Screen Media Seminar: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
Philip Warnell (Filmaker)
Mabel Stark, a pioneering American Tiger trainer working since in the 1920’s, had a particularly special act with her Tiger, Rajah. In the ring she would turn her back momentarily on the animal, who would then pounce on her, in a seemingly unexpected attack from behind. Wrestling on the ground, their show would in fact culminate in the Tiger ejaculating on Stark, who wore an all white leather bodysuit in a bid to hide evidence of the Tiger’s semen from the audience.
"When I turned and called him, he would come up on his hind feet and put both feet round my neck. Pull me to the ground, grab me by the head, you know a male tiger grabs the female by the neck and holds her and growls till the critical moment is over. So, in this fashion, Rajah grabbed me and held me. We kept rolling over till he was through, and while the audience could not see what Rajah was doing, his growling made a hit." Mabel Stark – Hold that Tiger
Filmmaker Phillip Warnell will screen sequences from several of his films, including Ming of Harlem: 21 storeys in the air, a current work in progress. An only in New York story, the film develops around the living circumstances of Antoine Yates, Ming and Al (a full grown Tiger and Alligator respectively), who astonishingly co-habited a high-rise Harlem apartment in the projects until 2003. Archival footage of Mabel Stark at work, direct filming of stand-in animals and documentary material of Antoine Yates all feature, along with a poem written for the film by Jean-Luc Nancy, Oh les animaux des langues. A section from the 2009 film, Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies, will also be screened, a short film made in collaboration with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and an Octopus featuring an on-screen reading by Nancy of a text written especially for the film, étranges corps étrangers.
Stelarc is a Performance Artist and holds the Chair in Performance Art at the School of Arts, Brunel University, London
Abstract
We are increasingly expected to perform in Mixed and Augmented Realities. We are no longer merely biological bodies but increasingly accelerated by our machines and enhanced by our instruments. And we have to manage data in virtual systems. We have become extended operational systems, performing beyond the boundaries of our skin and beyond the local space we inhabit. As well as Circulating Flesh it is now an age of Fractal and Phantom Flesh.
Dr Frederick Baker (Senior Research Associate, McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge and Institute of Creative Media Technology, St Pölten)
Dr Baker is a Senior Research Associate at the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research as part of his EU Digital Heritage project.
Professor Steven Connor (Grace 2 Professor of English, University of Cambridge, Academic Director, London Consortium, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College)
Jenna Ng ((Facilitator), Newton Trust/Leverhulme Early Career, CRASSH) University of Cambridge)
William Brown (Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London)
Sarah Higley (Professor of English at the University of Rochester, NY)
Abstract
'I am excited by [machinima] essentially because it can be personalised - it should perhaps become like letter writing used to be - one to one in abundance - where everyone had his or her own handwriting. Don't put it in the cinema - you will kill it.' - Peter Greenaway
Machinima - films created in game or virtual worlds - converges cinema, animation, video games, television, puppetry, performance, music video and social virtual worlds, among others. No other media form in history pulls off such a smorgasbord of media in its makeup, or so defies placement in the mediascape. The challenge is to locate machinima's hybridity, preferably (as Greenaway implores) without killing it, in the process re-visiting our definitions and conceptions of cinema and, indeed, the future of the moving image. Beginning with a short reel of a few machinima films, this roundtable seminar features three speakers who will discuss machinima as an emerging media form. Does machinima provide a new visual regime for the digital moving image? Or might it provide new answers to what cinema is - or will be - in its slippery dialectic between the real and the virtual?
Paul Julian Smith (Distinguished Professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, CUNY)
Presentations on Work in Progress in Screen Media
Chris O'Rourke (University of Cambridge) Getting Over the Screen: The Live Worlds of Silent Cinema
Presentations on Work in Progress in Screen Media
Henry K. Miller (Birkbeck, University of London) Some Versions of Documentary
Presentations on Graduate Work in Progress in Screen Media
Lauri Kitsnik (University of Cambridge)
Presentations on Graduate Work in Progress in Screen Media
Alice Allen (University of Cambridge)
Dr Libby Saxton (Queen Mary, University of London)
Libby Saxton's research interests include the interactions between film and continental thought, especially philosophies of ethics; French cinema; and representations of the Holocaust and the Algerian War of Independence. She is the author of 'Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters' (co-authored with Lisa Downing, 2009) and 'Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust'(2008). At the moment, she is working on a monograph on European film and postsecular thought and co-editing the volume 'Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium' (forthcoming with Legenda in 2012).
Anthony Lane (Film Critic and Staff Writer for the New Yorker)
The Cambridge Screen Media Group is delighted to welcome film critic Anthony Lane, who many of you will know from his wide-ranging, ever-insightful and frequently hilarious film reviews, which have been appearing in the New Yorker since 1993. This evening, he will be hosting a screening of Jean Renoir's 1936 film 'Partie de campagne' (39 minutes). This will be followed by a short lecture on the film, and on the debt that it owes to Maupassant's 1881 story of the same name. After a period of discussion, there will then be a chance, for those who wish to stay, to view another Maupassant adaptation: 'La Maison Tellier', the central section of Max Ophuls's portmanteau film of 1952, 'Le Plaisir'.
For copyright reasons, we are unable to include footage of the films that Anthony screened on the evening. However, these can be sourced on DVD or online as follows:
Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir, 1936)
DVD available from the BFI, e.g. http://filmstore.bfi.org.uk/acatalog/info_2964.html
The film can also be viewed online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfJ3y3ncJ44
Le plaisir ('La Maison Tellier' segment, Max Ophuls, 1952)
DVD (Region 1) available from Criterion, e.g. http://www.criterion.com/films/572-le-plaisir
The section, 'La Maison Tellier' can also be viewed in instalments on Vimeo (though missing the final sequence):
- http://vimeo.com/23898882
- http://vimeo.com/23900299
- http://vimeo.com/23929170
- http://vimeo.com/23932260
- http://vimeo.com/23938068
- http://vimeo.com/23939077
Professor David Trotter (University of Cambridge). Part of the Screen Media Groups series.