, with the aim of confronting the socio-political challenges faced by the black British community. Employing the essay film genre, these collectives strategically wielded cinema as a medium to challenge and subvert prevailing narratives surrounding the black diaspora in the UK. Their collective creative efforts sought a profound 'deconstruction' of the black identity as portrayed by mainstream British media, concurrently unearthing, and reclaiming the manipulated collective memory of black Britain. However, the black British identity existed on the fringes of society, residing within the "interstices," marginalized and denied coexistence within the dominant narrative of the hegemonic community. Consequently, these collectives employed original footage while critically engaging with the available visual and textual archives, endeavouring to construct and reconstruct the memory of their community.

Financially supported by institutions like GLC, BFI, and Channel 4, these collectives demonstrated the transformative potential of collective practices in cinema, even with limited budgets. This paper analyses the background giving origin to the collectives to show how collective practice can be a powerful type of cinematic production. Additionally, it explores the challenges they navigated due to budget constraints imposed by external institutions, evident in their resourceful reuse of materials for production. This examination illuminates the intricate interplay between history and memory, challenging conventional narrative frameworks and highlighting the impactful role of collective filmmaking in reshaping cultural representations.

Bio:

María Piqueras-Pérez is currently completing her PhD in the Department of English Studies at the University of Murcia. She is the recipient of a Séneca Foundation doctoral grant. She has been a Visiting Researcher at the University of Westminster (London), King’s College (London) and the University of Liverpool and has presented a number of academic papers at conferences. María’s research focuses on the productions of the black British workshops Black Audio Film Collective, Ceddo and Sankofa. She explores their productions through her areas of interest, which include–but are not limited to–cultural studies, film studies, memory studies and postcolonial studies.

Victoria K. Pistivsek

“Chef, I would do anything to work at Noma!”: The Affective Entrapment of Masculinity and Labour in The Bear

In the American TV show The Bear (Hulu, 2022–) the white male chef protagonist Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto is, after taking over his late brother’s middling restaurant and transforming it into a Michelin star-worthy space, stuck in a formal vortex of stress, anxiety, and overwhelming, gruelling affect (e.g., produced by lingering close-ups or claustrophobic long takes). Hunter Hargraves writes that dis-ease has become normalised in postmillennial television, with “audiences learn[ing] how to transform feelings of discomfort into feelings of pleasure, a skill necessary to adjust fully into the systems of economic precarity and cultural instability brought on by the instantiation of neoliberalism into daily life” (1). Since The Bear funnels televisual discomfort primarily through the protagonist’s belaboured gendered performance, I argue that Carmy Berzatto’s hegemonic masculinity is underwritten by destructive, emotional torment for his labour of love; when he is not fulfilling his neoliberal drive and passion for culinary work, he evidently loses his sense of self. This plays into wider debates across the contemporary mediascape—like in the Hollywood film The Menu (2022) too—about ‘mythic masculinist chef genius,’ wherein “white male authority is fantastically recuperated through culinary entertainment” (Negra and Tasker 113). In The Bear, however, this works specifically through prolonged discomforting pleasure. While Noma, the Michelin-starred ‘World’s Best Restaurant,’ announced it will be closing its real-life doors soon because such an elite kitchen is, according to its owner, “financially and emotionally” unsustainable, Carmy Berzatto’s masculinity is only affirmed by the affective pains of his ‘hard’ culinary labour.

Bio:

Victoria K. Pistivsek is a Doctoral Researcher and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Film Studies Department at King’s College London. Her PhD investigates angry white men, divisive politics, and laughter in post-2016 American film and television. She is also broadly interested in how feminisms are negotiated in global popular cultures.

Damien Pollard

Showman/Exhibitor/Director: Luigi Cozzi, Composite Labour and Ad Hoc Film Production in Post-War Italy

This paper investigates the imbrication of different forms of labour in the career of Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi. In the mid-1970s, Cozzi ran a series of science-fiction review festivals in Rome and, later, across Italy. At these events, Cozzi embraced the role of showman-performer by giving elaborate, comic introductions to each film, handing out written leaflets to accompany each screening and by providing live translations of American films. Cozzi thus fostered a mode of exhibition that was relaxed, informal and participatory for his clientele. When Cozzi went on to write and direct Starcrash (1978), his approach to the film’s form was heavily influenced by lessons learned during the festivals; his use of humour, irony and moments of tension created a film that would foster the same sort of relaxed, light-hearted mode of spectatorship in the cinemas where it was screened. That is, Cozzi’s role as a showman-exhibitor and his role as a director were intertwined. This paper is based on previously undiscovered archival sources and several in-depth interviews that I have conducted with Cozzi. I argue that by amalgamating the roles of exhibitor, compere, writer and director Cozzi performed a form of ‘composite labour’ and that he continued to do so throughout his career. Further, I argue that such composite labour contributed to the ad hoc (and often precarious) nature of much post-war genre film production in Italy, and that the study of film exhibition, film production and film form are inseparable in this context.

Bio:

Damien Pollard is Lecturer in Film at Northumbria University. His research and teaching focuses on Italian cinema, film sound, film exhibition and popular African cinema. His monograph, Sounding Out the Giallo and co-edited volume Film Exhibition: The Italian Context are forthcoming.

Evan Pugh

Peeking behind the curtain, labour practices in reality TV and how they effected ethical decision making on Big Brother (2000-2018, UK).

Physical separation, scale of production and intensity of labour have a negative effect on TV ethical decision-making but production companies DO put practices into effect to help negate this.

Exploring the working conditions on the set of one of the most influential TV shows on UK screens follows other studies into TV Labour practices (Christa van Raalte, Richard Wallis & Dawid Pekalski (2023), (Swords et al., 2022) for example, but how did this play out on one of the longest running reality shows and how did practices effect ethical decision making?

Physical interaction (or lack thereof) can be seen to have an impact on the productions regard for contributors. An original Big Brother rule for contestants was ‘no outside contact’. This was limited with production and crew as well, being spoken to via the Big Brother ‘Voice Of God’, or in the Diary Room, which didn’t have just an effect on how the contributors felt but also how production crew came to view them. The physical separation, via screen or one-way mirror, risked contributors being de-humanised and producers seeing themselves as ‘Puppet Masters’.

In this paper, I will look at the working conditions in reality TV and how, through personal conversations with TV colleagues, some of the ethical decisions were made. Intervention or lack of is a point for discussion and it can be seen that whilst the format of the show was to be ‘hands-off’ even the first series had producer intervention, duty of care, and protocols designed to protect participants.

Bio:

Currently researching a part-time PhD on The Ethics of Reality Television, Evan Pugh is Senior Lecturer and Deputy Course Leader of Television Production at the University of Portsmouth. His television career spans 23 years including directing on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Love Island.

Tillie Quattrone

On the Structural Implications of Digital De-ageing: The Hierarchical Labour Configurations Furthered by 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny'

'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' (2023) features a flashback sequence in which octogenarian Harrison Ford is digitally de-aged. Referencing pre-2022 Hollywood releases that feature digitally de-aged characters, academics have observed that both the associated technology and promotional materials routinely centre human labour despite the technology’s ability to diminish its visibility and presence. Theorists suggest that such attention marks an attempt to nullify unease surrounding digitisation’s challenge to cinematic indexing of profilmic acting labour. 'Dial', however, is distinguished from its forbears by the complex methodology of its de-ageing approach, which consists of six techniques—two of which use CGI, two of which use AI to mine Lucasfilm’s archival footage of Ford, and two of which are manually enacted. When considered alongside cinema’s human-indexing legacy, questions arise surrounding the precise labour structures that such a multifaceted de-ageing method and promotional discussions indeed signify. 'Dial' accordingly presents an opportunity to explore the broader impact of digital de-ageing on the ever-shifting relationships between digitisation, stardom, cinema’s indexical properties, and labour. Through close analysis of filmic and extratextual materials, I argue that the de-ageing method in 'Dial' signifies a complex interplay of human and mechanised, logistical and frontline, and individual and collective labour. By allotting back-office tasks traditionally performed by women to AI, discussing digital artists as a nameless mass, and centring the multitemporal work of one male star, the use of and discourse surrounding 'Dial'’s digital technology jointly index hierarchical power structures that mirror and reinforce those which have long underpinned Hollywood.

Bio:

Tillie Quattrone (she/her) is pursuing a PhD in Drama (Screen Studies) at The University of Manchester. Her current research explores screen culture in the digital age, with particular attention to labour structures, the sociocultural function of legacy films, screen media stardom, corporate power, and the spectacular filmic.

Dharmesh Rajput

Film Festivals – Creative Labour, Community and Culture

Birmingham Indian Film Festival has been running since 2015 as an extension of the London Indian Film Festival (started in 2010). More recently, the festival has extended to Manchester and Yorkshire. My own experiences as Deputy Director show the value and importance of experiencing culture and having a window on the world (Wessels, 2023) through the festival and developing a community around the films shown as they put a spotlight on lesser seen stories such as those from LGBTQIA+ and women film makers in a city that would otherwise fall outside the impact of these films. Film festivals like this also play an important part in cultural industries in terms of tourism, developing skills in volunteers, job creation and creating cultural value (Pederson & Mazza, 2011, Oakley & O'Connor, 2015, Das Gupta 2022). Therefore, there is a tight line between providing access to films and opportunities to interact with film makers and acting talent from independent cinema from the Indian diaspora and funding.

As the ability to manage the day-to-day activities in setting up and running a festival is fundamental to the successful delivery of an important cultural project, my paper will explore the dynamic intersection of creative labour and community in the film festival landscape with a spotlight on the unique experiences and challenges in curating and managing Birmingham Indian Film Festival. I will also speak to the actual dynamics of doing creative labour whilst thinking through the issues in academic literature across creative labour, community, and culture.

Bio:

Mr Dharmesh Rajput is Senior Lecturer and Course Director, BA Media Production. Additionally, he is Deputy Director for the London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Yorkshire Indian Film Festivals and works on a variety of arts and film initiatives developing and building community relationships.

Giulia Rho

The Altar of The Housewife: The Kitchen Table and Cinematic Expression

Experimental women filmmakers often resorted to an artisanal mode of production to lower the economic barriers of their craft (Cook 1981). This paper focuses on the centrality of the kitchen as a locus of personal expression, intimate reflection, and creative utility.

In 'Water Sark' (1964-65), Joyce Wieland transforms her enclosed domestic space into a psychedelic dimension of potentiality. She fashions a cinematic language to express her interiority through everyday objects, and thereby attempts to transform the spectator’s own outlook on the landscape of the home. She commented: “the kitchen table has become the core of all my art… it is like a kind of altar” (1971). The film is a celebration of the territory of the housewife, to which Wieland stakes a claim as a portion of life operating outside the dominion of the phallus. Wieland’s political interaction with the kitchen is further explored in 'Rat Life and Diet in North America' (1968), a satirical allegory of immigration, utopia and nationalism involving a group of gerbils and the artist’s cat.

