[csaa-forum] Screen & Cultural Studies Seminar: Bruce Isaacs ("Reality Effects") and Richard Smith ("The Sovereign Woman")

[Timothy Laurie]

Screen & Cultural Studies Seminar Series

Theme: “Cinema”

Dr. Bruce Isaacs (University of Sydney)
Dr. Richard Smith (University of Sydney)

Time: 1pm-2.30pm, Thursday October 2
Venue: 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne


Reality Effects: The Ideology of the Long Take in the Cinema of Alfonso
Bruce Isaacs

This paper offers a critical examination of the ‘long take’ as a film image traversing the technological and phenomenological space that has opened between celluloid and digital aesthetics. The long take serves a number of philosophical and aesthetic functions in film studies discourse: the desire for realism, experiential immersion and perceptual ambiguity have all filtered through the discussions of Bazin, Deleuze, and more recently digital cinema theorists such as Nicholas Rombes (2009) and Steven Shaviro.

I propose to reengage the long take as an ideological vehicle in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men  (2006) and Gravity (2013). I take as my point of reference the debate over the ideological underpinnings of depth and duration in film images (Comolli, 1972; Bordwell, 1997), which has recently expanded into a broader imperative to discover the ideology (or even meaning) of a digital image bereft of indexical substance. If celluloid implicitly ideologised the image through forms of montage (whether a depth/duration image itinerary, or an Eisensteinian perceptual and affective conflict), what is the ideological and political consequence of an image divorced from its referent (Manovich, 2001; Shaviro, 2007)?

Bruce Isaacs is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney. He works primarily in the field of film aesthetics, with a special interest in the deployment of technology in the development of aesthetic forms. His most recent book, The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle, was published by Bloomsbury in 2013.


The Sovereign Woman from Lubitsch to Wilder: Aristocracy, Oligarchy and Democracy in 30's Hollywood romantic comedy
Richard Smith

This paper explores the centrality of what I call ‘the sovereign woman’ in the sophisticated romantic comedies of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder.  The paper seeks to trace the co-evolution of the relation of Hollywood and Weimar cinema, and the genre of the sophisticated romantic comedy.  Further it argues that a grand narrative of hegemonic cultural change can be discerned in the intersection of mobility and sovereignty, and especially as it pertains to the female protagonists of the period of the early 1930s to the early 1940s.

Richard Smith is a Lecturer and Director of Film Studies at the University of Sydney. His principle area of research interest is the temporality and form of the cinematic image. He engages with structuralist and poststructuralist accounts of meaning and its production, materialist and idealist accounts of cinematic technology, and Bergsonian and Deleuzian concepts of time and evolution.
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