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Authenticity?
Reality, Reliability & Access in
Performance and Media
Friday 11 April 2008
Film, Theatre & Television —
University of Reading
Supported by the Standing Conference of University
Drama Departments (SCUDD)
and the Graduate School in Arts and Humanities,
University of Reading.
Journeys Across Media 2008
Welcome to JAM 2008!
Table of Contents
Overview of the Day ................................................ 3
A1: Reception & Authorship .................................... 4
B1: Engaging with Space ......................................... 8
C1: Public Performance Practices .......................... 12
A2: Popular Forms & Practice................................16
B2: Confronting Media Multiplicity ...................... 20
C2: Visibilites of Performance .............................. 24
A3: Interpreting Genre in Film & Television ......... 28
B3: Negotiating Adaption & Translation ............... 32
C3: Docu/Drama: Portraying the Real .................. 36
Biographical Information ......................................41
About JAM............................................................ 47
Acknowledgements............................................... 48
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Authenticity?
Overview of the Day
9.30 – 10.00
Registration (Bob Kayley Foyer)
10.00 – 11.25
Welcome and Keynote Panel
Life After PhD
(Bob Kayley Theatre)
11.25 – 11.40
Coffee/Tea (Bob Kayley Foyer)
11.40 – 13.10
Session One (Various Rooms)
13.10 – 14.05
Lunch (Studio 1)
14.05 – 15.35
Session Two (Various Rooms)
15.35 – 16.05
Coffee/Tea (Studio 1)
16.05 – 17.35
Session Three (Various Rooms)
17.35 – 18.20
Wine Reception (Studio 1)
18.20 
Close
/
Travel
to
Reading
for
Post-conference Meal
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Panel: A1
Reception &
Authorship
Chair: Jonathan Bignell
Room: Studio 2
Time: 11.40 – 13.10
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Authenticity?
Andrea Dunbar: “The Bard of the West Riding CouncilEstate Jungle”
Sarah Bell
Partway through Andrea Dunbar’s first play, The Arbor (1980), the
central character revealed her name to be “Andrea Dunbar”, from
that point onwards the dramatist was unable to escape a constant
focus on her personal life. Dunbar had four productions staged at
the Royal Court in the 1980s and all were regarded by theatre
critics as representations of her life. Despite repeated denials to
the contrary, her plays were understood as ‘truthful’ and ‘factual’
and by harmful association as narrow, naïve and repetitive.
What makes Dunbar’s reception even more problematic is that the
Royal Court also promoted her work as authentic. Furthermore,
Max Stafford-Clark, Artistic Director of the Royal Court 1979-93,
inadvertently still controls the way Dunbar’s work is understood.
In 2000/1 his theatre company Out-of-Joint toured Dunbar’s
second play Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) with a verbatim piece, A
State Affair (2000), formed through interviews in her native
Bradford.
This limiting idea of authenticity in Dunbar’s work still continues
after her death and is linked to both her personal life and the
Northern council estate backdrop against which her plays are set.
Central to this is the belief that Dunbar kept writing about councilestate life because it was all she knew. Many critics and some
academics have damagingly concluded that Dunbar had little
dramatic talent, as all she did was simply record events she had
taken part in or witnessed.
It is now time for Dunbar’s work to be reclaimed from the
damaging and restrictive concept of authenticity; her plays need to
be valued as pieces of dramatic art that present an
underrepresented young, female working-class experience.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
John Cassavetes and Dogme 95. Authenticity and radical
aesthetics.
Angelos Koutsourakis
One of the aims of this paper is to re-read the cinema of John
Cassavetes and redeem him as a radical director. Therefore, I will
relate his films to the Dogme manifesto and attempt to find signs
of connection with radical aesthetics. The films of Cassavetes are
rarely acknowledged as radical, or political mainly because his
dialogue with Hollywood is not essentially oppositional. However,
a critical examination of the formalistic aspects of his films may
bring us valuable conclusions regarding of the political aspects of
his aesthetics. The main thrust of this paper will be a study in the
formal aspects of his films identifying elements that are considered
to be authentic and radical. Emphasis will be placed on the spatial
and temporal articulation of his films and the refusal to narrate a
story through a single character’s point of view. On the contrary,
the multiplicity of point of view shots and the treatment of
character as a process (which is heightened by Cassavetes’
insistence on improvisation on the part of the actors), the narrative
aperture, the avoidance of extra-diegetic music in the scenes of
emotional tension, along with the use of direct sound and handshaked camera are some elements that locate Cassavetes in the
realms of radical cinema. Furthermore, discussion will be focused
on the Dogme 95 manifesto, which called for authentic and antiillusionist films aiming at going against established cinematic
practices and audience expectations. Cassavetes’ influence on this
movement will be discussed, in order to highlight the radical
implications of his films, in order to see the movement from a nonBazinian point of view. Cassavetes’ insistence on observing things
and portraying them beyond oversimplistic distinctions of good
and evil, together with the refusal to condense life (a characteristic
of classical dramaturgy) and the frustration of preconceived
expectations on the part of the spectators firmly opposes the
traditional cinematic practices and locates him into the realms of
political cinema.
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Authenticity?
“Vietnam As It Really Was”: The Promotion and
Reception of Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986)
Oliver Gruner
“Oliver Stone has come a long way since Vietnam,” declared
Platoon’s theatrical trailer “but he hasn’t left it behind.” Released
on the back of a marketing campaign that championed Stone’s
Vietnam veteran credentials, the film was greeted with a firestorm
of media coverage and public debate when it reached cinemas in
December 1986. Time magazine announced that it showed
“Vietnam As It Really Was”, and a host of similarly triumphant
notices appeared in numerous other publications. After a spate of
oft-condemned “revisionist” Vietnam films – the Rambo and
Missing in Action series’, for example – that had appeared in the
early 1980s, Platoon was touted by many as a long overdue
“authentic” cinematic chronicle of the Vietnam veteran experience.
This paper will explore the ways in which “authenticity” was
promoted through publicity materials and negotiated in
subsequent debate that circulated in the media at the time of
Platoon’s release. Locating these materials within a 1980s context
– the highly publicised construction of the Vietnam War memorial
in 1982, the mobilisation of Vietnam rhetoric in political debates,
and the apparently increasing interest in first person Vietnam War
accounts by veterans in articles, books etc – I will argue that the
promotion of Stone’s Vietnam vet persona was central to Platoon’s
perceived “authenticity.” For it not only promoted the film as
Oliver Stone’s autobiography, but it also offered the opportunity
for numerous other Vietnam veterans, in interviews and articles, to
recall their own experiences. Platoon, I will argue, became
“Vietnam As It Really Was” for the very reason that it acted as a
canvas upon which numerous Vietnam stories could be written and
re-enacted.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Panel: B1
Engaging with Space
Chair: Lib Taylor
Room: Bob Kayley Theatre
Time: 11.40 – 13.10
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Authenticity?