Conversely, Carolee Schneemann’s 'Kitch’s Last Meal' (1975-8) explores feminist politics through the quotidian facts of life and death by foregrounding the artist’s home as an environment for creative living as well as unglamorous chores. Here, the personal and the cinematic clutter merge into daily routine.

Through close analysis of these films building on feminist film theory, I explore the domestic space of film labour and the reimagining of a traditionally gendered location into an expansive realm of political potential.

Bio:

Giulia Rho is a PhD candidate and Teaching Associate at Queen Mary University of London’s Film Studies department. Her research covers women artists of the New York Avant Garde and LA Rebellion, as well as Post-structuralist Feminist Philosophy. Her writing has appeared in Frames Film Journal and Film-Philosophy.

Jacqueline Ristola

A Studio of One’s Own: The Feminised Labour of Colour Design

This paper examines how the work of animation colour designers is feminized, both in its historical and ideological formation. Colour work, such as the inking and painting of cels, has historically been women’s work in the animation industry. Disney is a prime example here; while separate in their own building, women worked inking and colouring cels in Disney’s Fordist division of labour. This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to North America. Diane Wei Lewis’s research on Shiage, or finishing work, examines how in the 1970s, the Japanese anime industry relied on women as a flexibilized and thus exploitable labour force to do this colour work for cheap. This paper compares these earlier historical moments of female colour designers to contemporary labour movements around colour work in America, namely, the Animation Guild’s Colour is Design campaign in 2017. The Colour is Design points out the inequities currently in place the animation industry, both in terms of wages and creative recognition for the important work they do.

In comparing these different iterations of colour work as feminized (and thus underpaid), this paper draws on David Batchelor’s Chromophobia, which argues that colour itself is feminized and sublimated to form in art production and criticism. In short, colour design labour in animation has been and very much continues to be highly feminized labour, both ideologically and historically. This paper traces these ideological and historical manifestations to argue for new theoretical and material considerations of colour in animation.

Bio:

Dr. Jacqueline Ristola is a Lecturer in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Bristol. She received her PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University, Montréal. Her research areas include animation/anime studies, media industry studies, and queer representation.

Vladimir Rizov

Body is Reality: The Policing of Labour in Popular Cinema

The origins of police work lie in the social control of all labour. From the proto-policing practices of slave patrols in the USA through strike-breaking and migrant criminalisation to modern policing’s militarisation, police workers stand in a unique position as the ideal workers in a capitalism system. Micol Seigel has pointed out that at the core of this unique position stands the instrumentalization of violence in the policing of bodies; so much so, that police work can be equated to ‘violence work’. Building on this, in this video essay I will use the thematic of the human body in relation to policing in four sci-fi films in relation to capitalist exploitation and accumulation. I posit that the temporality of cinematic representations of police work serves to contribute to a totalisation of police work as constant and unceasing—being off-duty and out of uniform do not remove the demands for police work. In terms of corporality, my position affords me an in-depth engagement with the contradictory embodiment of police work—from RoboCop’s (1987, 2014) complete control of a police officer’s body to the manufacture of a replicant detective (investigating other replicants/androids) in the Blade Runner duology (1982, 2017); counter to this, I will examine the extraction of commodified organs in both Repo Men (2010) and Crimes of the Future (2022) in relation to the body as being central to understanding cinematic representations of policing’s power and violence.

Bio:

Vladimir Rizov is Lecturer in Criminology at the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sussex. He writes on film, video games, and documentary photography through a critical social science perspective with a focus on urban space and social theory.

Vladimir Rosas-Salazar

Whose Work Is This, Anyway?: Archival Reworkings and the Changing Value of Creative Labor in Documentary Filmmaking

Digital technologies have facilitated an increasing access to archival footage in ways that were not possible before. Such material, both in film and video, has been repurposed by documentary filmmakers in innovative ways, sometimes to denounce, sometimes to unearth stories that otherwise would remain unknown. However, there are questions that arise regarding the ethics of activating archival materials: For instance, to what extent are such reworkings a way of reappropriating someone else’s creative work? Does this type of archival activation, as a form of collective authorship, diminish the initial recording’s intent? This presentation explores how the growing trend of archival reworkings in documentary filmmaking serves as an opportunity to reflect both in the labour put on archival interventions and most importantly, in how the original sources were produced in the first place. In this regard, I argue that reusing archival holdings warrants critical attention regarding authorship and hierarchies in documentary production. As a case study, this presentation will focus on analysing some reworking strategies in the Italian documentary “Un mito antropologico televisivo” (2011) directed by Maria Helene Bertino, Dario Castelli, and Alessandro Gagliardo. Ultimately, I argue that by shedding light on archival recordings as outcomes of labour helps us to rethink assumptions underpinning the ethics of archival reuse within the context of ownership, authorship, and storytelling.

Bio:

Vladimir Rosas-Salazar is an Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study and currently teaches at the Department of Film and Television Studies (Warwick). His research interests overlap film and media studies with memory studies.

Eleonora Sammartino

Williams/Verdon: ‘Correcting the Record’ on Women’s Creative Labour and Equal Pay in Post-#MeToo Television [Sammartino]

Female celebrities have played a key role in ‘sustaining media attention’ on #MeToo, often through public statements and appearances at awards ceremonies (Cobb and Horeck, 2018). Since the pay gap controversy regarding All the Money in the World (R. Scott, 2017), Michelle Williams has been increasingly advocating for equal pay rights. In accepting the Emmy for her portrayal of Gwen Verdon in Fosse/Verdon (FX, 2019), she called attention to the importance of an equal economic support in a conducive creative process.

In this paper, I will focus on Fosse/Verdon as an example of post-#MeToo television that attempts to ‘correct the record’ on women’s creative role in the entertainment industries, both narratively and in the production process. Through the survey of interviews and awards appearances, I will demonstrate how issues of gender equality post-#MeToo have fundamentally informed the development of the project. The initial focus on Fosse as creative genius has been shifted during writing to the fertile partnership with Verdon, as the analysis of some key sequences that foreground her artistry and contribution will show. This parallels the emphasis on Williams’s acting skills in the reception of the mini-series, which stressed her mastering of Verdon’s characteristic voice and corporeality, attributed by Williams to the collaboration with women working below-the-line enabled by equal pay conditions.

I thus argue that the resonances between the world of the diegesis, production and extra-textual meanings associated with Williams allow for a revaluation of women’s creative labour between past and present.

References:

All the Money in the World. Dir. by Ridley Scott. Sony Pictures Releasing, 2017.

Cobb, Shelley and Tanya Horeck. 2018. ‘Post Weinstein: Gendered Power and Harassment in the Media Industries.’ Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 3: pp. 489-91.

Fosse/Verdon. FX, April 9 – May 28, 2019.

Bio:

Eleonora Sammartino is a Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Southampton. She has published on gender and the musical in the European Journal of American Studies and the collection Musicals at the Margins. She has recently co-edited a special issue of Celebrity Studies dedicated to Hugh Grant.

Melanie Selfe

Between Hollywood and Manhattan: bi-coastal working and cross-country thinking in the 1930s film industry

Between 1930 and 1936, Samuel Goldwyn produced six highly successful, big budget musical comedies for United Artists, starring Eddie Cantor – Broadway’s ‘apostle of pep’. These films were made in Hollywood and sold across both North America and U.A.’s rapidly expanding global market. But the success of the series was built on the talents and connections of two New Yorkers: in the spotlight, Cantor, the films’ star, and behind the scenes, Lynn Farnol, Goldwyn’s publicity agent.

This paper considers issues of labour by examining Cantor and Farnol’s parallel but different experiences of cross country working, and what their respective knowledge, skills and East Coast networks contributed to Goldwyn’s success. Both men brought talent to the first film, the stage adaptation Whoopee!, by helping to negotiate contracts with onstage cast members in Cantor’s case, and headhunting backstage creatives (Busby Berkeley as dance director) in Farnol’s. And both had an exhausting double rhythm to their working year: production centred summers in LA and promotion intensive winters in New York. For Cantor, a N.Y. winter was when he returned to the stage, broadcast weekly radio shows and reconnected with the Broadway scene. For Farnol it was not only promotion of the latest Cantor and other Goldwyn releases, it was also networking with those in film distribution and publicity, and in the advertising industry on Madison Avenue. Drawing on the Goldwyn papers (Margaret Herrick Library), I will show how frequent coast-to-coast telegrams tell a story of labour, influence and the migration and mutation of ideas.

Bio:

Melanie Selfe is a Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the University of Glasgow. She has research interests in cultural policy and organisations, media audiences, film policy, marketing practices, specialist exhibition and cultural criticism.

Alexander Sergeant

The Labour of Fantasy Film Production: Tracing the Origins of Hollywood’s Most Lucrative Genre

Herbert Brenon is one of the first, and most important, fantasy filmmakers in US film industry. In a career reaching its zenith between c.1916-c.1926, Brenon helmed a number of innovative and successful fantasy films for studios such as Universal, Fox and Paramount, producing works like Neptune’s Daughter (1914), A Daughter of the Gods (1916), War Brides (1916) and Peter Pan (1924). These films helped to propel Brenon to the status of arguably the most popular filmmaker of the mid-1920s. They also helped to establish the financial credence of the studio system and the popularity of cinematic spectacle amongst audiences.

The story of Brenon’s fantasy is therefore part of the wide story of the Hollywod studio system’s crystallisation, regimentation and popularisation. The technical and practical demands on labour they required became industry standards thanks in part to the kinds of stories he told. It is also a story that has seldom been told within standard histories of this era.

This paper will explore the processes and politics of labour behind some of Brenon’s fantasy films. Taking a case study from his career, it will present a comprehensive history of how a particular work of fantasy was manufactured, and the ramifications it had on the industry’s developing sense of collective strategy and identity. The aim is to better understand the contemporary phenomenon of fantasy fandom by examining how the interrelationship between industrial capital and the manufacture of wonder was forged in the early stages of the US film industry.

Bio:

Dr. Alexander Sergeant is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema (SUNY Press 2021). He is also the co-founder of Fantasy-Animation.org, and co-host of the popular Fantasy/Animation podcast.

Jack Shelbourn

A Cinematographer and their Crew’s Role In Tackling Climate Change.

Film Production is a major contributor to global greenhouse emissions. ‘A Screen New Deal’, published by the BFI in 2020 outlines that; ‘Data analysis shows that one average tentpole film production – a film with a budget of over US$70m – generates 2,840 tones of CO2e, the equivalent amount absorbed by 3,709 acres of forest in a year. Within this, transport accounts for approximately 51% of carbon emissions, mains electricity and gas use accounts for around 34%, and diesel generators for the remaining 15%.’ (BFI, 2020) It is therefore vital that the key labour force on a film project, the production crew, become part of the solution instead of continuing to be part of the problem. The Cinematography department is key to any production and one that is not spoken about within this context enough. Instead, the talk is about removing generators and changing fixtures to LED. Rather than discussing the cinematographer’s practice itself. In this paper I will ask how I, as a practicing cinematographer can introduce change through my own practice. With reference and case study to my practice in the feature films; Mind-Set (Murray, 2022) and How You Look At Me (Gonzalez, 2019).

