[csaa-forum] FW: CIL Research Seminar this Friday 2 November at 3pm in C1.41

[Susan Luckman]

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CIL School Seminar Series
Friday 2 November at 3pm in room C1.41


Presentations this Friday:

[cid:image001.gif at 01CDB692.1AB914F0]    Saige Walton - Towards a Phenomenology of Grace: Elemental Attachments and the Cinema of Bruno Dumont
Coupling the secular with the sacred and the worldly with the spiritual, contemporary French director - Bruno Dumont - folds animate and inanimate matter into one another to incarnate a cinema of grace that speaks to a shared sense of being-in-the-world.
Focusing on Dumont's two most recent films Outside Satan (2011) and Hadejwich (2009), this paper will detail the 'elemental' attachments that connect bodies, objects, spaces and things in his work.   As I argue it, the elemental attachments of Dumont's cinema derive their affective force from an aesthetic of abstraction or minimalism that is conjoined with experiences of temporal distension and an emphatically material-visuality.  In that regard, this paper seeks to demonstrate how Dumont's cinema might recall pre-modern traditions of religious or ecstatic art in which the transmission of affects occurs through sensuous surface-attachments - as a means of connecting bodies with often abstract or invisible concepts.  Similarly, Dumont's cinema conveys and elicits feeling through his attention to the expressive surfaces that connect bodies with other selves and with the world: from vast landscapes and open skies to subtle shifts in bodily comportment, movement, gesture and the visage.  Here, props, objects, textural and elemental patterns assume great significance in their own right.  Drawing upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy, embodied film theory and new materialist scholarship, this paper examines the ways in which surface and depth, subject and object, self and other intertwine in Dumont's cinema - prompting us to consider experiences of 'grace' that are borne of a relational ontology rather than religion.



Ø Dr Saige Walton is Lecturer in Screen Studies at The University of South Australia.  Before arriving at UniSA, she taught in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne and was a former Assistant Curator of Exhibitions with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).  Her work on film/media aesthetics appears in Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin (University of Manitoba Press 2009), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (Routledge 2008) and Lounge Critic: The Couch Theorist's Companion (Latrobe 2004) and in Screen, Senses of Cinema, Screening the Past and Real Time.  She is currently at work on a manuscript that develops a sensuous account of the historic and cinematic baroque, as well as a new project on grace and materiality in the cinema.

[cid:image001.gif at 01CDB692.1AB914F0]    Simone Marangon and Katrina Jaworski - "Let your freak flag fly": Lady Gaga, spectacle and the celebrity politics of camp
Lady Gaga has risen to an extraordinary celebrity status through the use of camp in her performances, fashion style and interaction with fans and media. She is better known for her spectacular performances than for her pop style of music, thanks to the power of digital media and social networking websites. While Lady Gaga's fame has been simultaneously praised and criticised, little attention has been given to the way she uses camp to articulate the appearance of difference and "Otherness". In response, we argue that Lady Gaga is a spectacular contradiction, produced and sustained through interchangeable messages such as "be yourself" and "born this way". We also argue that these messages depend on gender and race, through which Lady Gaga uses camp to articulate the "freak". We begin by examining selected online media and blog content that debate the rise of Lady Gaga's fame. We then analyse camp, gender performance, authenticity and "Otherness" to show the contradictions in her maintenance of a freak that can always let her flag fly.



Ø Simone Marangon is a 3rd year undergraduate student in the Bachelor of Communications (Media and Culture) at the University of South Australia. She is interested in researching sexualities, public spaces and celebrities. Unlike Lady Gaga, in her spare time Simone plays acoustic guitar and sings in pubs for very little payment.

Dr Katrina Jaworski is a lecturer in Cultural Studies at the School of Communication, International Studies and Languages. Her research focuses on suicide and gender in particular, and death and dying more broadly. Other research areas include violent extremism, older men and urban sheds, African genocide and celebrity lives and deaths.

ALL WELCOME - drinks and nibbles provided
Please RSVP to CILResearch at unisa.edu.au<mailto:martina.nist at unisa.edu.au> by COB Thursday
Martina Nist
Senior Academic Services Officer (Research)
School of Communication, International Studies & Languages
Rm C2.17 | Tel 8302 4647
University of South Australia

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