[Commlist] "Displacement in Film and Visual Culture": BIMI-PItt Research Workshop

Here is a revised and updated programme for the BIMI-Pitt Research 
Workshop next week -- "Displacement in Film and Visual Culture".


[...]

*_BIMI-PITT RESEARCH WORKSHOP: “DISPLACEMENT IN FILM AND VISUAL 
CULTURE”,  WEDNESDAY 15 – FRIDAY 17 MAY 2019_*

The third edition of the biennial research workshop organised by 
Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) and the University of 
Pittsburgh Film Programme will take place Wednesday 15 May to Friday 17 
May 2019 in Birkbeck Cinema.

The idea of the workshop is to bring together faculty and postgraduate 
students from Birkbeck and Pittsburgh to share their ongoing research, 
to get to know each other in person, and to develop collaborative 
research projects together.

Previous editions – “Cinema and the City” (2015) and “Urban Change” 
(2017) – have been both productive and enjoyable occasions, generating 
several joint research initiatives, including journal publications, 
student and staff exchanges, public lectures, curatorial projects, and 
study days.

The forthcoming edition is entitled “Displacement”, a theme that for the 
purposes of the workshop can be interpreted from any angle or approach, 
as long as there is some connection to film, moving image, or visual 
culture.

The workshop is free and open to all, regardless of institutional 
affiliation.

If you would like to attend the workshop, please register here, as this 
will help us to know who is coming:

DAY ONE, Wednesday 15 
May:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bimi-pitt-research-workshop-displacement-in-film-and-visual-culture-tickets-60916029484

DAY TWO, Thursday 16 May: 
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bimi-pitt-research-workshop-displacement-in-film-and-visual-culture-tickets-60916380534

DAY THREE, Friday 17 May: 
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bimi-pitt-research-workshop-displacement-in-film-and-visual-culture-tickets-60916637302

Alternatively, you can let us know by email ((bimi /at/ bbk.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(bimi /at/ bbk.ac.uk)>). We look forward to seeing you there, as it is 
the quality of discussion and conversation that has made the previous 
workshops such memorable events.

Below and attached, you will find the timetable for this year’s workshop…

Best wishes, Michael Temple, Catherine Grant, Matthew Barrington, on 
behalf of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image

[…]

*_TIMETABLE FOR BIMI-PITT RESEARCH WORKSHOP: “DISPLACEMENT IN FILM AND 
VISUAL CULTURE”,  WEDNESDAY 15 – FRIDAY 17 MAY 2019_*

**

*DAY ONE: Wednesday 15 May, Birkbeck Cinema*

**

*Morning session 10:30-12:30*

**

*Panel #1: Displacing Animation*

**

*_1.A. Unmoored Realism in Irish Animation: the Multiple Migrations of 
Cartoon Saloon_*

Speaker: Alison Patterson (in collaboration with Dana Och)

*Abstract: *Irish cinema has inhabited an intermediate position since 
its institutionalization. Before then “Irish Cinema” existed only in 
between, in the glimpses of people and spaces in location shooting of 
foreign productions.  Irish animation’s history runs parallel to that of 
live action film. We examine the work – labour and products – of the 
Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, as it moves between national identity and 
the pressures and opportunities in animation that is both 
boundary-crossing and highly local. Stylistically, their films have been 
described as between institutional styles of realism and 
transnationalization of the superflat for their specifically Irish 
features (/Secret of Kells/,/Song of the Sea/) and the third of the 
“Irish Trilogy” (/Wolf Walkers/, in production). Additionally, Cartoon 
Saloon has produced full features and segments set outside of Ireland 
exploring alterity in body, dress, and religion, and streaming service 
shows with transnational production, distribution and reception. Two 
contemporaneous works – the studio’s contribution to the adaptation of 
Khalil Gibran’s /The Prophet/(2014), and the “Storyteller’s Cavern” in 
both /Song of the Sea/(2014) and /VR/(2017) – exemplify movement across 
national borders and migration between media forms. Cartoon Saloon 
articulates an identity both Irish and transnational, in its subjects, 
techniques for perspective, and material form.

**

*_1.B. Technological Displacement in Animation: Imagery in the 
Intermedial Space_*

Speaker: Olga Blackledge

*Abstract: *This presentation is concerned with the questions of 
displacement in animation along the lines of technology and aesthetics. 
Here, displacement is interpreted as a powerful force that increases the 
potential of animation to create new imagery while integrating imagery 
from other media. I argue that historically, technological shifts in 
animation production – such as the shift to celluloid and the shift to 
the digital – provoke several simultaneous processes, including the 
following: the previous animation techniques, even though they were 
displaced, did not disappear; they were integrated into the new 
technology through style and aesthetics; displacement of older 
technologies opened up a space for migration of other media into the 
space of animation, thus increasing its intermediality.