The Tangible Performance Space: God Is a DJ
Eirini Nedelkopoulou
The paper explores the merging between the physical body and
visual/tactile technologies that create a sensual space of
engagement in the performance God Is a DJ staged in Athens in
2001. During the performance the actors record themselves and
the audience with video cameras, and this footage is projected on
multiple big screens. By considering this ‘chiasmatic’ experience,
which combines the physical body and the technologies, I examine
the phenomenal presence of a reconfigured performance space.
The technologies function as an extension of sensory information
and create the potential of performer’s/spectator’s physical contact
with an expanded, mediated, and tangible space. In this ‘tangible
mediated space’, where technological and performance modes of
audience address intertwine, the body of both the spectator and
performer becomes immediately experiential. I will address the
nature of this sensual engagement with otherness by analysing
relationships between the visual and the tactile, and the visual
tactility/tactile visuality discussed by Merleau-Ponty. The paper
elaborates the convergence of the material body and machine
under the phenomenological idea of ‘massive flesh’ that underlines
and challenges the intertwining relationship between the live and
mediated. Focusing
on
the
moment
when
a
live
performer/spectator confronts her mediated other through the
technologies of reproduction, the paper suggests that the
experience of the self as other in the space of technology can be
read as an erotic palpable experience.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Entering the Frame
Jennifer Markowitz
Can the spectator ever experience the authentic environment
implied by the play text? Site-based theatre has the potential to
create authentic experiences for audiences. Access to the visceral
invites audience members to experience a more complete world
than what might be merely observed during a proscenium
production. However, the very nature of placing a performer
within a specific space might create an unavoidable frame of which
the spectator might be unable to penetrate. In this paper, I will
consider the use (or non-use) of the frame in creating an authentic
experience for the spectator. Drawing upon recent site-based work
from New York theatre companies, I will explore the different ways
the use of site creates frames, both definitive and subtle, and
whether or not it is actually possible to avoid framing within the
context of a performance.
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Authenticity?
'I could hardly believe that each morning there were new
things to see'
Eirini Kartsaki
Within the realms of contemporary performance the emergence of
repetition as a structural and expressive means raises many
questions. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s notion of the writerly (Le
plaisir du texte), I argue the possibility of a particular mode of
experiencing repetition in terms of movement and text. Using
specific examples, I illustrate how repetition achieves to construct
a space, within which the spectator’s viewing is accommodated.
For the purposes of this analysis, I use two performative examples:
Ana Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas: Four movements in the
music of Steve Reich and Pina Bausch’s Bluebeard. What I am
interested in is the space, in which the spectator does not merely
watch (in the same way that the reader does not merely read the
text in Barthes’s Le plaisir du texte), but actually performs or
‘writes’ the repetitive in the act of viewing. This constitutes a
particular mode of spectatorship, a point of view from the inside:
the viewer is not anymore looking at the performance from the
outside, since his point of view is now situated within the
performance itself. Thus, the viewer’s perception is affected on an
emotional level, since the spectrum though which he looks at the
piece of art, has shifted. This shifting is crucial in this analysis, as it
challenges the idea of the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ in terms of the
meaning that it produces.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Panel: C1
Public Performance
Practices
Chair: Graham Saunders
Room: BG 78
Time: 11.40 – 13.10
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Authenticity?
The construction and undermining of authenticity:
Persona, performance and lyrics of the Swedish rockartist Eva Dahlgren.
Anna Biström
The concept of authenticity is essential in describing and
understanding the work of the Swedish singer and musician Eva
Dahlgren. Generally speaking, Dahlgren’s project seems to be to
construct an image of something genuine and real.
In my presentation, I want to identify some different ways in which
Dahlgren, as well as other actors, such as media, are “doing
authenticity”, and are performing or creating an image of a true
self in Dahlgren’s songs. I will show in what way authenticity is
constructed in Dahlgren’s simplified and intimate performance on
stage, her use of voice and her lyrics.
However, it is equally interesting and important to consider
examples of how Dahlgren overthrows her own authenticity, and
creates another kind of persona, for instance by parodying the
“authentic Dahlgren” in her performance of a song.
I also want to look at in what way the image of Dahlgren as
“authentic” is constructed in media. For instance autobiographical
interpretations of Dahlgren’s lyrics function as a marker of
authenticity, as the “own experience” adds to the authentic value.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Poetry Preserve Us: The Introduction to the Public Poetry
Reading
Paul Maddern
What really constitutes the
variety act […] is the fact that
on each occasion something
happens and nothing happens
at the same time.
—Theodor Adorno
At every public poetry reading the complex interrelations between
introducer, poet and audience forms a discourse community
concerned with the dissemination and reception of poetry. In its
attempt to authenticate a shared set of values that exists, or that
should exist between all participants in the reading, the
introduction to the reading provides the framework within which
both the reading and the criteria for inclusion in the discourse
community are evaluated. The creation of a framework operates at
both a micro and macro level, with the individual (micro) reading
feeding the generalised (macro) conception of what constitutes a
‘genuine’ poetic act. This paper will ask if the creation of the
framework sustains barriers between varied bodies purporting to
guard authentic poetic interests. If so, is the introduction to the
public reading one of the most potent forces at work in the erection
and maintenance of these barriers? Does the introduction
perpetuate a culture in which the public reading is little more than
a variety act, during which something and nothing happens? It
could be argued that the micro-discourse community serves only to
ritualise ‘The Poetry Reading’ inasmuch as the content of the
reading (the ‘something’ that happens) reinforces pre-existing
notions surrounding the macro-discourse community – the
community in which the guiding tenet is that ‘nothing happens’ to
threaten the framework.
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Authenticity?
On Narrative and Ownership: Performance-based
Interpretation in The Museum
Polly Williams
Museums usually have the effect of endowing everything that is
contained or displayed there as authentic. But what happens to
this authenticity guarantee when what is displayed is a
performance based on its collections? The re-enactment or
dramatisation of past lives, whether they are Victorian servants or
Tudor gentry necessarily includes elements of fiction or fantasy.
The status of the history that these re-creations are based on is in
any case uncertain, based on knowledges that are partial,
incomplete, polyphonic and reconstructed. The question of who
has the authority to interpret history and reproduce historical
narratives in the museum is problematised when the task is given
to the actor/interpreter who may consider that the moment of
interaction with their audience to be the ‘real’ truth and that in the
interests of enlightenment or understanding, create their own
stories.