Bio:

Jack Shelbourn is a senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln. He is a cinematographer and his credits include Mind-Set (2022), which won best UK feature film at the Manchester International Film Festival. Jack is currently pursuing a PhD on Sustainable Cinema.

Frances Smith

Sparkle and negative affect in contemporary teen media

In 2015, Mary Celeste Kearney argued that sparkle - alongside pink - had become the principal signifier of white, affluent girlhood. The ephemeral luminosities derived from sparkle marks the bearer as a member of the “intimate public” of contemporary girlhood. The connections between sparkle, luminosities and postfeminist girlhood have been widely discussed, and these insights have been further taken up and amplified by Rebecca Coleman’s (2020) book-length study of glitter, which makes the case for the property’s galvanising future orientation.

Sparkle and glitter in these formulations have typically centred on younger girls. However, sparkle, especially in the form of glitter make-up and costume, have recently appeared in contemporary teen media featuring older adolescents, among which Euphoria, (HBO, 2019 – present), Do Revenge (Robinson, 2022) and Sex Education (Netflix 2019-2023). In these examples, sparkle represents not luminosity and futurity but ambivalence and negative affect.

In addition to close textual analysis, this paper is indebted to affective approaches to screen media, notably Lauren Berlant’s theorisation of ‘slow death’ which refers to the ‘wearing out of a population’ (2007, 754). While all three of these examples of contemporary teen media are said to speak to coming of age, they also express an ambivalence about their latent futurity, and with it a knowingness about their generic past.

Sparkle, this paper argues, mediates the movement of contemporary teen film and television between past and present, and evidences their complex negotiations between community and the individual.

Bio:

Frances Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie (EUP, 2017) and Bande de Filles (Routledge 2020). In 2023 she edited a special issue of French Screen Studies on writing and director, Céline Sciamma.

Phyll Smith

Who was that Masked Woman?: Women’s labour, agency and credit, in Republic’s Zorro’s Black Whip (1944).

Unlike Republic’s other Zorro serials, Zorro’s Black Whip, is a canonical text credited to creator McCully, despite never using the name Zorro outside the title and having a female hero (which never occurs in McCully’s stories) and being set in Idaho some 50-100 years after other Zorro stories and films. It poses as an adaptation, while appearing to be an original. Zorro’s Black Whip, features a masked Linda Sterling in the role of vigilante hero, her mask concealing both her identity and her gender; this text of emancipatory female labour was apparently produced by an all-male creative and technical team, whose credits mask the existence a previously unknown source treatment.

This paper, examining Republic Studios’ contracting and title-credit production processes, reveals the structures, impulses and desires which allowed for the production of a female Zorro, revealing amidst the paperwork that the scenario was written by an uncredited woman, Ruth Roman, then an emergent actress. Archival admin documents show the institutional structures which should give credits and acknowledge adaptations, but which also allow Roman’s contribution to be excluded from the credits in favour of men; In a reversal of her onscreen heroine, Roman can be seen to perform adroit female roles as an actress, but her credit is erased, and her work as a writer is masked by (unionised and agent represented) male names – but the process of adapting the treatment to Republic’s serial format, and into the generic Western/Zorro moulds can’t erase Roman’s feminist narrative and character impulses.

Bio:

Phyll Smith writes on film Serials, shorts, fan publications and other marginal media and their audiences, and on the reclamation of female and other marginal labour within the media archive. He teaches at University of East Anglia and DeMontfort University.

David Sorfa

Firing Marilyn Monroe: Something’s Got to Give

Marilyn Monroe is often presented as a hard worker and a dedicated, if sometimes misguided, actor whose life acts a cautionary tale against the evils of working in Hollywood in particular, and in the modern capitalist world in general. The film industry in this story is a contradictory and mythological place of unimaginable freedom and licence, in which any involvement is necessarily a Faustian pact. Just before her death, Marilyn Monroe was infamously fired from the George Cukor directed production of Something’s Got to Give, in which Monroe played a woman, lost at sea and presumed dead, who returns home to find that her husband has remarried. There is some controversy about the details of what exactly happened on set, whether Monroe was in fact subsequently rehired and what, if anything, this might tell us about the circumstances of her apparent suicide. I want to explore the complex details of her employment by 20th Century Fox as well as the issue of labour in the extant fragments of the film, with comparison to the original filmed version of the story, My Favorite Wife (Leo McCarey, 1940), starring Cary Grant, Irene Dunne and Randolph Scott, as well as the following iteration with Doris Day and James Garner, Move Over, Darling (Michael Gordon, 1963). These three films give us an insight into the imagining, refracted through the fantasy of Hollywood, of anxieties about work, the responsibilities of women and the complex role of love and marriage in pre- and post-war life.

Bio:

Dr David Sorfa is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and editor-in-chief of the journal Film-Philosophy. He 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 Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida and the presentation of thought and thinking in cinema.

Hannah Spaulding

Ring TV: Labours and Leisure of Surveillance Media

Ring, Amazon’s home security company famous for video doorbells, promotes their products as defensive, labour-saving tools that protect the home and assist in domestic work. Similarly, Google positions Nest, its smart home system that includes video monitoring, as a domestic assistant, a means of helping its users with everything from home security to parenting. Promotional videos for these devices repeatedly show them acting as a security guard or babysitter, offering their busy customers assistance and protection while they are away from home. Labour seems to define these devices: they presented as technological analogues of guards, servants, concierges, and nannies; moreover, as parts of Amazon and Google they are inextricable from the immaterial labour of data surveillance fundamental to today’s digital media landscape. Yet, these home surveillance devices are not simply defined by discourses of usefulness and labour. They also function as entertainment. YouTube and TikTok are full of videos captured by Ring and Nest cameras. Ring goes so far as to explicitly invoke the spectre of television, referring to its YouTube channel as “Ring TV”. This paper explores the tensions between labour and leisure that haunt home surveillance technologies. Through an analysis of Ring and Nest’s promotional rhetoric, corporate discourses, and online videos, as well as early examples of television surveillance as entertainment, I argue that surveillance media offers pleasures—voyeuristic, creative, and sometimes banal—that exceed their rationalised intended deployments, blurring boundaries of labour and leisure in the work of watching and being watched. 

Bibliography

Andrejevic, Mark. “The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploration of Self-Disclosure.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (June 2002): 231. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393180216561.

Hughes, Kit. Television at Work: Industrial Media and American Labor. New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA, 2020.

West, Emily. “Amazon: Surveillance as a Service.” Surveillance & Society 17, no. 1/2 (March 31, 2019): 27–33. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.13008.

White, Carla, and James N. Gilmore. “Imagining the Thoughtful Home: Google Nest and Logics of Domestic Recording.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 40, no. 1 (January 1, 2023): 6–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2143838.

Bio:

Hannah Spaulding is a Lecturer in Digital Screen Studies at the University of Liverpool. Her work examines histories of domestic technology, care, and surveillance with a focus on television. Her current project traces a history of “useful television” in the American home.

Marta Stańczyk

Animals’ Work Is Never Done. Selig’s Zoo as a matrix of animal labour in film industry

Akira Mizuta Lippit writes: "The advent of cinema is... haunted by the animal figure." The aim of this presentation is to indicate that the birth of medium is built on something much more concrete and material – animal labour. Non-human animals were present even in the earliest films, and their attractiveness quickly contributed to the institutionalization of their exploitation. Using the example of William Selig's studio, I will demonstrate how a system of animal labour was created, replicating the approach to animals in society.

Considered one of the pioneers of Hollywood, Selig began collecting wild animals in the early 1910s to add elements of exoticism, danger, and adventure to his films, while also having easy access to various species. In 1915 he opened a zoo in Los Angeles and he started collaborating with other studios by lending them animals and offering the services of trainers, usually with circus experience. Selig's actions were not isolated (to mention only Universal and Bostock), suggesting the possibility of showcasing the work of animals in that studio as an exemplification of overall animal exploitation in the film industry.

In my presentation, I will highlight several aspects of that labour — training, work on set, exhibition in zoo, being exchanged between studios. I will focus on literature in the field of critical animal studies, interspecies labour, as well as early cinema and spectacle history (Sharon Sharp, Michael Lawrence, Karen Lury, Michael Dalym, Sabine Haenni). Additionally, I will analyze training guides, such as "Training Wild Animals" from 1903.

Bio:

Marta Stańczyk is a film scholar from the Institute of Audiovisual Arts (Jagiellonian University). She is the author of the book "Time in Cinema" (2019) and “Cinematic Sensorium” (2023). Additionally, she is a co-editor of the publication "The Searchers of Lost Meanings" (2016) and an editor in the film journal "Ekrany."

Lauren Steimer

Accident: the Dangers of Stuntwork on Set

Abstract not published at the request of the speaker.

Bio:

Lauren Steimer is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Film and Media Studies and Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. Her book, Experts in Action: Transnational Hong Kong-style Stunt Work and Performance (Duke University Press, 2021) traces a distinct, embodied history of transnational exchange by identifying and defining unique forms of expert performance common to contemporary globalized action film and television genres.

Milosz Stelmach

On the peripheries. World-system of cinema and the division of labour in Central Europe and New Zealand

World-system theory, formulated and developed by Immanuel Wallerstein to describe political and economic reality of modern capitalism, rarely has been employed to analyze film industry. Meanwhile, the division of modern world-system into the core, peripheries and semi-peripheries can serve to examine economical and discursive inequalities between national film industries. One of the main characteristics of this system and a basis for distinction between the developed, self-sufficient core and inferior, underdeveloped peripheries is the division of labour.

In world-system of cinema core means primarily big Hollywood studios and multimedia conglomerates that control them, owning the capital, technologies, distribution networks etc. and produce globally popular content. The (semi)peripheries, although capable of their own production, also serve as a customer base and reservoir of cheap labour for the core. Outsourcing (post)production services, using the shooting locations, brain drain of talents, offshoring and coproducing to maximize the usage of available tax breaks and incentives – those are all areas of potential gain and conflict between the core and the (semi)peripheries of the globalized film industry.

The aim of this presentation is to outline these relationships in the light of Wallerstein theory using two significant examples – postcommunist countries of Central Europe and New Zealand. Those remote geographically, historically and culturally cases will show the practices of Hollywood core to exploit structural power inequalities to use the local labour in film industry to their own ends. They include economic but also political incentives and pressure and bring some desired but also difficult consequences to local film industry.