The presentation will focus on the technological shift that took place 
in Soviet animation in the 1930s, when animation production moved from a 
variety of animation techniques, such as drawing on paper, cut-outs, 
flat marionettes, and others, to the celluloid or cel technology. By 
examining the animated film, /The Humpbacked Horse/(Soiuzmul’tfil’m, 
dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano, 1947), the presentation invites to discuss the 
question of aesthetic consequences of this shift and its intermedial 
potential.

*Lunch 12:30-13:30*

**

*Afternoon session 13:30-15:30*

**

*Panel #2: Technological Displacements *

**

*_2.A. The Virtual Walls: Metaphor, Mediation, and Making the 
Experimental VR Film /47 KM/(2017) _*

Speaker: Jinying Li

*Abstract: *In China, the rapid economic development has displaced much 
of the rural population from farmlands to factories. What is also 
displaced is China’s socialist past, when walls were extensively used 
for painting Maoist slogans and images. These socialist legacies are 
largely gone in cities, but remain in rural villages. Filmmaker Zhang 
Mengqi recorded the images of these abandoned walls in the latest 
instalment of her documentary series /47km/. Combining theory with 
practice, this talk critically contemplates the project that I 
participated in collaboration with Zhang to remediate her documentary 
/47km/into a VR film. I consider how the virtual walls can critically 
engage with the history and politics of space-as-media, as well as the 
ways in which this mediating space can be displaced and retrieved. 
Drawing upon the “window” metaphor, I argue that it is the wall rather 
than the window that fundamentally defines what VR really is. Shifting 
the metaphor from “window” to “wall” is a theoretical reconsideration of 
media not simply as systems of visual representation but as spatial 
organization. The VR space in /47km/is such a mediating environment, 
through which China’s forgotten socialist past that is displaced in the 
rural wasteland is recorded, resurrected, and repurposed.

*_2.B. Displacement and Compression_*

Speaker: Jesse Anderson-Lehman

*Abstract*: Compression is what allows for media objects to be 
displaced, to move from one place to another more readily and with less 
friction. Easily distributed and shared file formats lend the 
contemporary moving image a sense of both spatial and temporal 
displacement, where a video uploaded to YouTube in 2015 can then pop up 
again and go viral on Instagram in 2019. As platforms and technologies 
are rapidly displaced, the images are constantly downloaded, decoded, 
converted, encoded, and uploaded, whether on servers, in the cloud, or 
on our phones or tablets. Compression algorithms are thus pivotal sites 
of corporate manoeuvring, with standards agreed upon by the Motion 
Picture Experts Group (MPEG) now facing competition from the Alliance 
for Open Media (AOM), in which Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, 
Microsoft, and Netflix are all governing members. The presence of so 
many contemporary media heavy-hitters in one consortium illustrates the 
degree to which the “free” flow of “open” media makes for good business; 
the displaced cultural condition that results only heightens the ease 
with which corporate interests can exert an ever-greater influence on 
our media consumption habits.

*__*

*Tea 15:30-16:15*

**

*Late afternoon session 16:15-17:30*

**

*_Art at the Frontier of Film Theory: Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen_*

Session led by Oliver Fuke and Nicolas Helm-Grovas

Group visit to the BIMI/Essay Film Festival produced exhibition “Art at 
the Frontier of Film Theory: Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen”, Peltz 
Gallery, Birkbeck; including presentation/discussion with curators, 
Oliver Fuke and Nicolas Helm-Grovas, and with Laura Mulvey.

*ENDS 17:30*

[…]

*DAY TWO: Thursday 16 May, Birkbeck Cinema*

**

*Morning session 10:30-12:30*

**

*Panel #3: Displacing Cultures*

**

*_3.A. Displacing the “Last Western”: Remaking Eastwood and Rethinking 
Japan_*

Speaker: Charles Exley

*Abstract: *I propose to consider the theme of displacement in the 
western through a reading of Lee Sang-il’s 2013 film 
/Unforgiven/(Yurusarezaru mono). Because it draws closely on Clint 
Eastwood’s /Unforgiven/(1992), the work has been recognized as a 
faithful remake of Eastwood’s iconic late western. At the same time, Lee 
reframes the western to focus on displacement, calling particular 
attention to the repression of political and ethnic ‘others’ in the 
acquisition of frontier territory (Hokkaidō) in the 1860s. This 
cinematic reworking of Eastwood is notable also for its transmedia 
sensibility because it draws significantly from manga artist Tezuka 
Osamu’s /Shumari/, a work which explores the imperial origins of the 
frontier in Hokkaidō set at the same formative moment.  In light of 
recent European interest in the transnational western Lee’s complex film 
offers a useful starting point for a larger discussion of how the 
transposition of the western to East Asian soil adjusts our expectations 
of what is overemphasized as being the most American of genres, and 
indeed how displacement examined in this film might connect to other 
examples of the transnational evolution of the western around the globe.