This paper is based on my ongoing PhD research at the University
of Leeds, School of Performance and Cultural Industries and the
National Coal Mining Museum for England. This museum, which
is also a ‘real’ coal-mine uses two quite different forms of
performed interpretation. One is a more obviously dramatic form
based on the practices of ‘living history’ and is carried out by
interpreters who are both actors and educators and which ‘brings
to life’ past ‘characters’ from the mining industry and mining
communities. The other is carried out by miner-guides who are
genuine ex-miners and who both embody and interpret what is a
comparatively recent history. This paper will interrogate the status
of authenticity as it shifts across performance practices.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Panel: A2
Popular Forms &
Practice
Chair: Lisa Purse
Room: Studio 2
Time: 14.05 – 15.35
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Authenticity?
The Signification of (In)Authenticity in the ‘Cinema of the
Suburbs’: Ambiguity and Ambivalence in Pleasantville,
The Truman Show, and The Stepford Wives
Tim Vermeulen
It is certainly a truism, if, indeed, not a cliché, to say that suburbia –
at least in the ways it is commonly stereotypically represented in
popular cultural discourse – and inauthenticity are often associated
with one another (Mumford 1966; Jurca 2001; Silverstone 2001;
Beuka 2004).
This can certainly be said with regards to those recent films set in,
but also, more importantly, about suburbia, a lot Felperlin (1997)
and Muzzio (2002) have termed the ‘cinema of the suburbs’.
Suburbia’s meticulously ordered, tree-lined streets, homogenous,
1950s-like, pastel coloured, semi-attached, picture-window
dwellings, inhabited by white middle class nuclear families, exist,
so these films have it, on the principle of exclusion and repression
of ‘otherness’, in architecture as much as in ethnicity, class, sexual
preference and psychological disposition. In this ‘place myth’ (the
persistent connotation of a place with certain norms and values to
the extent it becomes wholly signified by (one of) them (Shields,
1991)) the inauthentic is thus put on a par with the
undifferentiated.
Authenticity then, I will argue in this paper through an analysis of
Pleasantville (Ross 1998), The Truman Show (Weir 1998) and The
Stepford Wives (Oz 2004), is effectively envisaged as all that which
has been excluded and repressed which returns and dislocates the
‘place myth’. That is to say, it is the plurality of difference (in
architecture, in ethnicity, etc), and, more complex, that which
could not be categorized, ordered: the ambiguous, the ambivalent.
This process, I will show, is both a narrative pattern and a visual
trope: it is signified not only by the deterioration of the houses, the
disintegration of the families, but also by the sudden change in
mise en scene, colour, tone and sound. I hope to show that in this
particular instance, the inauthentic and the authentic are
inevitably and necessarily in a tension, bound up with one another,
and so contribute to a different understanding of former and latter.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Unrealism and the Hollywood Happy Ending
James MacDowell
This paper is related to my ongoing research into issues
surrounding the ‘Hollywood happy ending’ – a subject that, despite
its apparent prevalence, has received surprisingly little sustained
attention from the field of film studies.
Apparently signifying the epitome of cinematic artifice, the ‘happy
ending’ of Hollywood cinema is often assumed, within both
academic and popular discourses, to be a narrative device that
reveals fundamentally ‘unrealistic’ or ‘inauthentic’ impulses. In
instances in which a critic wishes to defend a particular ‘happy
ending’, it is common for the defence to be mounted in terms that
describe the ending as constituting an ironic, self-consciously false,
inflection of the trope. David Bordwell, for example, has said that
‘unmotivated happy endings’ can ‘force us to recognize the
conventions that rule classical cinema,’ and ‘flaunt the disparity
between what we ask of art and what we know of social life’.
Through discussions of narrative closure, and the close textual
analysis of three Hollywood films (The Woman in the Window,
Sleepless in Seattle, and Buffalo ’66), my paper interrogates the
assumptions underlying such beliefs. I investigate both why the
‘happy ending’ is considered to be a necessarily ‘unrealistic’
narrative device in the first place, and whether ironizing it is the
only way in which it may come to be seen as more ‘authentic’.
Ultimately, this paper is dedicated to exploring some of the ways in
which Hollywood filmmakers have attempted to present the ‘happy
ending’ without making their films’ conclusions appear broadly
‘unrealistic’ themselves.
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Authenticity?
Challenges and Questions: Creating Authentic Costumes
for 'The New World' and 'There will be Blood'
Elizabeth Galindo
My current work looks in depth at how twenty-first century
filmmakers document period costume, and at the specific crafts
involved to produce pieces of clothing through what is now called
‘originary practice’ (constructing costume through authentic,
historically accurate crafts and skills). The research has been
prompted by my international experience in the worlds of couture
design (Galindo Couture)1 and costume design in film (see
biography), and my understanding that costume has an
exceptional social and cultural impact on those who see the clothes
and those who wear them, yet costume – as opposed to fashion – is
little understood in academic studies. My particular concern is that
‘originary practices’ for constructing historical ‘authentic’ costume
are dying out, literally, as the artisans become elderly i.e.: single
needle lace making, men’s tailoring, hand devore silk-velvets,
hand embroidery, crewel work etc… The purpose of this paper is to
document the practices and procedures undertaken by the brilliant
costume designer Jacqueline West in recreating historical costume
in the film The New World , directed by Terrence Malick, and to
assess the impact of this work.
1
Reilly, Maureen. California Couture: Shiffer Publishing, Atglen, PA: 2000 pg 150
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Panel: B2
Confronting Media
Multiplicity
Chair: Elke Weissmann
Room: Bob Kayley Theatre
Time: 14.05 – 15.35
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Authenticity?
Realism vs. Reality TV in the War on terror: Artworks as
Models of Interpretation
David Crawford
Much of what is associated with the so-called “War on Terror”
bears a relation to images. While society is increasingly media
savvy, these images tend to be produced and consumed in such a
manner that spectators are left little room and even less
encouragement to engage in critical thinking as an intermediary
act. The proliferation of new technologies for the production and
distribution of images (= camera phones and the Web) have added
new elements to the equation worth consideration. This article
attempts to open up a space for reflection using a combination of
theoretical contextualization (largely by way of Jean Baudrillard)
and artistic example. The practice of art making is thus cast as a
productive tool for sense-making on the part of those producing
and consuming images associated with the so-called “War on
Terror.”
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Journeys Across Media 2008
This is Me – or is it? The instability of the video diary
text.
Jo Henderson
The ‘video diary’ has been utilized in artistic practice, first person
film-making, reality tv and now, Web 2.0 enabled social
networking sites to signify authenticity and truth through
proximity and indexicality.
What are the circumstances that prompt the production of such
texts and in what ways can the embodied first person narrative to
camera be read?