Bio:

Miłosz Stelmach (Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland) - holds a Ph.D. in arts studies; works as an assistant professor at the JU Institute of Audiovisual Studies; editor-in-chief of the film magazine Ekrany (‘Screens’). His research interests include film history, art cinema, modernism, and quantitative film studies.

Nick Stember

In Sleep What Dreams May Come: Envisioning the transformation of labor and social class from Chinese socialism to glocal postsocialism in The Long Season (2022)

In this paper I look at depictions of labor and social class in the Chinese television miniseries The Long Season (Manchang de jijie), released by iQiyi in 2022 and directed by Xin Shuang drawing on original stories by Yu Xiaoqian and Ban Yu. Set in the fictional city of Hualin, located in the northeastern rustbelt, the events of The Longest Season take place over two timelines, one in the 1990s, and another some 20 years later in the 2010s. In this regard, the series—which concerns a series of unsolved grisly murders—provides a unique perspective on the dramatic social and economic changes which have taken place in China since the late 1970s, as it has moved from state socialism towards free market capitalism, with a corresponding transformation of work and everyday life. As I show, in fact the entire series is concerned with this social transformation, prefigured in the 1990s timeline with the opening of a new nightclub in which several other characters are employed, and through which become involved in series of escalating crimes. Drawing on the work of criminologist Børge Bakken and literary scholar Jeff Kinkley, in addition to the “glocalism” of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Roland Robertson, I develop a framework for understanding the moral panic over the “spiritual pollution” of decadent Western popular culture which stands in supposed contrast with the healthy positive values of Chinese socialism as it developed under Mao and his successors.

Bio:

Nick Stember (he/him) is a historian and translator of Chinese literature and popular culture who recently defended his PhD dissertation on “pulp science” in early Reform-era (1976-1986) comic books at the University of Cambridge. Next year he will be joining the New East Asian Museum Tales with Historical Dramas as Motor project at the National Museum of Denmark as a postdoctoral researcher, where he will be exploring depictions of Daoist self-cultivation in popular culture.

E. Charlotte Stevens

Televising cultural heritage in iQiYI’s Hi Producer (2023)

The Chinese television series Hi Producer (iQIYI, 2023) follows a fictional independent television production company as it develops a series about cultural heritage topics local to Suzhou and of interest nationally. 35 episodes long, it is part of a recent cycle of ‘women in the workplace’ dramas. It also takes a compellingly heterogeneous approach to genre and storytelling, which raises questions about the role of television in cultural heritage, particularly as Hi Producer is arguably an extended advert for the Suzhou Museum.

Hi Producer hybridises several different genres, often moving across each of these in a single episode: a media industry workplace (melo)drama; historical show-within-the-show sequences that parody (or are pastiches of) notable Chinese period dramas, for example, that re-use costumes from international hit Story of Yanxi Palace (iQIYI, 2018); docudramas about the working lives of craftspeople who discuss their work in heritage industries, featuring guest actors who are also well-known for their work in historical dramas; and ‘behind-the-scenes’ documentary interviews with ‘real’ craftspeople. Running throughout are explicit (and metafictional) conversations strategizing how to enact policy discourse, especially once a competitor series with less ‘historical integrity’ and a lower-brow appeal starts airing.

Therefore, this presentation looks at Hi Producer’s multifaceted approach to representing television producers’ balancing act of producing engaging and informative cultural heritage programming. By dramatizing the processes, it positions television production as a craft (and a labour of love) akin to the tailors, goldsmiths, and ceramicists profiled within the programme.

Bio:

E. Charlotte Stevens is a lecturer at Birmingham City University, and is the author of Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). She has also published on videogame fan histories, 1980s television fanzines, screen vampires, and cultural heritage discourses in Chinese tomb-raiding television dramas.

Francesco Sticchi

Becoming-Class at the Movies: Between Negative Solidarity and Collective Insurrection

Purpose of this paper is to attempt re-thinking the relationship between film and politics. Taking into account a notion of class as becoming, in the way it is adopted by contemporary post-workerist and neo-Marxist thought, this concept can be connected with counter-subjectivating pushes and desires or tensions towards disidentification. When applying these ideas and analytical tools to film experience, we can argue that the power of moving images is based on their capacity to disrupt closed identity configurations because of their relational and dialogical openness. The issue, then, becomes mapping the transformative conceptual and affective trajectories a certain cinematic experience provides. In this sense, I contend that contemporary audiovisual culture is pervaded by opposing tensions typical of the neoliberal precarious economy defining, on the one hand, multiple forms of adherences to negative solidarity and, on the other, instances of collective ruptures and demand for new subjectivities to emerge. Together with offering detailed explanations for these tendencies and dynamics, and for the never too praised power of “beautiful moving-images”, the films Emily the Criminal (Patton, 2022) and Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) will be the case studies discussed in accordance with the theoretical blueprint previously set up.

Bio:

Francesco Sticchi is a Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is the

author of the monograph Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television and

works in the field of film-philosophy and ecology of media. He is co-founder of the Cinematic Precarity Research Network.

Julia Stolyar

Labour of Love? Representation of the TV industry professionals in Korean dramas

The success of the Korean television industry was one of the main vehicles of the Korean Wave (Hallyu), raising not only the profile of Korea and Korean content as a whole but specifically the Korean media industry, as the vehicle of this success. Despite the glamour and attraction, less glamorous aspects of the industry came to light with time and steered public discourse to discussion of draconian contracts, sexual harassment, and bullying within the industry. Following the public discourse and criticism, a form of reflexive commentary on the industry as a whole and the different roles producers, actors, and broadcasters hold has developed. Utilizing David Roche’s discussion of ‘meta’ in film and television as a form of introspection and commentary about the medium (Roche, 2022), these dramas form a ‘meta-Hallyu’, a commentary on the industry and its national and international successes and their prices. Analysing three Korean dramas Dream High (KBS, 2011), The Producers (KBS, 2015) and Be Melodramatic (JTBC, 2019) I explore how the industry represents itself, and argue that the representation aims to achieve three main goals: educate the audiences about the workings of the industry, promote its brand and prestige to attract new personnel, and mitigate any bad press following the publicity of various scandals.

Bio:

Julia Stolyar received her PhD from SOAS, University of London where she is currently a Senior Teaching Fellow. Her research explores transnational television flows between Japan and Korea, remakes and national identities, and the ways in which stories travel, adapt, and negotiated across borders. 

Rod Stoneman

Film – Work – Training

Derek Jarman asked “Is filmmaking to be understood as a job of work?”  His personal example of combining properly budgeted, paid larger scale work and mobile, supplementary alternative routes for creativity is particularly relevant in these constrained times. There have been considerable developments in educational and institutional contexts since I wrote the essay ‘Chance and Change’ for Film and Risk, (ed. Mette Hjort, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012) over ten years ago. Arguably an already risk-averse culture has tightened and standardised systems of production and truncated the range of content that appears on screens since then. Perhaps the dynamic function of chance has an even greater role as a vital means of bringing about transformation.

Bio:

Rod Stoneman is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Galway; he was the Director of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media from 2003-15; Chief Executive of Bord Scannán na hÉireann / the Irish Film Board from 1993-2003. Previously a Deputy Commissioning Editor in the Independent Film and Video Department at Channel 4 Television from 1983-93.

Sarah Street

This Studio is Dangerous! Hazards of working in British film studios

The film studio environment was often hazardous for employees, mainly because of the dangers caused by heavy equipment, combustible materials such as nitrate film or wood used for building sets, and electrical faults. Studios were dangerous places to work, and employers typically responded to individual incidents rather than reform workplace health and safety. This paper discusses the physical and mental strains of working in British studios, and the impact of studio fires, injuries, and other documented hazards. While Brian R. Jacobson has examined a devastating fire during a Pathé production in Manhattan in 1929 (Cinema Journal, 57: 2, 2018), the dangers of introducing highly combustible materials, new equipment, special effects, and measures for greater environmental control in British studios have not been documented or analysed. The paper discusses how disasters such as studio fires were sensationalised in the press and often treated lightly by employers. At the same time, the spectacle of damaged studio architecture and facilities drew attention to both the materiality of studios and the dangers of being a studio employee. Gender and class dimensions of studio hazards are also considered. The paper concentrates on the 1930s but also the impact of the Second World War on workplace health and safety when many studios were requisitioned to assist the war effort. The paper concludes by assessing what can be learned from this relatively hidden history of the human costs of working in film studios.

Bio:

Sarah Street is Professor of Film, University of Bristol. Her latest books are Deborah Kerr (2018); Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (2019, co-authored with Joshua Yumibe), and Colour Films in Britain: The Eastmancolor Revolution (2021, co-authored with Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith and Carolyn Rickards).

Andrew Stubbs

“Thinking Macro”: amplifying marginalised voices and navigating the barriers of Hollywood’s industry logics

In the 2010s and 2020s, the number of Black people working as talent intermediaries in Hollywood has remained disproportionately low (DiverseRepresentation.com). This deficit arguably restricts the visibility of people of colour on screen and the authenticity of Black stories in a post-Classical Hollywood where much of the control over the careers of talent passed to talent intermediaries (Mann, 2008, p.84). White representation of artists of colour owing to this deficit is arguably an example of Hollywood’s ‘plantation scheme’, which Monica White Ndounou describes as an ideology and pattern of production inherited from plantation arrangements where Whites, including slave owners, used Black bodies for White entertainment (2014, p.31-34).

This paper thus examines the work of a single talent management and production company named Macro that was founded in 2015 by Charles D. King, a Black former agent and the first African-American partner at WME, and which is dedicated, in the company’s own words, to amplifying the voices of people of colour on screen. Recognising that Black popular culture is a site of ‘strategic contestation’ not reduceable to simple binaries (Hall, 1993), the paper investigates how Macro and King at once adhere to wider Hollywood systems, seek to differentiate themselves from Hollywood’s established intermediary companies, and endeavour to shift the conversation around the commercial and cultural possibilities for Black talent and Black-run intermediary businesses. In doing so, the paper explores how ideas about talent and creative autonomy surrounding Black above-the-line labour workers intersect with broader notions of Blackness.

Bio:

Dr. Andrew Stubbs is a lecturer of Film Industries and Studies at Staffordshire. His monograph, titled The Talent Management of Indie Authorship: From American Indie Cinema and short “films” to Pay-TV and Streaming, is to be published by Edinburgh University Press in July 2024.

Judy Suh

Precarious Creativity in South Korea

This presentation focuses on two Korean narrative works—a sixteen-episode romantic comedy drama series, Because This Is My First Life (Park Joon-hwa, 2017) and Lee Chang-dong’s acclaimed arthouse film, Burning (2018)—that foreground precarity in South Korean millennials. This generation is referred to as the “880-won” generation, so-called because those who came of age after the nation’s economic collapse following the IMF crisis in 1997 were relegated to working temporary or part-time jobs paying an average of 880-won (US$830) per month.