*_3.B. _**_The Visual Ecstasy of 1980s Bombay: The Disco, and Disco 
Films as Contraband_*

**

Speaker: Silpa Mukherjee

*__*

*Abstract: *My presentation will showcase an aggregation of ephemera, 
photographs, flyers and gossip columns from English language Indian film 
magazines. These will resonate in the flicker of the images from the 
“disco films” made in 1980s Bombay. The presentation will be moored to 
clips from disco song sequences from these films. I am keen on mapping 
this lost decade of underground media culture. I refer to this affective 
visual infrastructure of disco as contraband. The precarious quality of 
disco life becomes the contraband object. The scale of desire, risk and 
guilt associated with this displaced and displacing alien culture is 
significant for the project. Using the conceptual anchor of disco as 
contraband the project engages with chance encounters with rapidly 
morphing new media cultures which forged an alternative sensorium with a 
new range of tastes. Displacement here is a tangible event locatable in 
the newness of disco films, and in the transgressive charge and 
materiality of the discotheque; in its actual hosting of contraband 
bodies and events, and allowing the exchange of physical contraband. The 
presentation will generate a visual sleazeography linked to the 
contradictory impulses of desire and paranoia.

*Lunch 12:30-13:30*

**

*Afternoon session 13:30-15:30*

**

*Panel #4: Queer Displacements*

**

*_4.A. What makes Wong Kar-wai’s /Happy Together/a Queer Film? The 
Border, Diaspora, and Disorientation_*

Speaker: Carlos Rivera

*Abstract:*The 1997 queer melodrama /Happy Together/relates the journey 
two gay men, Lai Yiu-fai and Ho Po-wing, make from Hong Kong to 
Argentina. Inspired by a lampshade depicting a waterfall procured by 
Po-wing, the pair embark on a South American trip to the Iguaçu Falls in 
an attempt to salvage their relationship. This natural border 
constitutes the queer protagonists’ object of contemplation and desire. 
As I will argue, we encounter recurring images – namely, the passport, 
the lampshade, and the waterfalls – comprising a Deleuzian amalgam of 
affection-images. In turn, these affection-images exude a common 
quality: a highly fluid, polysemic border that, at once, enables and 
restricts the movement of queer desires. The film, via its canny 
employment of close-ups, transmutes the border into an aggregate of 
affection-images susceptible to differing interpretative interventions. 
Considering the effects of cinematographic techniques like the close-up, 
this sense of disorientation is what renders the film queer. The film’s 
queerness lies in how the border ends up having different, conflicting 
meanings and sensations for the protagonists that vacillate from hope to 
anger and from despair to perplexity.

*__*

*_4.B. Becoming /Trans/: Moving the Still and Queering the Archive _*

Speaker: Jonathan Devine

*Abstract: *My presentation mobilizes the theme of “Displacement” by 
looking at the representation of trans* (transgender, transsexual, 
nonbinary, and so on) subjecthood in /Trans /(Chris Arnold, 2012), a 
nonlinear documentary that exhibits a kaleidoscope of different and 
varied trans* experiences. I respond to Jay Prosser’s claim in /Second 
Skins/that still photography can be at odds with the trans* experience, 
a queer transformation that indicates movement, while photography as a 
medium ostensibly portrays something that is in stasis. Such 
displacement is thus not only bodily, but also temporal. In /Trans/, it 
stems from how the movement of still, photographic images evinces a 
temporality where past, present (and sometimes future) are presented 
concurrently, owing to zooms, dissolves, and fades (in and out). This 
style of documentary plays an important role when looking at different 
representational forms in trans* history, such as the case study, the 
clinic, pictures, and oral history.//Rather than being reduced to a form 
of “irregularity” or “mental illness,” queer/trans* subjects have a 
voice, and are presented as trustworthy in contributing to their archive 
via a first-person narrative. By allowing his interview subjects to 
openly express their queer, nonlinear entanglement of past, present, and 
future, Arnold rather moves towards a sort of sympathetic voyeurism.