The BBC’s Video Nation is a participatory project in which
members of the public – constructed as ‘ordinary people’ are
invited to represent their everyday reality and experience through
the creation of self-filmed monologues to camera: video diaries.
These are edited, with participant approval, into stand-alone texts
for transmission on the Video Nation website and other BBC
platforms. The conventions of the (national) broadcaster combine
with the ‘auto-ethnographic impulse’ of the individual and the
resulting texts can occupy a contested space on a continuum of
authenticity – performativity. Using individual Video Nation texts,
I look at ways in which specific participants have chosen to
construct themselves and highlight potential tensions between the
represented individual and the institution to draw out some of the
ways that these texts challenge notions of authenticity.
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Authenticity?
Reconfiguring Authenticity in the Music Press
Stephen Hill
This paper will look at the way in which the magazines Smash Hits
and Q transformed the notion of authenticity in the music press
during the 1980s. Prior to the launch of Smash Hits in 1978, the
music press, from Jazz through to Punk, was steeped in the notion
that authenticity, both musical and social, was the barometer of
aesthetic integrity. This was amplified by the legacy of both Beat
writers and New Journalists who privileged the subjective
attachments of the writer and whose influences were manifest in
the polemic style of writers like Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus and
Tony Parsons. Smash Hits and challenged this in two ways. Firstly,
by privileging the visual Smash Hits reacquainted popular music
with its televisual aesthetic: thereby exposing the constructed
nature of genre distinction. In particular its celebration of the
mainstream is pertinent for both its non-partisan approach and
the volume of single sales in UK at the moment of its inception at
the end of Seventies. Secondly, while Q borrowed some of the
stylistic conventions of Smash Hits and orientated itself to a new
older demographic of music consumers, it challenged the
conventions of the music press in its explicit appropriation of
consumer discourse. The CD in particular emerges as key symbol
of historical significance, around which the relative notions of
cultural value are negotiated. Embedded in this are some very
particular strategies for thinking about popular music, of which the
process of canonisation is central and the notion of authenticity is
reconfigured as a contingent structure on the flat landscape of
post-modern consumer culture.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Panel: C2
Visibilities of
Performance
Chair: John Gibbs
Room: BG 78
Time: 14.05 – 15.35
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Authenticity?
Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent's verbatim
theatre: Playing for Real.
Tom Cantrell
Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor are internationally famed
for their development of a particular form of verbatim theatre at
the Tricycle Theatre, London. Influenced by Weiss and Hochhuth,
Norton-Taylor adapts trial transcripts, creating hard-hitting
polemical plays which aim to make interventions in political
processes and Government policy. In 2007, Norton-Taylor
changed his tactic to try and increase electoral antagonism against
Blair, interviewing former colleagues and public figures, to
produce a set of interviews accusing Blair of lying to the public
about the case to go to war with Iraq. The subsequent play 'Called
to Account' intensified the debates surrounding verbatim theatre
and claims to authenticity (see Bottoms 2006, Reinelt 2006,
Luckhurst 2007), but also raised vexed questions for actors. While
a fair amount has been written on Norton-Taylor's approach to the
adaptation of material in the public realm, little has been written
on the particular challenges that actors face when required to
embody a real, often celebrated individual. With reference to
detailed interviews with the performers in 'Called to Account', this
paper examines the ways that actors 'playing for real' are under
more pressure than ever to adapt themselves to an illusion of
reality. The paper investigates how performers interpret both
Norton-Taylor's interview material and adapt live footage of their
'real' characters to create a complex doubling effect.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Access to interiority through performance in Elia Kazan’s
East of Eden (1954)
Ceri Hovland
In everyday life, access to someone else’s interiority is
limited to inference on the basis of visible behaviour and our belief
in the continuing existence of aspects of the world, even if we do
not have direct or constant experience of it. In film, how
interiority is signified and the degree of access provided to it is
subject to similar epistemological issues. There are several ways in
which film has signified character interiority. Many of these
rhetorical devices, and similarly many studies on the issue of
interiority, are focused on how and whether film can provide
access to a ‘first person’ or ‘subjective’ experience of interiority. In
this paper, I am going to focus on the access to character interiority
more commonly provided by film, which is predicated on inference
and interaction along the lines of the everyday life model of
interiority.
I shall do this through an analysis of the performances in
Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1954). I shall consider what kinds of
interiority does the film offer and how does it offers them? I will
then address how these methods enable the film to negotiate the
problems of access to interiority? In particular, I will focus on
interiority as a marker of a particular kind of complexity sought
after in ‘Method’ performances of the 1950s. Through the films of
Elia Kazan, the Method became associated with the effective
depiction of complex, idiosyncratic, psychologically motivated
characters. This paper will explore the concrete details of these
‘Method’ performances which aided the construction of complex
characters and the inference of interiority.
26
Authenticity?
The Death of Performance? Questions of Post-Studio
style and meaning in relation to access and performance
in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Lucy Fife
Much is made of the viscerally disturbing qualities embedded in
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - human bodies are traumatised,
mutilated and distorted – and the way these are matched by close
and often intense access to the performers involved. Graphic
violence focused on the body specifically indicates the film as a key
contemporary horror text. Yet, for all this closeness to the
performers, it soon becomes clear in undertaking close-analysis of
the film that access to them is equally characterised by extreme
distance, both spatially and cognitively. The issue of distance is
particularly striking, not least because of its ramifications on
engagement, which throws up various aesthetic and
methodological questions concerning performers’ expressive
authenticity.
This paper will consider the lack of access to performance in The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, paying particular attention to how
this fits in with contemporaneous presentations of performance
more generally, as seen in films such as Junior Bonner (Sam
Peckinpah, 1972) and The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola,
1974). As part of this investigation I will consider the affect of such
a severe disruption to access on engagement with, and discussion
of, performance. At the heart of this investigation lie
methodological considerations of the place of performance analysis
in the post-studio period. How can we perceive anything of a
character’s interior life, and therefore engage with performers who
we fundamentally lack access to? Does such an apparently
significant difference in the way performers and their embodiment
is treated mean that they can even be thought of as delivering a
performance?
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Panel: A3
Interpreting Genre in
Film & Television
Chair: Tom Brown
Room: Studio 2
Time: 16.05 – 17.35
28
Authenticity?
They don’t make ‘em like that anymore: Watching
Westerns in the 21st Century
Pete Falconer
The Western is often regarded as the emblematic genre of
classical Hollywood. Two key factors that motivate this are its
centrality to the early study of popular genres and the
substantial decline in the prominence and popularity of
Westerns in the last decades of the 20th Century.
Viewed from a contemporary perspective, then, the Western
genre has both classical cachet and a certain historical
remoteness. It can be seen as a repository of “lost” authenticity,
or as something more elusive and difficult to retrieve. My paper
will examine the ways in which these two perspectives affect the
experience of watching Westerns in the 21st Century.