Both works sketch a generational structure of feeling and explore a range of generational affects from disillusioned resignation to rage vis-à-vis the heightened contradictions of creative labor in the new millennium. They foreground deteriorating dreams of mobility, diminishing lifepaths, and blurring conceptualizations of the global forces that determine their daily lives.

Featuring creative writers as protagonists, both narratives reflect on the contradictions of a time when creative labor is simultaneously romanticized, valorized, and denigrated. From their different approaches, they query the commercial genres that ostensibly address in particular women’s precariatization and vulnerability.

Despite vast differences in terms of style and media formats, they share a charge of South Korean cultural production to incorporate a dual domestic and global address in the widespread turn to “creative economies” and their intensive commodification of creative labor described by Andrew Ross and Angela McRobbie. Their juxtaposition usefully clarifies a range of critical strategies as well as accommodations in South Korean narratives widely considered groundbreaking in their critiques of neoliberal conditions.

Bio:

Judy Suh is an associate professor of English at Duquesne University (USA) with interests in modernist British fiction and Korean-language media. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Precarious Translations, on Korean-language narratives of precarity, fan studies, and the American political imagination.

Julia Szivak

Foreigners’ Bollywood

The globalization of the Bollywood cultural industry is a popular topic of academic research; however, there is less focus on the fact that Hindi films are not only consumed, but also produced in a transnational environment. There is an increasing number of foreign contributors active across the many areas of film production. Often called firang, or foreigner, in Hindi, they are often innovative, sometimes disruptive, but never invisible.

In this paper, I focus on the labour practices of those international professionals, who work behind the scenes in a variety of roles, ranging from production (DOPs, editors, VFX professionals, colourists, production designers), music production (composers, background scorers, session musicians) to celebrity grooming (make-up artists, stylists, trainers) who play an instrumental role in contributing to the shaping of Bollywood cinema as a globalised cultural industry. In doing so, I seek to answer a variety of questions related to the transcultural labour practices of the Bollywood industry. What draws these professionals from America and Europe to the Bollywood industry? Why do Indian filmmakers want to work with foreign cine-workers? How does the transnational positionality of these creative professionals impact on their opportunities and career trajectories in India?

By examining their path to the Indian entertainment industry and their work there, I attempt to gain a more detailed understanding of the Bollywood industry and the intertwining of Indian identity, multi-directional migration flows, globalization and Indian soft power.

Bio:

Dr. Julia Szivak, Associate Lecturer at Pazmany Peter Catholic University, completed her PhD in Media and Cultural Studies at Birmingham City University in 2021. Her research delves into Indian popular culture and society.

Yvonne Tasker

“ I wasn’t good enough”: Cultural value, women’s screen labour and Jill Craigie in British Film Histories

This paper explores women’s screen labour through a focus on the British socialist, feminist filmmaker Jill Craigie. As a director and screenwriter Craigie exemplifies above the line work, pointing to the post-war presence of at least some women in these high-profile roles. Detailing Craigie’s struggles with finance and distribution Sue Harper observes “Small wonder that Craigie directed so few films” (2000: 192). My focus here is not with Craigie’s films per se; rather I am concerned with the way in which Craigie’s labour has been understood. The paper begins from a discussion of the marked tension between Craigie’s statements regarding filmmaking in the 1940s and 50s, and an extensive interview that she gave later in life as part of the BECTU History project. That tension is in part tonal (see Wearing 2021), with the confident assertations and political enthusiasm of her most active years contrasting sharply to the sense of regret and even failure evident in the 1998 interview: “I wasn’t good enough, that is the truth of the matter.” Yet it is also telling with respect to the histories of British cinema that developed over the period, histories in which Craigie shifts from her status as a notable filmmaker—“Miss Craigie is a director to watch” wrote one reviewer of her first film, Out of Chaos (1944) and indeed a member of the establishment (see Tasker 2021) to a figure who is more often either a footnote, mentioned in passing or even taken as a sign of potential unfulfilled.

Bio:

Yvonne Tasker is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. Tasker has written widely on gender and popular culture, and on women’s film history. She is currently completing a jointly authored book (with Sadie Wearing) entitled Jill Craigie: Film and Feminism in Post-War Britain.

Kate Taylor-Jones

Labour, Care and the Unruly woman in the work of Tanada Yuki and Momoko Ando

This presentation is about the films of Japanese women directors Ando Momoko and Tanada Yuki. Via a focus on four of their respective films, I will explore how examining their work via a lens of care opens up a new dimension on how we chart and engage with the work of female filmmakers and how they represent and interrogate, ideas around female labour. With a focus on care, we draw attention to the often-unequal structure of power and practices in a specific societal/historical-scape that the films are embedded inside and this is particular pertinent when we look at questions of female labour in both the domestic and the workplace setting.  In the work of Ando and Tanada, we can see that viewing their films via a dual lens of care and labour we are asked to consider both working practices but also “intersubjective dimensions such as affect, emotion or compassion” (Andersen et al. 2019: 569).

This presentation has three core questions: firstly, how is a sense of care important to our reading and understanding of female-centric screen labour? Secondly, how is female labour shown in the work of Ando and Tanada? Finally, how does their representation of female labour open up a space for social and political critique?

Bio:

Kate Taylor-Jones of Professor East Asian Cinema in the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield. She is co-editor of International Cinema and the Girl (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema: New Takes on Fallen Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and has published widely in a variety of fields. Her last monograph Divine Work: Japanese Colonial Cinema and its Legacy was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2017 and she is editor-in-chief of The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture. Her current project – Ninagawa Mika, Miyake Kyoko and Ando Momoko: Shōjo Dreams and Unruly Idols will be published by Edinburgh University Press.

Sarah Thomas

Generative Artificial Intelligence and Performer Labour

This paper will examine the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) systems on performer labour in the entertainment industry. Even away from debates around AI, ‘precarity is the defining aspect of screen actors’ careers’ (Fortmuller 2021: 8) and the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike put issues of AI and actor precarity centre stage, shaping public and professional understanding of what the integration of AI systems in the creative industry might mean for performer labour. The importance of the narratives constructed around AI has been widely acknowledged (see Cubb et al 2022), whereby the ‘narratives of intelligent machines matter because they form the backdrop against which AI systems are being developed, interpreted and assessed’ (Cave et al 2020: 8).

This paper will look at how performer labour and GAI collide – literally in terms of working practice and figuratively in terms of discursive narratives that are used to describe this work.  Exploring examples from American and UK contexts, I outline how generative AI systems have contributed to new screen or audio work, computing data derived from archived and real-time performances. I consider how different strata of performer labour (and identity) must negotiate generative AI - from stars to character actors to extras.  In particular, I explore the impact on voiceover performers where voice cloning software has already meaningfully entered the working environment. In doing so, this paper will demonstrate how the debates and functions of AI in the entertainment industry embody contrasting economic and existential arguments around the precarity of media labour. 

References:

Fortmuller, Kate (2021) Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Chubb, Jennifer, Darren Reed and Peter Crowling (2022) ‘Expert views about missing AI narratives: is there an AI story crisis?’, AI & Society https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01548-2

Cave, Stephen, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon, (2020) ‘Introduction: Imagining AI’ in Cave, Dihal and Dillon AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1-22.

Bio:

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, her publications include the forthcoming Stars and Franchises (Edinburgh University Press), James Mason for the BFI Film Stars series (BFI Bloomsbury 2018), and ‘The Star in VR’ (Celebrity Studies 2019).

Dolores Tierney

Theorizing Labour on the Margins: Extras of colour in late silent and early sound era Hollywood.

In late silent and early sound era Hollywood, a slew of popular (colonial) adventure films (King Kong 1933) and other genres set in the American Southwest (Westerns, Border films) or the Global South, relied on large groups of Los Angeles based extra of colour to establish not just their exotic locales but also their racial imaginaries. Whilst the onscreen labour of star and billed players in this era has been theorized in film studies in ways that emphasize startexts (Dyer, or Shingler, Lopez), actors as craftspeople (Naremore, McDonald), or agents of their own careers(Kramer et al.), the daily labour of extras has until recently received scant scholarly attention. This paper builds on the recent upswing in work on extras (Slide, Seagrave, Mueller, Kenaga) and also work on marginalized actors of colour in the early sound era Hollywood (Petty, Wang) to explore how we can begin to theorize extras of colour as both labourers and creative contributors to the racial imaginaries of the films they appear in. It asks how we can analyse the fleeting moments of these extras of colour on screen in relation to the ideologies of the films’ racialized narratives. The paper also situates the creative labour of extras of colour in relation to their doubly precarious working conditions which fell outside industry measures to safeguard extras and standardize and regulate extras’ working practices.

Bio:

Dolores Tierney is Professor and Subject Head of Film Studies at the University of Sussex. Her publications include work on Latin American, transnational and exploitation cinemas, and representations of race in classical Hollywood including classical and contemporary Mexican actors and stars.

Muriel Tinel-Temple

Representation of cinema as work: between labour and creation in Cinéma, cinémas

This paper aims to contribute to a cultural history of television’s representation of cinema as work, focusing on a specific example, Cinéma, Cinémas (1982-1991) produced by Anne Andreu, Michel Boujut and Claude Ventura for Antenne 2.

In 1980s France, the range of programmes about cinema seems impressive by today’s standards: film clubs (Cinéma de minuit), social debates (Les dossiers de l’écran), entertainment programmes (Monsieur Cinema), and documentaries (Étoiles et toiles). These relied on established televisual genres and representations of cinema, whereas Cinéma, cinémas stood out, not only because of its ambitious discourse about cinema, but because the diverse topics it presented were primarily centred on the question: ‘Who is working, on what, where, and how?

I will discuss three recurrent subjects covered by the show: the 51 reports showing a film crew in action; the series ‘Letter from a Filmmaker’ (14 episodes), in which filmmakers represent themselves at work; and the 14 representations of a specific job, including cinematographers, screenwriters, producers, and costume maker. In mapping out the content of these strands, and the choices behind them, I will analyse how the treatment of each subject is conceived, filmed, and edited, asking what kind of discourse about the work of cinema, here between labour and creation, the programme constructed during its ten-year existence.

Paradoxically the show ended just as television was becoming the principal financier of the film industry, but this is maybe why we could see Cinéma, cinémas as symptomatic of this transitional moment in the relationship between television and cinema.

Bio:

Dr Muriel Tinel-Temple is Lecturer in Film and Digital Content Creation, University of Roehampton. Her research explores self-representation, experimental filmmaking, found footage/archive-based films, video essay and essay film, as well as French and Francophone visual artists, notably the work of Jacques Perconte on digital 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).