**

*Tea 15:30-16:15*

**

*Late afternoon session 16:15-17:30*

**

*_Displacement and the Compass Project_*

Session led by Michael Darko and Leslie Topp

This special session, chaired by Leslie Topp (chair of the Compass 
Project steering group), will present an ongoing artistic collaboration 
between Anna Konik, a video installation artist from Warsaw, and a group 
of Compass Project students, all studying at Birkbeck while in the 
asylum process. Students from the Compass Project are currently 
undertaking a collaboration with Anna Konik, a Warsaw-based video artist 
whose work includes the video installation /In the Same City Under the 
Same Sky/, which focused on the narratives of women migrants in Europe 
and explored empathy and its limits. Compass Project students are 
working with Anna to produce an art documentary or video installation, 
titled /Eight Days a Week/, inspired byKrzysztof Kieślowski's /Seven 
Days a Week/, which will show each day a fragment of the life of a 
different person looking at the complexity of their journey in different 
cultural, political, social contexts as well the reality of 
displacement. With another Compass student (to be confirmed), Michael 
Darko will present the group’s work in progress on the project, 
alongside a screening of selections from Anna Konik's previous project.

*ENDS 17:30*

[…]

*DAY THREE: Friday 17 May, Birkbeck Cinema*

**

*Morning session 10:30-12:30*

**

*Panel #5: Displacing Communities*

*_5.A. “Because We Feel We Must”: Freeways, Displacement, and the 
Cinematic Aesthetics of Infrastructure Development_*

Speaker: John Taylor

The construction of the United States Interstate Highway System 
displaced countless people, homes, and communities, and profoundly 
reconfigured the way that American spaces and built environments were 
perceived and represented in media. While the system is most often 
understood as a manifestation of Cold War-era defense policy, my work 
shows that it was also an aesthetic project to remake the way the nation 
understood itself, a project that entailed the displacement and 
relocation of citizens from /old/rural and urban spaces into 
/new/suburban spaces of futurity. In this presentation I will show 
government and corporate sponsored films from the 1950s to the 1970s 
that articulate an aesthetic politics of highway and infrastructure 
planning. These films were critical to making the case for freeways to 
the general public and to those freeway planners aimed to displace. I 
will further show that such government and corporate sponsored films 
demonstrate that Interstate planners and stakeholders were operating 
within a coherent representational ideology that both influenced and was 
influenced by mainstream commercial film and television, which similarly 
facilitated the displacement and erasure of communities.

**

*_5.B. Black Space Matters: Contested Community Activism in Processes of 
Urban Renewal in Pittsburgh_*

Speaker: William Ackah

*Abstract: *One of the most prominent historical neighbourhoods in 
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is the Hill District. At its heyday in the 
post Second World War period it was home to over 80,000 African 
Americans and was a dynamic multi-cultural urban space known as the 
second Harlem. Nine of the ten plays by Pulitzer Prize winning 
playwright August Wilson based on each decade of the 20^th Century were 
set in the Hill. Today the Hill District is home to less than 20,000 
African-Americans the majority of whom earn less than $20,000 dollars 
per annum. This paper explores the changing dynamics of the 
neighbourhood since the Second World War and assesses the impact that 
urban policy making has had on fortunes of the community. In particular 
the paper focuses on the role played by African American church leaders 
and community activists in trying to preserve the unique historical 
black cultural legacy of the Hill whilst trying to navigate a policy 
environment concerned with regenerating the area and changing its class 
and racial make-up.

**

*Lunch 12:30-13:30*

**

*Afternoon session 13:30-15:00*

**

*_Young Voices @ EFF: Curating Essay Films by Young Filmmakers

_**__*

Session led by Lily Ford, Sarah Joshi, and Janet McCabe

This session focuses on a small-scale project involving the screening of 
essay films made by young filmmakers (16-22years old), programmed by 
students on MA Film Programming and Curating. The filmmakers are alumni 
of three different programmes: the Pittsburgh-London Film Program (with 
the University of Pittsburgh), the Making Images course at the Phoenix 
Cinema, East Finchley, and the Hidden Persuaders film workshops for 
Camden sixth-formers run by Birkbeck and the Derek Jarman Lab. The aim 
is not only to introduce the idea of the essay film as a film practice, 
but also to delve into questions of what it is to programme such films 
for an audience. This collaborative session will involve staff and film 
programmers in conversation, discussing what it is to conceive of and 
direct an essay film, but also how to interpret, curate and present 
these kinds of films in a publicly accessible way.

**

*ENDS 15:00*


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