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<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b>Research Unit in
Film Culture and Theory (RUFCT)<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b>Monash University <o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b> <o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b>AN INTERNATIONAL
FILM AND TV STUDIES <o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b>RESEARCH SEMINAR<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">“MEDIATION OF
LANDSCAPE AND NEW SCREEN TECHNOLOGY” <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b> <o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b>TUESDAY 31 AUGUST<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b>4-6PM<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b>Room S704 (Menzies
Bldg, Clayton Campus<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">Associate Professor<b>
</b><span style="font-weight:normal">Alastair Phillips and Dr Helen Wheatley, <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">Film and Television
Studies Warwick University (UK) <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"> <o:p></o:p></p>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Dr Helen Wheatley<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Title: ‘Beautiful images, spectacular clarity’: Spectacular
television, ‘landscape porn’, and the question of (tele)visual pleasure<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In establishing
television’s difference from cinema, scholars have too quickly dismissed the
medium’s spectacular qualities. Typically, arguments about television which
emphasise comparison with cinema position the medium as visually inefficient
(Williams, 1975 ) sound-led and lacking in visual detail (Ellis, 1982), or
simply ‘less dense, less complex, less interesting’ (Lury, 2005). Theories of
television’s distracted viewership also understand television as
anti-spectacular, and, as Mimi White has argued, ‘the emphasis on the
temporality of liveness on television (immediacy, interruption) distracts from
consideration of the medium’s spatial articulations’ (2004). It is these
articulations, in the form of the spectacle of landscape on television, which this
paper addresses.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Considering the
recent cycle of ‘landscape porn’[i] on British television, I will discuss
television’s spectacular aesthetic. The paper will explore the pictorial
qualities of programmes such as Coast (BBC2/1, 2005-), A Picture of Britain
(BBC1, 2005), Wainwrights Walks (Skyworks for BBC4, 2007), Britain’s Favourite
View (ITV1, 2007)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>and Britain from
Above (Lion for BBC1, 2008), and visual pleasure on television. I will argue
that these programmes presume a contemplative mode of viewing more
traditionally associated with the spectacular in other media (landscape
painting, film). Whilst I reject a technologically determinist argument about
the rise of HD shooting and viewing technologies and the advent of this genre
of programming (indeed, attention will be paid to pre-HD examples of landscape
television as early as 1950), I will also understand these recent programmes as
post-digital revolution television. This is simultaneously ‘slow television’
which allows for a contemplative gaze on spectacular ‘natural’ landscapes, and
also a heavily-CGI’d cycle of programming which draws on a ‘Google Earth’
aesthetic to produce a frenzy of dazzling cartography, showcasing the spectacle
of ‘new’ technologies. The paper will be informed by interviews with production
personnel working within this burgeoning field of programming.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">[i] Steve Evanson, producer of Coast, interviewed 16/10/09<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Alastair Phillips <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Title: Unsettled Visions: Uchida Tomu’s A Fugitive From the
Past/Kiga kaikyo (1965)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">The field of Japanese ‘noir’ cinema is as notoriously
unstable as that of its American and European counterparts. Whilst it is
important to acknowledge stylistic and thematic points of similarity if they do
indeed exist, it also remains essential to simultaneously observe the cultural
specificities of the deployment of these patterns within the context of
particular historical case studies. Examples of this kind of critical writing
are Miyao’s recent work on Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (2007); Yoshimoto on
Kurosawa’s High and Low (2000) and Phillips’ discussion of Imamura Shohei’s
Vengeance is Mine (also 2007). This paper will attempt to broaden the English
language discussion of Japanese crime cinema by considering Uchida Tomu’s
startling epic, A Fugitive From the Past/Kiga kaikyo, released in 1965 towards
the end of Uchida’s lengthy career as a major Japanese film director.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">A Fugitive From the Past (also known as Strait of Hunger)
with its intriguing archetypal noir English language title is a critically
undervalued crime film that spans space and time from Hokkaido in the North of
Japan to Tokyo and from the late 1940s to the late-1950s. Uchida’s distinctive
aesthetics certainly contribute to the atmospheric power of the film: it is
shot, like High and Low, in black and white Scope and the film, like Vengeance
is Mine, is preoccupied with a powerful sense of space and location. As with so
many American film noirs, beyond a feeling of place and a concern with a
distinctively moody visual style, A Fugitive From the Past, as its English
language name suggests, is also concerned with the politics of temporality. It
is this inter-relationship between landscape and memory that I especially wish
to focus on in order to illuminate not just the noirish interplay between past
and present in terms of an analysis of individual’s flawed psychology, but the
implications of relating this to wider concerns about the politics of postwar
Japanese society and the legacy of the Pacific war within the varied social
tableaux of postwar Japan.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><b>BIOS: <o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><b>Helen Wheatley</b><span style="font-weight:normal"> is
Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Wawick. She
has research interests in various aspects of television history and
historiography and has published widely on generic television drama. She is the
author of Gothic Television (Manchester University Press, 2006) and the editor
of Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography
(IB Tauris, 2007). Helen is currently undertaking research on the notion of
television spectacle and visual pleasure on television. She is also
co-investigator on the forthcoming AHRC-funded project, A History of Television
For Women in Britain, 1947-1989 (with Dr. Rachel Moseley (Warwick) and Dr.
Helen Wood(De Montfort University)), and corresponding editor on the journals
Screen and Critical Studies in Television.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><b>Alastair Phillips</b><span style="font-weight:normal"> is
Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the
University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of City of Darkness. City of Light.
Emigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939 (2004); Rififi (2009) and the co-author
(with Jim Hillier) of 100 Film Noirs: A BFI Screen Guide (2008). He is the
co-editor (with Julian Stringer) of Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (2007)
and (with Ginette Vincendeau) of Journeys of Desire: European Actors in
Hollywood (2006). His articles have appeared in a number of journals and edited
collections including Screen, Iris, Positif, The French Cinema Book (2004) and
Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (2005). He is currently co-editing (with Ginette
Vincendeau) The Blackwell Companion to Jean Renoir. Other projects include a
new book on Japanese cinema for the BFI, a study of the films of Jacques Becker
and an inter-disciplinary project provisionally entitled ‘Cultures of British
Film Criticism 1950-1970’. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of Screen,
The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Film Matters and the BFI Film
Classics series.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Contact:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Associate Professor Adrian Martin <a href="mailto:Adrian.Martin@monash.edu.au">Adrian.Martin@monash.edu.au</a>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Head of Film and TV Studies, Monash University,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->
</div><div>Refreshments will be served. </div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">Therese Davis</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">Senior Lecturer, Film and TV Studies</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">School of English, Communications and Performance Studies</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">Arts Faculty</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">MONASH UNIVERSITY</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">Victoria 3800 AUSTRALIA</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'">Codirector, Research Unit in Film, Culture and Theory</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'"><a href="http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/research/">http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/research/</a> </font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Modern No. 20'"><br></font></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br></div><br></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></body></html>