Ellie Tomsett

“I don’t want to be a Hulk. I just got my own office!”: She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022) and representations of gendered corporate cultures.

his paper analyses, through a feminist media studies lens, the representations of corporate cultures portrayed within the Marvel series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022) produced for Disney+. The protagonist, Jennifer Waters, in both ‘normal Jen’ and ‘She-Hulk’ forms, is forced to navigate numerous gendered environments and expectations as part of working within the legal profession as a defence lawyer. The show, in line with popular forms of western fourth wave feminism as explored by Orgad and Gill (2022), McRobbie (2020), and Banet-Weiser (2018), engages with numerous contemporary gender issues, including women’s safety, expectations of normative femininity, workplace identity, and revenge porn.

This paper will explore how the character of Jennifer, within the parameters of the superhero comedy form, provides a site for pop culture critique of the gendered aesthetic and emotional labour women undertake within corporate workplaces. In a post #MeToo context She-Hulk: Attorney at Law makes sophisticated use of its comedic elements to both expose and challenge some of the gendered systems and pressures women experience when working in male-dominated corporate environments. In addition, metafictional frame-breaking is used within the show to comment on the industrial conditions of those working on Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) productions. 

Bio:

Dr Ellie Tomsett is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Birmingham City University. She is the author of Stand-Up Comedy and Contemporary Feminisms: Sexism, Stereotypes and Structural Inequalities (2023) and co-editor (with Poppy Wilde and Nathalie Weidhase) of Working Women on Screen: Fourth wave feminism and paid labour (2024, Palgrave).

Lyndsay Townsend

What lurks beneath the land? Uncovering the ominous effects of rural labour in Folk Horror film.

Folk Horror has a long tradition of representing rural labour onscreen. With narratives often set in rural communities, a physical working of the land is required for characters to survive. However, it is frequently through this physical labour that an evil force is uncovered. Consequently, rather than labour being productive, it uncovers something sinister in the land.

Through an examination of "The Blood on Satan’s Claw" (Haggard, 1971), "The VVitch" (Eggers, 2015) and "Hagazussa" (Feigelfeld, 2018), this paper will highlight how Folk Horror complicates our understanding of labour in two ways. Firstly, the representation of labour is connected with its physicality and difficulty, through sensory evocations of effort and exertion, thus rejecting a historical, pastoral representation of rural labour as idyllic and harmonious. Secondly, this difficulty is mirrored in the characters’ inability to master the land, as an uncovered evil force (often representative of buried histories of the land’s ‘folk’) works to interrupt this process. By presenting rural labour as a physical, sensory task, thus connecting audiences phenomenologically to the work onscreen, Folk Horror uses this alignment to draw a discomforting attention to the sacred land of ‘folk’, and the dangers of working where ancient practices/rituals are buried. Disrupting our understanding of rural labour, furthermore, Folk Horror confirms its position as an inherently sensory subgenre and contributes to its own larger theme of insular communities burying their own archaic past.

Bio:

Lyndsay Townsend is a PhD student in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews. Her thesis explores the sensory affect of Folk Horror screen texts from 1968-present, and her chapter on drums in Folk Horror was recently published in "Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed" (2023).

Theresa Trimmel

The representation of women and female labour in Apple TV’s 'The Morning Show'

When Apple TV+ released the first episodes of The Morning Show in November 2019, the programme immediately attracted substantial media attention due to the series’ exploration of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace. Set behind the scenes of a fictional live TV network and exploring a sexual misconduct scandal on a morning news programme, The Morning Show has a feminist agenda and represents the aftermath of #MeToo and the post-Weinstein era in Hollywood. The show’s debut also coincides with the resurgence and intensified visibility of feminist discourses in popular culture after 2010 (Keller and Ryan, 2014; Gill, 2016; Banet-Weiser, 2018). Yet as Sarah Banet-Weiser explains in relation to feminist politics in popular culture, visibility is still a complex matter because “simply becoming visible does not guarantee that identity categories will somehow be transformed, or will deeply challenge hegemonic power relations” (Banet-Weiser et al., 2019, p.10). This paper therefore analyses how The Morning Show represents female labour, women’s organisational vulnerability and cultural practices behind the scenes of TV productions after #MeToo on screen and in promotional discourses surrounding the series. To do so, this paper combines an analysis of the show’s first season and its promotional material. The paper argues that such discourses and representations often display an ambiguous relationship with feminist politics as they, on the one hand, self-consciously criticise patriarchal power structures and clearly challenge postfeminist and neoliberal values, but, on the other hand, still reproduce such sensibilities.

References

Banet-Weiser, S. (2018) Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Banet-Weiser, S., Gill, R. and Rottenberg, C. (2019) “Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation”, Feminist Theory, Vol. 21(1), pp.3-24.

Gill, R. (2016) “Post-postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times”, Feminist Media Studies, 16(4), pp.610-63.

Keller, J. and Ryan, M. (2014) Call for Papers: Problematizing Postfeminism. Available at: http://arcyp.ca/archives/4244 (Accessed: 11 July 2019).

Bio:

Theresa Trimmel is a television scholar and Lecturer at the University of Bristol with research specialisms in contemporary global television production and reception, and gender, race and sexuality representation in both textual and paratextual discourses. She is currently writing her first monograph under contract with Routledge which explores female authorship in contemporary US television.

Romana Turina

Three Sisters in a Sketchbook, the years in the making as an independent filmmaker

The project for the film was born when I found images of three sisters torn into slices and hidden into an empty camera box in 2020 in my mother’s garage. This moment was re-enacted in the film because the existence of the slices determined the process of exploration and discovery of three women’ lives, as such torn images felt to the screenwriter like a suspended story awaiting to be told. Derived from years of independent, individual, work, not different from the short film Return (2008), from the project (REPEAT) from the beginning/Da Capo (Kentridge 2008, in Lloyd 2009), where scattered elements are called into position by the motion induced to them by the artist, the action of looking at slices of found photos in Three Sisters in a Sketchbook formed images of reality that dissolved immediately after they briefly crystallized in front of the eyes of the filmmaker, as they were continuously questioned by novel information that were found. Kentridge’s film Return invited the audience to consider, as commented in the article on the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, if it was at all possible to literary ‘save anything of it’ (Il Sole 24 Ore, 16/10/2008). Similarly, I asked myself if it was possible to save anything of three girls’ past through the individual work of the filmmaker. Or maybe, like in the case of Return, where scattered slices of material form images that appear only briefly as the arranged composition rotates, what is important here is the tension created by daily labour lasted years, and the conditions, which casted questions of meaning and returned the material to its state of sketch, because in looking for the past what I really wanted was to arrive at a stable image:

Arriving at the image is a process, not a frozen instant [like in a photo] …there may be a vague sense of what you’re going to draw but things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate, or shed doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of ideas: a slow-motion version of thought (Krauss 2017:1). 

If a sketch is always tentative, and encapsulating the tension of the drawing hand in capturing what the eye sees, in Three Sisters in a Sketchbook the action of looking at photos became a cyclical game of revelation and concealment within a set of interviews. In this condition of presence and absence, of suspended narration, the voices of the sisters dominated the audio, and set the agenda of the telling.  But as images related to concealment, covering, dormant existence found their way into the editing, and the questions accumulated, a link to autoethnography appeared, and the socio-cultural arena delineated by the three women’s testimonies resonated with current issues about exploitation and negated education.

Bio:

Dr Romana Turina is a screenwriter, filmmaker and historian. Associate Professor at the Arts University Bournemouth, Romana focuses her research on exploring writing processes that enable faster and more robust character development for fiction and non-fiction narratives alike. While working on short stories and films, Romana looks at different academic traditions, strategies, and methods. Her creative practice continues questioning the dialogue between archival research and narratives, building on a professional practice in film and documentary that prompted her to work in the essay film form and explore the links between research 'in and as film' in the expression of postmemory, silenced history, and complex realities. At present, Romana supervises the postproduction of her essay film Three Sisters in a Sketchbook (2024). Recent publications include Turina, R & Dooley, K. (Eds), Journal of Screenwriting, Special Issue 14 (3), entitled ‘Virtual Reality: Exploring technologies, practices, and paradigms’, Dec 2023. Turina, R. & Tremblay, G. (Eds), Journal of Screenwriting, Special Issue 13 (3), entitled ‘Textual Perspectives: Screenwriting Styles, Modes and Languages’, Nov 2022.

Ben Tyrer

“What, Me Worry?”: The Libidinal Economies of Labour in Sorry to Bother You

Boots Riley’s Afrosurrealist, anti-capitalist comedy Sorry to Bother You (2018) is notable for the combination of counter-cinema and narrative cinema techniques in its commentary on the intersections of class, race and gender with the violence of accumulation. While previous studies have tended to address these concerns in terms of the formal conceit of “white voice” and/or the semiotic overdetermination of its “equisapien” horse-people (e.g. Beck 2019; McGuinness & Simpson 2021; Myszka 2021), this paper will focus on the interactions of political economy and libidinal economy in the film to explore the affective dimensions of labour in Riley’s vision of the neoliberal workplace. Building on Todd McGowan’s Lacano-Hegelian insights into “the psychic cost of the free market” (2016), my analysis will identify the mobilisation of enjoyment in Sorry to Bother You as being central to the reproduction of the means of production under late capitalism, as well as being a necessary factor in its critique and potential dismantling. More specifically, I will examine how the film stages its fictional corporation WorryFree’s attempts to condition the perfect worker as a subject alternately bound by the offer of “security” and motivated by the promise of “more”: instantiating a libidinal economy that encourages political quiescence while ensuring continued economic productivity. Overall, I will demonstrate how Riley’s use of inventive form and radical narrative presents the lure of satisfaction as a key political problem for contemporary labour, and insists upon dissatisfaction – or a reorientation of our relationship with enjoyment – in its emancipatory potential.

Bio:

Ben Tyrer is a Lecturer in Film Theory at Middlesex University. He is the author of Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir (2016), and co-editor of Femininity and Psychoanalysis (2019) and Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable (2016). He is a member of the editorial board of Film-Philosophy.

Andrew Vallance

Future Proofed!?

At this year’s BAFTSS-and GLAD conferences I presented papers, which grew out of the essay Questions of Imagination and Process that was published in MIRAJ, which posed and considered a set of questions:

•      How should film education relate to the film industry?

•      How can film’s practices be communicated and evaluated?

•      How do we encourage students to become aware practitioners?

Currently there is pressure on film courses to prove their industry credentials and offer students the promise of an assured future. Many film courses privilege technical teaching, because this is perceived to produce recognizable results that are equitable to employability. As part of this approach film courses actively promote their staff’s industry experience. So, it should follow that graduating students are industry ready, but despite this focus there is still an entry level skills gap. The film industry needs an able and adaptable workforce, but graduates can offer more than willing compliance.

Film courses are not the industry, nor should they be, as they need to be diverse, flexible and evolving. Further to this, no one can predict the future, but we can look back (for example over a ten-year period) and clearly see what is still relevant and applicable. Therefore, developing reflexive and reflective student practitioners within an engaged, critical and technical environment, which addresses personal and professional practice, is a recognizable and worthwhile undertaking. This approach enhances adaptable awareness, employability (in the broadest sense) and enables the emergence of new voices.