My discussion will centre on a comparison of the two versions
of 3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957 and James Mangold,
2007). I will look at how and why the older version of the film
appears authentic and assess the role that familiarity (or
unfamiliarity) with genre conventions plays in this. I will
analyse the ways that the remake attempts to recapture the
authenticity and prestige associated with the genre, and the
burdens of explanation and justification faced by the makers of
contemporary Westerns (“What is a Western and why are you
making one?”). Through this comparison I hope to evaluate the
notion of authenticity in relation to genre and clarify some of
the ways in which our relationship to genre conventions as
viewers and critics changes over time.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Naturalising the Fantastic: Science Fiction and the
Uncanny Realism of Heroes
Dave Hipple
Science fiction (sf) as a genre has taken up a dominant position in
film and TV production in recent decades, arguably resulting
largely from the success in 1977 of those well known B-movies Star
Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the cinema, and
the consequent resurgence of Star Trek as an interminably
powerful presence on large and small screens.
Such popular material has frequently presented the fantastic with
celebratory flourishes of visual effects, and many viewers and
critics have regarded this element as being intrinsic to sf. Indeed,
the development of special effects technologies has generally been
spearheaded by the requirements of fantastic film and, to a lesser
extent, TV. However, where George Lucas famously waited for
CGI techniques to advance sufficiently to realise his vision of the
final three Star Wars films, other filmmakers and TV producers
working in the genre have criticised this tendency for visual effects
to become such a privileged consideration in sf, to the detriment of
storytelling.
Heroes is the latest TV series to deploy state of the art effects
technologies that integrate visions of the fantastic into images of
the viewers’ real world, and is also the latest of several to do so in a
way that in fact downplays the triumphant artifice of its methods.
The audience is invited not to admire its visual achievement, but
briefly to incorporate the fantastic into a traditional sense of
drama. This paper considers the ways in which material such as
Heroes uses advanced techniques not directly to celebrate its own
creativity, but to bring to the fore the comprehensible relevance of
the human stories that are being told. This paper therefore also
questions some orthodox conceptions of how sf operates overall.
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Authenticity?
Naturalising the fantastic: comics archetypes in Heroes
Julia Round
This paper discusses the much-vaunted realism of the TV series
Heroes in the context of comics history, proposing that many of
the tropes and mechanisms used to achieve this realism are drawn
from this source. It identifies the archetypes and motifs drawn
from comics and analyses the ways in which they are presented in
a new medium by the TV series. It seeks to define the evolution of
the superhero tradition across media and in so doing addresses
questions of medium specificity.
This paper initially examines the ways in which Heroes’
character types and attributes reference golden-age superhero
archetypes; focusing on the ostensibly unpowered characters
(HRG, Mohinder Suresh) and relating these to the Batman
archetype. It proceeds to identify the use made of silver-age motifs
such as teenaged characters (Clare Bennet, Micah Sanders) and
sidekicks (Ando). It expands this to address the ways in which
Heroes’ characterisation draws on silver-age tenets such as the
accidental (and pseudo-scientific) origin, the reluctant hero, and
the superhero team-up. It moves to discuss the 1980s realism of
environment in a similar manner.
The paper then demonstrates the ways in which these
realistic elements have converged in contemporary comics titles
and identifies visual and textual parallels between these and
Heroes.
Finally it analyses the construction of the superhero,
where one half is often the antithesis of the other; relating this
model to the character of Niki/Jessica Sanders, whose fragmented
identity epitomises the duality underlying the superhero. It
expands this notion to include the hero/villain analogy which
became popular in the 1980s (Batman versus Joker) with reference
to the parallels drawn between the characters of Peter Petrelli and
Sylar.
It concludes by: summarising the similarities and
differences of presentation of these elements across these two
media, and situating Heroes firmly within the superhero tradition
of comics.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Panel: B3
Negotiating
Translations &
Adaptations
Chair: John Bull
Room: Bob Kayley Theatre
Time: 16.05 – 17.35
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Authenticity?
Translation and Film: On the Defamiliarizing Effect of
Subtitles
Dionysis Kapsaskis
In the process of re-examining reality in terms of authenticity and
illusion, 20th-Century thinkers often recognized translation as a
paradigmatic discipline for Modernity. For Heidegger and
Benjamin, translation mediates not between different realities but
between different representations of reality (different languages,
cultures, identities). The poststructuralists further explained that
translation lays bare the foreign and derivative character of what
we tend to perceive as domestic and authentic (e.g. the mother
tongue, collective/individual identity).
The way translation reveals foreignness and inauthenticity has
been extensively discussed in relation to literature, but it also
applies to film as a prototypically modern form of aesthetic and
socio-political representation. Within the cinematic form, the
illusion of realism and domesticity is perpetuated thanks to the
suppression of everything that is foreign to the image. However, as
Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour stress in their book Subtitles, “every
film is a foreign film”. In this context, subtitles may be considered
as a supplement to film, contaminating film’s purported selfsufficiency. The presence and content of subtitles highlight the
heteronomy of the medium. By disturbing the unity of cinematic
space-time, subtitles help to dissolve the aura of film.
Certainly, film was initially seen as Modernism’s answer to the
aura of the classical artefact. But we must acknowledge the West’s
role in swiftly re-investing film with an aura that is mostly felt in
Hollywood’s awe-inspiring “realistic” images. This paper submits
that subtitles have a defamiliarizing effect. They ascertain
(geopolitical) difference by exposing both hegemonic and nonhegemonic cultures and traditions to the experience of the foreign.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Journeys of the King: Adapting Shakespeare’s Richard II
from page to stage to screen
Laura Higgins
This paper starts from the premise that every performance of
Shakespeare today involves an act of intercultural theatrical
translation. I explore the processes of adaptation at work in the
production of the play directed by Deborah Warner for the
Cottesloe Theatre in 1995, and in Warner’s subsequent version for
television in 1997. Drawing on Patrice Pavis’s notion of the
reception adapter I argue that the design and articulation of the
stage and theatre space served to create links between the
sixteenth-century text and the contemporary audience, and
investigate the means by which such connections could be
facilitated in the final phase of the plays journey across media from
stage to screen.
34
Authenticity?
Two Versions of Shao Jianghai: Politics of Theatre
Historiography in China
Hsiao-Mei Hsieh
Unlike other traditional performances that were brought to
the island by its Chinese immigrants, Gezaixi, also known as
Taiwanese opera, is purely and proudly “made in Taiwan.” With its
popularity, Gezaixi made its way across the Taiwan Strait to
southeastern China in the late 1910s, and gradually drew local
audiences.
