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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 2 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 3 Journeys Across Media 2008 Panel: A1 Reception & Authorship Chair: Jonathan Bignell Room: Studio 2 Time: 11.40 – 13.10 4 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. 5 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. 6 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. 7 Journeys Across Media 2008 Panel: B1 Engaging with Space Chair: Lib Taylor Room: Bob Kayley Theatre Time: 11.40 – 13.10 8 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. 9 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. 10 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. 11 Journeys Across Media 2008 Panel: C1 Public Performance Practices Chair: Graham Saunders Room: BG 78 Time: 11.40 – 13.10 12 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. 13 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. 14 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. 15 Journeys Across Media 2008 Panel: A2 Popular Forms & Practice Chair: Lisa Purse Room: Studio 2 Time: 14.05 – 15.35 16 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. 17 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. 18 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 19 Journeys Across Media 2008 Panel: B2 Confronting Media Multiplicity Chair: Elke Weissmann Room: Bob Kayley Theatre Time: 14.05 – 15.35 20 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.” 21 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. 22 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. 23 Journeys Across Media 2008 Panel: C2 Visibilities of Performance Chair: John Gibbs Room: BG 78 Time: 14.05 – 15.35 24 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. 25 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? 27 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. 29 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. 30 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. 31 Journeys Across Media 2008 Panel: B3 Negotiating Translations & Adaptations Chair: John Bull Room: Bob Kayley Theatre Time: 16.05 – 17.35 32 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. 33 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. 35 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 37 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. 39 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 45 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. 47 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