Bio:

Dr Andrew Vallance is the MA Film Practice Award Leader and Associate Professor at Arts University Bournemouth. He studied his Master’s and PhD at the Royal College of Art. His thesis considered film and memory. 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

Jennifer Voss

Scrapbooking Screencraft: Bebe Daniels and The Labour of Reinvention

This paper will examine a collection of scrapbooks held at the British Film Institute’s National Archive, focusing American film, TV, and radio star, Bebe Daniels. Scrapbooks have recently garnered renewed academic attention in relation to their significance in the development of fan culture in the 1910s and, more specifically, how this relates to women’s engagement with stars through movie magazines (Anselmo 2019, 2023). This paper seeks to further feminist re-evaluations of gender and performance within scrapbooks through an interdisciplinary lens, by examining how the images of within these scrapbooks offer unique insights into women’s performances and careers. Drawing on Sharon Marcus’s work on the theatrical scrapbook (2013), this paper will offer a framework for using scrapbooks to explore screen performance, recognising Daniel’s impressive 50-year career which saw her reinvent herself over and over again. This is particularly important in terms of recognising the screencraft involved within women’s performances, offering a more nuanced understanding of the labour behind the glamourous photographs that filled movie magazines and which ‘illustrated cinema’s reliance on performer appeal’ (Jeffers McDonald and Lanckman, 2019: 3).

Through close textual analysis, this paper will make use of writings produced in performance studies, to offer a performance-centric focus and vocabulary through the unique representations can be fully realised. In doing so, I will demonstrate how scrapbooks can be used as a tool not only to engage with women’s historical screen performances, but to also unpack what these images reveal about stars’ individual, and carefully crafted performative personas.

Bio:

Dr Jennifer Voss is a Postdoctoral Researcher and PT Drama Lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester. Jennifer’s current research is funded by the AHRC/Midlands 4 Cities DTP, and explores performativity, theatricality, and women’s screen acting in British fan-made scrapbooks.

Helen Warner

Behind the Seams: Women’s Affective Labour in the Motion Picture Costumers’ Union

In Hollywood Costume, David Chierchetti aims to capture the significant contribution costume designers made to the “visual language of motion pictures.”  His compendium of significant costume designers in the studio era is often viewed as the first attempt to make visible the labour of those working in costume. In his introduction, however, he acknowledges that, in addition to the designers singled out in his work, there are “thousands of expert seamstresses, cutters and fitters, milliners and wardrobe men and women, working long hours with little reward, [that] made the brilliant concepts reality.” 

This paper seeks to render visible the work of those practitioners by examining the history of the Motion Pictures Costumers Union (IATSE Local 705). Using original archival material (primarily the newsletters from the 1940s-1960s) gathered directly from the Local’s Headquarters, this paper reconstructs the activities of women in 705 and argues that the union’s successes are owed to the invisible, unpaid labour of rank-and-file women members: a practice that continues to this day. Recovering the precise nature of this work, and its problematic consequences for the value of women’s labour, is necessary if one wishes to imagine an alternative future.

Bio:

Dr Helen Warner is an Associate Professor in Cultural Politics, Communications and Media Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her research examines gender and below the line roles in the creative industries; specifically in costume and wardrobe departments.

Alan Watt

Working heroes of the Western: do they work?

In his seminal essay on the Western, Robert Warshow asserted that the genre’s typical hero is a ‘man of leisure’, who always ‘appears to be unemployed’; and Richard Halpern has argued in Eclipse of Action that the separation of the heroic action of drama from the productive activity of labour is deeply rooted in the broader dramatic tradition, going back to Aristotle. As Halpern puts it, ‘tragic heroes traditionally love or kill, suffer and die…but they do not, almost by definition, work’.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, this ‘rule’ is violated by the appearance of a series of Western films with labourer heroes, and in this paper I will consider how two of them, Will Penny (1968) and Monte Walsh (1970), navigate the challenges posed by the difficult combination of labour and heroic action, of making (poiesis) and doing (praxis). Halpern is pessimistic about the prospects of such a tie-in, claiming in his study of the first great working hero, Milton’s Samson Agonistes, that being made to work at the mill ‘prevents him from achieving the status of triumphant or tragic hero’. However, through analysis of filmic narrative structures and characters, I will argue that Monte Walsh and Will Penny both offer more successful examples. Their position as workers does indeed make them different from the traditional Western hero, and modifies the action in important ways, but they still nevertheless achieve heroic – indeed, tragic – status.

Bio:

Alan Watt is a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh Film Studies department, where he is researching the tragic American Western. 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 Nietzsche.

Andrew Watts

Between Work and Play: Evolutionary Psychology and Screen Adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (1844)

The fiction of Alexandre Dumas père has often been associated with hard labour and literary production on a near-industrial scale. Far from being a sole author, Dumas worked extensively in collaboration, presiding over a team of writers who generated vast numbers of stories that he would then edit and shape into finished texts ready for publication. Subsequent adaptations of his novels have reflected the mass quantities of material that the author and his staff were able to produce. In the case of arguably his most famous novel, The Three Musketeers, there have been at least twenty-four screen adaptations, including versions in film, television, and cartoon animation. This paper explores a selection of these adaptations through the thematic lens of work and play. Focusing, first, on the 1973 film The Three Musketeers (dir. Lester), the initial part of this discussion examines what can be considered the fundamental ‘work’ of adaptation, namely the recreation of familiar elements of the novel – such as its emphasis on swashbuckling heroism – and the self-conscious endeavour of key filmmakers as they showcase their creative reinvigoration of the source material. The second part of my paper links this concept of adaptive labour to the notion of play. Specifically, it mobilises theory from evolutionary psychology – in particular Steven Pinker’s characterisation of art as ‘cheesecake for the mind’ – to reassess how playfulness operates in an adaptive context. Whereas Pinker describes art as a pleasurable but non-essential by-product of human evolution, my analysis argues that games of repetition and variation not only underpin how adaptation works, but are integral to the almost mechanical regularity with which we tell and retell specific stories.

Bio:

Andrew Watts is a Professor of French Studies at the University of Birmingham, Co-convenor of the Adaptation SIG, and is currently working on a book about adaptation and evolution.

Matt Weaver

Radicalism, activism and representations of queerness and AIDS: from New Queer Cinema to now

The radical and defiant nature of New Queer Cinema in the 1990s demonstrated a shift in both film-making tactics and representations of AIDS and queer identity. Mostly derived from anger at oppressive heteronormative governments and their lack of attention towards the AIDS crisis, NQC films were often made by inexperienced film-makers and AIDS activists who infused their films with rage and both a refusal to conform, socially and cinematically. In fact, the films themselves can be viewed as visual forms of queer and AIDS activism. In this conference paper, I want to evaluate how that radical history has been represented in more mainstream, contemporary texts. I aim to explore whether wider queer visibility and societal acceptance has resulted in shifts in AIDS representation, and whether radical activist tactics of NQC are still used to challenge the ongoing dehumanisation of queer subjects. In my paper, I aim to draw upon a variety of texts including NQC films such as Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992) and Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) and comparable contemporary examples such as Russell T. Davies’ It’s a Sin (2021) and Ryan Murphy’s Pose (2018-2021). This paper fits BAFTSS’ conference theme of labour as it will analyse how queer screen media has evolved from its origins in AIDS activism in relation to queer creative labour and mainstream cultural cache/value.

Bio:

Matt Weaver is a third-year PhD student at the University of Portsmouth, and is researching representations of gay men and the AIDS crisis in Anglo-American film and television. His other research interests include queer and trans representation, LGBTQ+ issues and the Walt Disney brand, masculinity in film, and drag culture in the media. He has published a number of articles for The Conversation which have been re-published in Spain, Mexico and India.

Andrew J. Webber and Stephan Hilpert

Labour in Several Shots: Christian Petzold & Co.

As co-authors of the forthcoming book, Screening Work in the Films of Christian Petzold (due for publication by Legenda in the first half of 2024), we propose a pair of 20-minute papers that draw on aspects of the volume’s argument concerning what, for Petzold and Farocki as filmmakers, and for their dialogical collaboration, was the ‘big theme’ of labour (Arbeit). The two papers will foreground a set of shots from across several films ‘by Petzold’, while insisting on the labour of many co-workers – and not least Farocki as Petzold’s teacher and regular consultant – that constitutes these acts of filmmaking. By homing in on specific shots, we will follow something of the logic of the work of many that was Farocki’s last major undertaking, Labour in a Single Shot (Eine Einstellung zur Arbeit), curated with his partner Antje Ehmann from 2011 to his death in 2014. In particular, we will tease out the resonances of the German ‘Einstellung’ (both shot and attitude or disposition), lost in the English translation, in order to consider how perspective and mise-en-scène in the multiple shots in question create a set of attitudinal frames with implications for the screening of work across a set of dimensions – political, ethical, aesthetic, epistemological and ontological.

Bio:

Andrew J. Webber is Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture at the University of Cambridge. His research interests encompass a wide range of German and comparative film, from the 1920s to the present day. His most recent screen studies publications include a set of essays on the films of contemporary Berlin School filmmaker, Christian Petzold.

Stephan Hilpert is a film director based in Berlin and London. Having studied documentary filmmaking and Economics in Madrid, Munich and London, he has also completed PhD in Film Studies at the University of Cambridge (with a thesis on the films of Ulrich Seidl and Christian Petzold).

Harrison Whitaker

'Norma Rae' and Hollywood’s Representation of the Union Woman

When Norma Rae was released in 1979, it upended the long history of Hollywood’s representation of unions onscreen. No mainstream Hollywood film prior to it had featured a woman as its central union organizer; from The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and On the Waterfront (1954), unions in popular American cinema were by and for men. Though there is a simple material explanation for this shift —the labor force participation rate for women increased by nearly 20% from 1970 to 1980 and crossed 50% for the first time ever just prior to the decade’s end — Hollywood does not buck its traditions easily.

This presentation will track the history of how Hollywood represented the labor efforts of women in popular cinema, from the so-called “radical paternalism” of Classical Hollywood to Norma Rae’s liberal individualism. Fruitfully, this evolution parallels one that was being hotly debated at the end of the 1970s: Eric Hobsbawm’s “Man and Woman in Socialist Iconography,” also first published in 1979, inspired an understudied dispute around depictions on unionist women in revolutionary art. By reading Norma Rae and its precedents through the frameworks outlined by both Hobsbawm and his critics, this presentation will reframe longstanding debates not just around Norma Rae but also how labor, gender, and work were framed on the Hollywood screen across the 20th century.

Bio:

Harrison Whitaker is a final year PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying depictions of masculinity and labour in New Hollywood. 