The play Shao Jianghai, produced by one of the statesponsored Gezaixi troupes on the mainland, has undergone several
major modifications since its debut in 2002. It tells the story of the
early life of the Gezaixi master SHAO Jianghai (1914-1980). This
paper focuses on the changes in its narrative, and explores what
the process of the revisions reveal, namely, the trajectory of
gezaixi’s origin and cross-strait dispersal had been cleverly redelineated . I intend to analyzes the historiography of Gezaixi in
China at a time when the dispute over Taiwanese independence or
reunification dominates cross-strait interactions.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Panel C3:
Docu / Drama:
Portraying the Real
Chair: Derek Paget
Room: BG 78
Time: 16.05 – 17.35
36
Authenticity?
Aspects of Internal Correction in Steven Spielberg’s
Munich: Authenticity and Credibility
Reina-Marie Loader
“Authenticity is questioned only when texts challenge comfortable assumptions.”
– Nigel Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light, 2007
Self-correction is usually understood to be a diachronic
phenomenon when an individual emends or replaces an earlier
assumption, opinion or attitude in the light of later insight.
Artistically, it can however also be a synchronic phenomenon that
manifest itself in the simultaneous presentation of an opinion not
jettisoned, but qualified, balanced and therefore corrected in the
light of another. In this case the two opinions act as counter-poles
to one another.
Normally, neither is questionable, but when carried out through
the aesthetic interpretation of real events, boundaries naturally
become porous and ethical considerations become centralised.
This was no exception when Steven Spielberg’s film Munich was
released in 2005. The film critically depicts the counter-reaction of
Israel to the assassination of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972
Olympic Games in Germany. It has been subjected to a great deal
of public criticism relating to issues of authenticity and credibility.
The thrust of this criticism concerns the ethical implications of reen-acting specific historical events – particularly since these are
impossible to verify, but also because the public inevitably see
them from quite specific and ideologically eclipsed viewpoints.
Criticised for fabricating key scenes, for being politically too
unbiased and for humanising the original Palestinian terrorists in
Germany, the Jewish director Spielberg attempts to contextualise
the notion of counter-terrorism from a contemporary selfcorrective perspective in order to communicate “a prayer for
peace” in an unstable political climate that seems to feed on
violence and fear.
This paper will investigate in more detail the relationship between
aesthetic references and the real events referred to in Munich. It
will focus on the film’s main problematic, namely, self-correction
as a necessary aesthetic and contextual tool in re-presenting real
events that are well-known, but the authenticity of which are by
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Journeys Across Media 2008
their very nature “undocumentable” or difficult to verify
objectively. I will also examine the ethical questions raised by the
invention of scenes within a film claiming to be “based on real
events”. I will do so by further considering notions of fictional selfcorrection in “faction” films and argue that invention does not
compromise authenticity, and more importantly, credibility.
38
Authenticity?
Ghosts in the Picture. Mourning the Century in Chris
Marker’s Level 5
David Montero
Chris Marker’s Level Five (1997) attempts to make sense of
multiple images of death. From the anonymous thousands killed
during the Battle of Okinawa in the Second World War to the
intimate bereavement of a loved one, the main characters in the
film attempt to come to terms with loss through the use of different
memory-related technologies. Their various acts of mourning are
linked to the process of maintaining/creating a discursive afterlife
for those not present. They need to complete unfinished stories.
Such ongoing discourses, however, do not claim to be ‘authentic’ or
invoke notions of truth, but are dependent upon the longings and
inclinations of the one who remembers. This paper explores how
mourning is enacted by the characters of Chris and Laura who,
using film and digital media respectively, enter a profoundly
dialogic space where the image of those they have lost is negotiated
against various voices and opposed narratives. Defined by Marker
as a ‘semi-documentary’, Level Five calls attention to questions
which range from our personal responsibility before an
increasingly fragmented past to the role played by technological
development in the way we deal with memory, in general, and with
our recollection of the 20th century, in particular.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Strategies of Re-enactments in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah
Toni-Lynn Frederick
Claude Lanzmann has described Shoah as a “fiction of the real.”
He has never clarified exactly what he means by this provocative
statement, but based on some of the strategies he uses in this film,
he seems to be suggesting that the “fiction” involves putting people
who have been subjected to “real” and harrowing experiences into
constructed environments that will allow them to re-enact certain
aspects of their traumatic pasts in front of the camera.
As a method, Lanzmann is interested in a process of
“rememoration,” and he uses this strategy of re-enactment to
probe the subconscious part of traumatized memory in some of the
Holocaust survivors that he interviews. By mining a part of the
distressed psyche that even the survivors themselves may not
realize has been so traumatized, he believes he can access a living
archive and tap into a truth about the past.
On several occasions in the film, Lanzmann’s questioning drives
his subjects to tears; these are powerful cinematic moments, but
viewers are often troubled when they realize that certain scenarios
are set-up. What’s more, Lanzmann rejects the possibility that this
might be seen as ethically problematic, that it might be
inappropriate to use Holocaust survivors in this way, or that in
putting his subjects through such a taxing interview process, and
in some cases restaging certain events, his mode of inquiry might
re-traumatize the witnesses.
This paper will examine one of the most striking scenes in this
nine-and-a-half documentary: the opening sequence where
Holocaust survivor Simon Srebnik is placed in a small boat and
filmed as he is taken up the Ner river in Chelmno. This section of
the film is remarkable for a number of reasons, most notably
because the filmmaker re-stages an event from Srebnik’s past and
has asked Srebnik to sing the same Prussian war songs the Nazis
taught him when he was a child prisoner at Chelmno. The image of
an impassive Srebnik sitting at the bow of the boat is eerie, and
this staged river journey sets an unsettling tone for the measured
and unrelenting pace that Lanzmann will move at for the duration
of the film.
40
Authenticity?
Biographical Information
Ian Banks is a storyboard and concept artist who teaches part time in the
film, theatre and TV dept at the University of Reading. He studied Fine Art
at Leicester Art College and obtained a BA in Film and Drama at Reading
University. He completed an MPhil on David Lynch at Reading University
in 1996.
Sarah Bell is a final year PhD student in the English Literature
department at the University of Sheffield. She is writing up her thesis on
'hidden' female dramatists at the Royal Court during the first term of Max
Stafford Clark's Artistic Directorship and Margaret Thatcher's first term as
Prime Minister (1979-83).
Anna Biström (1976) is a postgraduate student and assistant at Nordica
(Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature) University of
Helsinki. The subject of her doctoral thesis under progress, is addressivity
in the lyrics of Eva Dahlgren.
