UPCOMING EVENT: Assemblage as a tool to explore Artists Cinema

Stephen Connolly
On Friday 6th June, 10.30am - 1pm at Goldsmiths - MRB Screen 2

© Stephen Connolly

Phenomenological and embodied approaches to cinema propose parallels between the perceptive and expressive agencies of camera and audience, as exemplified by the work of Sobchack and Laura U Marks. However, this paradigm lacks conceptual tools for exploring the manifest visual and aural in cinematic representation.

This practice-based PhD explores the concept of ‘assemblage’ for the analysis of artists’ cinema, informed by Deleuze and Actor Network theory and operationalized in a moving image work exploring material aspects of spatialisation in a US city. This presentation will report on the practice based hinterland of this approach using short moving image extracts; progress in applying it to the object of investigation with short moving image extracts; and explore elements of the theoretical approach.

http://experimenta2013.tumblr.com/tagged/stephen-connolly

PANamericanGEA by Jandy CSG

Ximena Castillo Smyntek
Friday, 14th March 2014 10.30am-12pm, Goldsmiths MRB Screen 3

© Ximena Castillo Smyntek

Ximena Castillo Smyntek (Jandy CSG) is a practice-based PhD candidate in Latin-American Cultural Studies and Screen Studies from the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester, England. She has a Master's in Spanish Language, Literature and Culture from Syracuse University, NY, USA. Also, she has a Maestría in Communication and Audiovisual Industries in the Iberoamerican Region from the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, La Rábida, Spain. In addition, she holds a certificate in General Radio & Television production from the Radio Nederland Training Centre, The Netherlands. She has belonged to the Audio-Visual (AV) PhD group at Goldsmiths University since 2013. She has shown her video work in different conferences, festivals and galleries in the USA, Chile and the UK. Her current video ‘PANamericanGEA’ is part of her current PhD research work "The role of the mass media in contemporary Chilean film...”

The video ‘PANamericanGEA’ explores the journey of a man called "Ben" as a metaphorical reflection on identity formation. Ben through the interaction with the mass media, such as the radio, Internet and television, becomes more aware of the complexity that some identity terms (Hispanic, Latino, etc.) have in relation with their historical past. This is a story that expresses the hope for a better integration in the Americas.

Her present research analyses the use of the language of the mass media as a protagonist within the diegesis of selected contemporary Chilean films, including her own video research practice. It examines the use of the mass communication language as an artistic and dramatic expression as well as a narrative and filmic device. This study, based on different theories and critiques, examines how a film can use the speech of the mass media as a language beyond the persuasive.  It demonstrates how the mass media could become a protagonist, which can create an impact in the mind of those who are exposed to it. This interaction could allow one to find alternatives that originate ways of expression and open avenues for the development of marginalized or silenced voices that could be subjects of an oppressive system.

Conceptualising the Mediation of Subjectivity in Documentary Film Practice – A Case Study of the Cinematic Portrayal of Blindness

 Catalin Brylla, Friday 14th February 2014, 10.30am-12pm, Goldsmiths, MRB Screen 3

The objective of this practice-based research project is to explore methodologies that facilitate the mediation of subjectivity through documentary film. Wayne (2008) identifies three essential functions of documentary practice: research practice, critical practice and creative practice. According to these, my proposed methodology suggests three different stages of mediation for the filmmaking process: mediation in a critical context, mediation of the encounter, and mediation through film form. For each stage I use cross-disciplinary methods, based on representation, anthropology and audience reception.

My case study looks at the representation of blind characters, and how these can bypass existing stereotypes that stigmatise blind people as “the other”. I focus specifically on embodied experience through filming interactions with spaces and objects.

www.catalinbrylla.com

 

© Catalin Brylla

The Contradictions of Hybridity: Re-reading the Visual Representation of Hybridity in Visual Art

Nina Mangalanayagam, Friday 10th January 2014, 10.30am - 12pm, Goldsmiths, MRB Screen 3

© Nina Mangalanayagam

My research and practice takes its starting point in the personal. It came out of the frustration of not finding artworks and theory resonating with my personal experience of having conflicting narratives, being a mix between a white and a black parent. And also by the difficulty making photographs on this experience, without falling into a metalanguage of hybridity. My research contributes to a re-reading of hybridity in photographic art, where the racial Hybrid is involved in a complicated struggle between its histories as both coloniser and colonised.