Abigail Whittall

Who Is the Monster of the Week? Examining the Relationship between Performance and Special Effects in Horror Television

This paper is part of a wider piece of research which considers the connections and potential tensions between the work of the special effects artist and the special effects performer (i.e. the actor who wears prosthetics or provides motion capture). This research puts forward the argument that when one of these realms of labour is highlighted, either by behind-the-scenes featurettes or reviews, it can often be at the expense of the other. It is thus common to see either the special effects artist or the special effects performer neglected, and important to bring both to light in order to examine the underlying attitudes and concepts which shape perception of these crafts. The horror genre provides a fertile case study due to the different types of special effects used and the relative prominence of special effects performers who bring monsters to life.

Where some attention has been paid to the relationship between performance and special effects in films, there is less work which focuses on these fields in television. This is perhaps because, as Stacey Abbott has argued in a 2013 special edition of Critical Studies in Television, television series have historically had smaller budgets, faster production cycles and poorer resulting aesthetics. In line with Abbott’s reappraisal of effects in television, this paper will consider the particular role of the special effects performer in horror television. Attention will be paid to the particularities of television including seriality, the ‘monster of the week’ trope and the concept of ‘quality television’.

Bio:

Dr Abigail Whittall is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University for the Creative Arts. She has published her research in the edited collection New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror and the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture.

Christina Wilkins

The work of adaptation

Adaptation, by its nature, requires work: both from the audience and the adaptor. With an audience, if an adaptation is being read as an adaptation, it asks the audience to, as Hutcheon notes, perform a: ‘conceptual flipping back and forth between the work we know and the work we are experiencing’ (Hutcheon:139). When it comes to the adaptor, there is necessity to think about the parameters of the medium a text is being adapted to, the cultural context, economic imperatives for the adaptation, and the desired audience. And arguably, within an adaptation itself, there is also another layer of work – of the actors themselves adapting the characters. Within the actor’s body, the physical labour of adaptation is made explicit. This is made clear in Todd Haynes’ recent film, May December (2023). Although not an adaptation as some would traditionally define it, the story adapts the real-life case of Mary Kay Latourneau, distancing the viewer through tweaks and adaptations to the textual material of the case. However, what also occurs in the film is a double adaptation – Julianne Moore adapts Mary Kay as her character Gracie, but at the same time, Natalie Portman portrays an actress, Elizabeth, who is going to play Gracie in a tv movie. This paper thinks through the various levels of work an adaptation requires, and why audiences (and critics) continue to engage with it, particularly when the body is so heavily implicated.

Bio:

Christina Wilkins is a researcher in literature, film, and TV. She has written on identity, mental health and adaptation. Her most recent book, Embodying Adaptation, thought through the importance of the physical in adaptation. She is a trustee of the Association for Adaptation Studies, Co-Convenor of the BAFTSS Adaptation SIG and currently teaches at the University of Birmingham.

Michael Williams

‘The Finest Epigrammist of the Present Day’: Fan-Magazines and the Queer Craft of Herbert Howe

When Photoplay magazine commissioned its lead writers, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Herbert Howe to create analytical sketches of each other in November 1923, the former described Howe as ‘the finest epigrammist of the present day’, praising his entertaining wit and insight and acknowledging the advantage that he ‘knows everybody’. Born in South Dakota in 1893, Howe handled publicity for the Triangle and Vitagraph companies and became a popular figure among New York critics, establishing himself as a leading writer for Photoplay in 1922. His queerness, and ‘penchant for Hispanic leading men’, was noted by Slide (2010), and Chávez (2011) explored the publicist’s relationship with his best-known star client and alleged lover, Ramón Novarro. However, Howe’s wider fan-magazine writing, and his work on the periphery of the film industry in producing a queer identity on the page, hidden in plain sight, deserves greater critical attention. This paper explores Howe’s writing style, already distinct in the late 1910s and characterised by an acerbic and often self-mocking wit, vivid characterisations, and a breezy campness and homoeroticism that is unabashed but carefully articulated for its mainstream context. His work also reveals glimpses of wider contemporary queer networks though his detailed and gossipy tales of Hollywood and New York clubs frequented by industry figures, celebrities and wider society figures.

Bio:

Michael Williams is Professor of Film at the University of Southampton. He is author of Film Stardom and the Ancient Past (2018), Film Stardom, Myth and Classicism (2013) and Ivor Novello: Screen Idol (2003) and is co-editor of British Silent Cinema and the Great War (2011) and Call Me by Your Name: Perspectives on the Film (forthcoming, 2024).

Melanie Williams

Odd woman out in the sixties: Muriel Box’s late-career generic reinventions

Muriel Box, who remains the UK’s most prolific woman director of feature films, made her final film in the early 1960s, as a concatenation of complex personal and professional circumstances led to her decision to step away from filmmaking. This paper will cover her last three productions, all of which were released in the early years of the 1960s: the social problem drama Too Young to Love (1960), the Children’s Film Foundation period drama The Piper’s Tune (1962), and the new wave-tinged sex comedy Rattle of a Simple Man (1964). Each of them represents an attempt to reinvent genres in which Box had already worked during her lengthy career as screenwriter and director, seeking to adapt them to the new stylistic and thematic possibilities, and the changing audience preferences, of a new era of British cinema. Box’s tactics in across this late period of her directorial career, and the strains of this regeneration, as well as the different responses this work received, will all be explored.

Bio:

Melanie Williams is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her recent books include A Taste of Honey (BFI Film Classic), Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema - as co-author, and Female Stars of British Cinema: The Women in Question. She is currently working on a book on British filmmaker Muriel Box.

Robert Williamson

The impact of music-hall performers and their characters in British feature films during World War 2

This paper explores the profound influence of music-hall performers on British films during World War II, with a particular focus on the intersection of performance and class dynamics. As the war unfolded, the entertainment industry became a crucial tool for boosting morale and fostering a sense of national unity. Music-hall performers, traditionally associated with working-class culture, played a pivotal role in shaping the cinematic landscape of wartime Britain.

The research delves into the ways in which these performers navigated the cinematic realm, transcending traditional class boundaries and challenging established norms. Through an examination of key films from the era, the paper analyses the impact of music-hall stars on the representation of workers in wartime narratives.

Furthermore, the paper explores the symbiotic relationship between music-hall entertainment and the evolving class structure, shedding light on how these performers negotiated their roles within a changing societal context. By examining the cinematic portrayals of class and the performers themselves, in films such as The Foreman went to France (1942), and The Ghost Train (1941), this research seeks to illuminate the intricate interplay between popular entertainment, class dynamics, and the socio-political landscape of wartime Britain. Ultimately, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the cultural and social forces that shaped British cinema during a critical juncture in history.

Bio:

PhD student (part time). Very close to submission.  MA Film Studies. MSc Mathematics.

Fay Winfield

‘The union is a great power. It is our only power’: deconstructing attitudes to labour in television adaptations of North and South

Sandy Welch’s adaptation of North and South (2004) has a labour dispute at its very heart. The factory worker’s strike and the conflict between ‘masters and men’ forms the backbone of both the social critique and romance plots of the series. While this speaks directly to the historical context of the Gaskell novel upon which it is based, it is also a key site where contemporary attitudes and concerns can be seen. From neoliberal economic policies, to the declining influence of unions, to the re-christening of the unemployed as ‘job-seekers’ I will read the series in light of New Labour’s policies and attitudes to workers, unions and unemployment, exploring how these political and societal shifts can be felt in this series. I will read this adaptation alongside the BBC’s previous 1975 adaptation by David Turner, exploring the ways in which is can be seen to be responding to the miners strikes that had politically dominated the early 1970s. Ultimately, through analysing these two series I will demonstrate how they speak to one other and their source text, but also to the historical moment in which they were made, and what this can tell us about how we have reached where we are now in the 2010 in regards to attitudes to workers, strikes and the inevitable power struggles that sit at the heart of capitalist societies.

Bio:

My PhD (University of Manchester) investigates representations of Empire in BBC adaptations of Victorian novels from the early 2000s. My main research interests revolve around television adaptations and I am currently working on an article exploring how a sense of place is created in Sandy Welch’s North and South (2004).

Polina Zelmanova

For Her Pleasure: The Labour Politics of Male Sex Work on Screen after #MeToo

Within representations of male sex work in cinema, labour has often emerged as a key issue. Whilst earlier representations have often explored labour in relation to economic precarity and masculinity (see Chow 2017; Scheaffer 2021), recent popular on-screen depictions more actively engage with the labour politics of sex work and sex worker rights. This paper explores the way recent representations of male sex work on screen engage with sex work labour politics and as a result bring to light a significant tension and paradoxicality within #MeToo-era popular feminism. Through close textual analysis of Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023) and Good Luck to You Leo Grande (2022) I explore how, on the one hand, the films reveal a politically charged engagement with the labour politics of sex work. At the same time, these politics are dismissed to allow for the celebration of the desires of the female clients whose pleasures are at the heart of the films’ feminist message. These representations speak to a popular feminist politics which relies on the acknowledgement of sex work as work, whilst simultaneously dismissing a deeper engagement with sex worker rights in order to allow for an unchallenged representation of heterosexual female pleasure. I argue that these popular filmic representations act as a site of struggle (Hall 1981) on which the popular feminist discourse of the present moment play out, revealing a current inability to reconcile this feminism’s clashing demands.

Bio:

Polina Zelmanova is an AHRC Midlands4Cities funded PhD Candidate 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. Polina is the organiser of the AHRC-funded conference Sex in Contemporary Media (2023) and is the co-founder and co-convenor of the Sex:Queer Research Network. Outside of her research, Polina has worked in film festival project management and as an audio-visual practitioner.

Yvonne Zhao

Against Women: Analyzing the Dissolution of lesbian Image in Adolescent Narratives within Sinophone Lesbian Cinema

My research focuses on Sinophone Lesbian Cinema as a field of study, examining the Sinophone lesbian community as its primary subject. At this conference, I aim to delve into the daily lives of lesbians, a marginalized group, utilizing Sinophone Lesbian Cinema as a lens to explore their professional attributes, survival status, and the hegemonic challenges they encounter. These challenges encompass the deprivation of their work identities, instances of verbal sexism, and the unequal social status they face.

My research approach involves analyzing textual content through visual symbol. I seek to deconstruct the symbolic language embedded within Sinophone lesbian cinema concerning identity expression, social definition, and self-identification. Simultaneously, my thematic focus pays particular attention to the cultural disparities between Sinophone communities on the periphery of China (such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc.) and those within the People's Republic of China (PRC). I aim to avoid flattening these distinct cultural identities with Sinocentric biases. As a result, my research will encompass analysis across three regions: the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Bio:

Yvonne Zhao is a first-year Postgraduate Researcher at the University of Leicester and her research interests lie in Sinophone lesbian cinema, specifically concerning identity expression, social definition, and self-identification.