Tom Cantrell is studying for a PhD in verbatim theatre at the University
of York. He is investigating the rehearsal and performance processes of
actors in relation to the demands of the different forms of verbatim
theatre. Prior to York, Tom studied Drama and Education at Cambridge
University. He also writes and acts, most recently appearing at York
Theatre Royal in Celebrity, and in Much Ado About Nothing at the RSC's
Dell Theatre. His new play, The Boarding House of Black Shale Beach, is
in development at York Theatre Royal.
David Crawford studied film, video, and new media at the
Massachusetts College of Art and received a BFA in 1997. In 2000, his
Light of Speed project was a finalist for the SFMOMA Webby Prize for
Excellence in Online Art. In 2003, Crawford’s Stop Motion Studies project
received an Artport Gate Page Commission from the Whitney Museum of
American Art and an Award of Distinction in the Net Vision category at
the Prix Ars Electronica. In 2004, he received an MSc from Chalmers
University of Technology and taught at The School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. Crawford is currently a PhD candidate studying Digital
Representation at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at
Göteborg University in Sweden. His artwork has been featured by the
41
Journeys Across Media 2008
Guardian and Leonardo. His writing has recently been published by
Princeton Architectural Press.
Pete Falconer is currently midway through a PhD at the University of
Warwick. His thesis is on Melancholy in the Hollywood Western 1939-62.
His research interests include popular genres, film violence, censorship
and film music. He has written on subjects including the BBFC’s
censorship of violence and virginity in horror films. He currently teaches
Hollywood Cinema.
Lucy Fife is a second year PhD student in the department of Film,
Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, researching
performance in the post-studio horror film, with particular focus on the
materiality of performance and its relationship to elements of film style.
She received her research MA in film from this department and her BA in
Film and English Literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury.
Toni-Lynn Frederick is an independent filmmaker from Vancouver,
Canada, who is in the final stages of a Critical Practice PhD in the
Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading in
the United Kingdom. With a focus on Holocaust representation, her
written work deals with the negotiation of landscape and the strategies of
re-enactment in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. While her films contribute to
the genre of first person non-fiction narrative, her multimedia installations are concerned with sites of pilgrimage and
commemoration, and attempt to construct transient memorials. During
her time in the PhD program within the Department of Film, Theatre &
Television at the University of Reading, she has produced Landmarks, a
12-projector, 16mm film installation that attempts to represent the
present-day condition of the one-time Nazi Death Camps in Poland, and
their neighbouring landscapes. Her upcoming project, Dachau Brick
(another 16mm film installation), concerns itself with a brick that was
taken from the Dachau Concentration Camp’s crematoria oven over 15
years ago. This project serves as part of her exploration of the remnant as
artefact, and the role of sites of commemoration and pilgrimage in the
formation of Holocaust memory.
Elizabeth Galindo is working on a PhD, “The Cultural Significance of
the Costume Designer for Film Studies”, at University of California Davis.
She has had extensive experience in the worlds of international couture
design (Galindo Couture) and costume design in film, including The Good
Shepherd, There Will Be Blood, PS I Love You and State of Play etc. Over
the past few years she has developed a methodological model for
understanding the work of the costume designer in film with special
42
Authenticity?
attention to ‘originary practices’. To date she has interviewed many award
winning directors, including Taylor Hackord, John Sayles, Paul Thomas
Anderson and others, and some of the most significant costume designers
currently practicing, including Ann Roth, April Ferry, Rita Ryack, Albert
Wolsky, Anthony Powell, Jacqueline West and others, to solidify her
model of the costume designer at the center of the historical film universe,
to explore and analyze the kinds of interaction that occur within the world
of costume making itself, and between that world and the larger world of
film. This model has recently been used as a central organizing principle
by articles prompted by her research in fall issue magazine; The Costume
Designer, The Offical Magazine of the Costume Designers Guild Local
892.
Oliver Gruner is a first year Film Studies PhD student at the University
of East Anglia. His thesis examines the representation of "The Sixties" not the 1960s per se, but rather an era that encapsulates such events as the
Vietnam War, Watergate, and the counterculture, civil rights and feminist
movements - in the contemporary biographical film, 1986 to the present.
Jo Henderson has undertaken her doctoral studies at the Institute of
Education as part of an AHRC funded project entitled Camcorder
Cultures, Media Technologies and Everyday Creativity. Her first degree is
in Photography and Multimedia, during which time she started to develop
her own video practice, and her Masters is in Cultural Memory. Her
research interests are vernacular recordings and their subsequent uses.
Laura Higgins is in the final year of PhD research in the Department of
drama at Royal Holloway University London. She is interested in plays as
powerful products of material culture which have both a history and a
geography. She is, therefore, concerned not only with the journey of a play
through time but also with its passage through literal sites; the theatres in
which it is performed, as it is within these places that spectators and
theatre practitioners interact with the text as it is mediated and
materialized in real time and real space. She is interested in both the
theatres themselves and their position within the cultural landscape, and
also in the scenography and the way both building and production design
can work together in the generation of meaning. Her thesis Staging
Geographies and the Geographies of Staging investigates the ways in
which an analysis of Richard II in performance which is sensitive to issues
of space and place can introduce new subtleties and nuances into readings
of the play in performance.
Stephen Hill is Head of Media at The Burgate School and Sixth Form
Centre. He is in the process of completing a PhD on the music press at The
43
Journeys Across Media 2008
University of Winchester, supervised by Professor Andrew Blake. Stephen
has published a number of articles in Media Magazine and the journal
Popular Music History. His research interests include Popular Music
Studies, the 1980s and consumer culture. Upon completing his doctoral
thesis Stephen is interested in pursuing research on tourism in the 1970s
and the culture of transport.
Dave Hipple is a Ph.D student at the University of Reading, working on
critical approaches to the sf genre in TV and film. He has taught sf film
and presented related papers at several conferences, has published
chapters on the sf credentials of Stargate SG-1 and the industrial history
of Star Trek, and is working on a chapter concerning the Dominick Hide
TV plays as sf drama. Another on the development and marketing of the
new Doctor Who franchise is due for publication later this year.
Ceri Hovland is a third year PhD student in the Department of Film,
Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, researching Hollywood
performance through epistemological framing and detailed analysis. She
has presented papers on performance and point of view in Sofia Coppola’s
The Virgin Suicides (1999)’ (Manifestations of Media Technology,
University of Reading), on the evaluation of successful performance in
Cukor’s A Star is Born (1954)’, and on the importance of knowledge and
interpretation to performance in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (1941)’
(Mind and Body, University of Reading). She received her MA in Film
from Reading and her BA in Drama from the University of Hull.
Hsiao-Mei Hsieh is a Ph.D. candidate in the program of Performance
Studies at Northwestern University. Her fields of interest include
traditional and contemporary Chinese drama, theatre historiography,
modern Chinese culture, post-colonial theory, and cross-cultural
adaptation.