My practice involves placing myself in situations and locations within my cultural and familial structure to reflect on my position. The main focus is on how other people’s perception of me influences my relationship with others. I expose how internal contradictions mirror external cross-cultural complications. My presentation focused on We call her Pulle - a three screen video installation in progress on my experience returning to Jaffna in Sri Lanka, the childhood place of my father. For most of my life, I had no access to this place due to the civil war. Having only visited once before my memory and image of the place is partly imagined through stories from my father and from the Western society I grew up in. My process includes deconstructing my idea of the past, while simultaneously attempting to re-construct it from the ruins and traces I find. The video focuses on my relationship to my aunt, Pulle, and her house.

The final piece aims to contest ideas of origin, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and question assumptions and attitudes that I have brought with me from my background. I expose how the hybrid also needs to assess their presumptions and stereotypes of others.

www.ninamanga.com

January 2014: Making history,  CAB 2014 - Colombo Biennale, Sri Lanka

June 2013: Land/Home, Michealis Galleries, University of Cape Town, South Africa        

Patients as Authors [working title]

Christine Douglass, Friday 15th November

I am applying the theories of shared visual anthropology and the methodology of shared visual ethnography to produce collaborative films with 9 individuals who have had a breast cancer diagnosis. My practice seeks to position patients as active producers of knowledge by facilitating a framework for them to “structure their view of the world - their reality - through film” (Sol Worth 1997: 7). It addresses the constraints of knowledge produced by a singular authorial view through the presentation of the individual perspectives and aims to capture the experience of having had a breast cancer diagnosis in a language that is not sanctioned. Equally though I don't want to promote a trope of victimology. My practice challenges the hegemonic epistemes used in clinical research to explore illness experiences. Cameras were 'handed over' to patients for 6+ months, the resultant footage has been collaboratively edited and will form a gallery installation in December 2014.

Worth, S., Adair, J. (1997). Through Navajo Eyes. An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology. Revised edition. Albuquerque. University of New Mexico Press.

Still: TB 2012

 The next presentation is with Tom Tlalim, 10.30am, Friday 13th December 2013 in MRB Screen 3.

Documentary - Intimacy - Migration

Marianne Hougen-Moraga,  Friday 11th October

My research takes its point of departure in my own film-project, which focuses on migration and long distance relationships (including all kinds of relationships from couples to parent-child relationships) and how the feeling of longing for someone and eventually somewhere creates another kind of long-distance intimacy than when being together.

By looking on my own moving image practice, I explore how I can achieve an audiovisual intimate aesthetic through different kinds of approaches as e.g. a confessional approach, close-ups and recorded conversations done on video calls by the characters themselves.

I am recording with four characters and aim at recording with at least five more. The recordings are planned to end up as a one hour non-fiction film.

Film as an Archive for Still Images: strategies for activating colonial memory

Miranda Pennell, Friday 31st May

My research explores the possibilities of film as an archive for assembling and animating colonial still images.  I hope to show how the merging of still and moving images bears on the perception of time and of history, collapsing the disconnections and separations that enable the colonial past to be kept at a safe distance. My research proposes a formal means for inviting the colonial past to be felt in the postcolonial present. 

For this session I shall look at some of the ways the archive has been theorised.  My current practice re-organizes the visual archive of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (BP). One of my immediate aims is to unravel the colonial construction of ‘Iran’, and of the British subject,  and to engage alternative readings of the company’s historical narrative. What are the techniques of seeing and knowing the world produced by the archive?  By which methods can these be grasped? And what kinds of knowledge or experience might a moving counter-archive hope to produce?

I will present a number of sequences from my film-in-progress, each sequence constructed either from an album of official company images or from the personal album of an employee. Each sequence seems to elaborate a way of seeing and of knowing the world. My film will act as an accumulation of different orders of such image-series, which I rework and reframe with other elements, including sound and voice-over.

*** Next meeting will be Friday 12th July