Dionysis Kapsaskis has recently submitted his PhD thesis at UCL with
the title: Marguerite Yourcenar: Authenticity, Modernity and the
Political Aesthetic. He is working as subtitler for the audiovisual industry
and as a lecturer in Subtitling and Translation at the Universities of Surrey
and Roehampton.
Eirini Kartsaki has a background in Theatre Studies and is currently
pursuing a PhD in Queen Mary University of London. Her subject focuses
on the senses of repetition in contemporary performance. She has taken
part in a number of conferences (Performance Studies International 13,
New York, Chester University, etc.) Eirini also creates solo performance
work that deals with parables of sexual despair and the discomfort of
44
Authenticity?
being loved. She has been presenting performance work in London (291
Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, CPT, The Place, etc) and elsewhere
(Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, Man-in-fest Festival, Cluj-Napoca,
Romania).
Angelos Koutsourakis is a first year doctoral candidate at the
University of Sussex, where he is conducting research on the films of Lars
Von Trier, through the lens of Bertolt Brecht. Trained as a dramaturge at
the University of Athens, he has done his internship in theatre
administration, while he has taught Drama in Secondary schools as part of
his degree. Angelos holds a first class MA in Drama and Performance
from University College Dublin. During his MA studies he gained an
interest in the theatre of Bertolt Brecht and his influence on Film Theory.
In May he is going to have his first article published in the journal
‘Communications from the International Brecht Society’. He is interested
in the theoretical and practical aspects of Drama and Film, while his
research is concerned with politics and representation in European
Cinema and the political implications of film in the age of postmodernism.
Reina-Marie Loader is a first year PhD student in the Department of
Film, Theatre and Television at the University of Reading. The main focus
of her research currently includes the aesthetics of docudrama as well as
its application through practice. She received her Research MA in Film as
well as her BA in Film and Theatre from the University of Reading.
James MacDowell is currently a first year PhD student studying in the
Film and Television department at the University of Warwick, where he
also previously gained a First Class BA in film and literature (in 2005),
and an MA with Distinction in film and television studies (in 2007). Last
year he was the visiting module leader of an introduction to Film Studies
module in the Performing and Visual Arts department of the University of
Birmingham. He has had two articles published on the online film journal
Offscreen (www.offscreen.com), and has an article currently under
consideration by the University of Nottingham's journal Scope. His
research interests include 'classical' and 'post-classical' Hollywood,
narrative theory, mise-én-scene criticism, and musicals.
Paul Maddern is a second-year PhD candidate with the Seamus Heaney
Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. His dissertation involves
writing on aspects of the performance of poetry and establishing an online digital archive of public Irish public poetry readings. In April 2007 he
presented a paper at Queen’s University Belfast’s conference, Waste and
Abundance: Critical Readings of Modern Wastelands, in which he looked
at the poetry of Conor O’Callaghan. He also writes poetry and has had
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Journeys Across Media 2008
work in The Caribbean Writer, Fortnight, Poetry Ireland Review, The
Shop, and Ulster Tatler. He is one of seven poets included in Incertus, an
anthology of emerging poets writing in the north of Ireland. In 2006 he
won the James Kilfedder Memorial Bursary and was included in Poetry
Ireland’s Introductions series of readings.
Jennifer Markowitz is a second-year, Theatre Studies PhD student at
the University of Warwick. Her Practice-as-Research dissertation is titled
All The Stage is a World: Using Found Spaces as a Map into the World of a
Play. Ms. Markowitz has over fifteen years experience directing plays in
such countries as Ireland, Israel, and Scotland as well as throughout the
United States. She is the winner of the L.A. Weekly Award, Chicago’s
Joseph Jefferson Award – both in the “Best Director” category -- and
Edinburgh Festival’s “Fringe First” award.
David Montero, graduated from the University of Seville before coming
to Bath to complete an MA in European Cinema Studies. He is currently
writing a PhD in essayistic filmmaking, under the supervision of Mrs.
Wendy Everett and Dr. Peter Wagstaff. His research interests include new
formats in non fiction film, especially the work of José Luis Guerín, Harun
Farocki and Chris Marker. David is also teaching Spanish language, as well
as contributing to seminars during the first and second year Spanish
cultural studies and to other units in Spanish and Latin American studies
at the University of Bath.
Eirini Nedelkopoulou is a 3rd year PhD student and part-time seminar
tutor in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television at the University
of Reading, UK. Her doctoral research is on Multimedia Practices in
Contemporary Greek Performance. She received her MA in theatre
directing from Royal Holloway and her BA in Theatre Studies from the
University of Patra in Greece.
Julia Round holds a PhD in English Literature from
Bristol University and MA in Creative Writing from
Cardiff University. Her research applies various critical
models to contemporary British-American comics in
order to explore the dichotomy between notions of
popular culture and literature and refine the models in
question. Further details at www.juliaround.com.
Tim Vermeulen is an AHRC funded Ph.D. student in the Department of
Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. His thesis is on
the cultural geography of white middle-class suburbia in recent American
46
Authenticity?
film and television. He has previously gained MA degrees in Film with
Television studies (Warwick), Media Studies (Rotterdam), and Cultural
Philosophy (Rotterdam).
Polly Williams is currently AHRC award holder for collaborative PhD at
the National Coal Mining Museum jointly supervised by the museum and
Leeds University, School of Performance and Cultural Industries. She has
an MA in Cultural Policy and Management from Sheffield Hallam
University and has worked for Calderdale Council's Museums and
Galleries Education service.
About JAM
Journeys Across Media (JAM) is an annual one-day
conference organised by and for postgraduate
students on a national and international level, and
aiming to provide a discussion forum for current
research in the areas of film, theatre, television and
‘new media’.
Established in 2003, JAM has proven successful in
providing an opportunity for postgraduate students to
gain experience in presenting aspects of their research
as a conference paper within a friendly environment.
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Journeys Across Media 2008
Acknowledgements
Reina and Lucy would like to thank everyone who
helped make today possible.
Rosemary Allen, Helen Apted, Chris Bacon, Ian Banks,
Jonathan Bignell, Tom Brown, John Bull, John Gibbs,
Ceri Hovland, Tonia Kazakopoulou, Simone Knox,
Theresa Murjas, Eirini Nedelkopoulou, Derek Paget,
Lisa Purse, Graham Saunders, Liz Silvester, Greg
Singh, Lib Taylor, Michael Tatham, Stephen Taylor,
Tim Vermeulen, Elke Weissmann.
Since 2005, the JAM conference has received financial
support from the Standing Committee of University
Drama Departments (SCUDD) and the Graduate
School in Arts and Humanities, University of Reading,
and the organisers gratefully acknowledge this
assistance.
48