2018 Keynotes
Professor Erica Carter
Kings College London
What is the distribution of the sensible? Cinema and mobility in the postwar white Atlantic
In October 1948, the Austrian émigré Erna Felfernig set sail for the Bahamas, having secured a position there in the British Empire’s Overseas Nursing Service. Erna’s career as a colonial nurse would later take her to West Africa, alongside travelling companions recruited from groups new to colonial service: working-class grammar school boys, or female white-collar workers mobilized in a modernisation drive designed to help Britain ride out the ruptures of decolonisation, and cement neo-colonial dependencies across an expanding Commonwealth. But Erna’s generational peers were not her sole companions. Travelling with her through the circuits of the postwar ‘white Atlantic’ was the paraphernalia of a middle-class white European leisure culture: illustrated magazines and newspapers, consumer commodities, and most centrally, films, music, dance modes and behavioural styles whose images, sounds and rhythms helped shape the colonial territories as a recognizable expatriate home. Drawing on writing on cinema and distribution both in media history, and in the political aesthetics of Rancière and Benjamin, this lecture asks how the story of Erna and her contemporaries might shed light on the part played by film and cinema in the fashioning of racialized, classed and gendered senses of community and belonging, including in the highly mobile context of the postwar white colonial tour.
Dr Amelie Hastie
Amherst College
Theoretical legacies and speculative histories: Loving women of the New Hollywood
The dominant model of “spectatorship,” designed through psychoanalytic and ideological theories of film, emerged in the US and the UK in the early 1970s. Much of the critical work that developed this particular theory of film (and theory of the spectator) was grounded in Classical Hollywood cinema. And that visual work that sought in parallel to destabilize spectatorship arose, particularly if scholarly approaches to film are the primary indication, in 1970s experimental form. In this presentation I will reconsider our feminist theoretical legacies from this era through an intersection between psychoanalytic, cinephilic, and phenomenological approaches in relation to three films of the era which were paid little or no attention by feminist theory of the time: Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970), Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971), and Sounder (Martin Ritt, 1972). Turning to these films through a different theoretical address enables me to imagine a “speculative history” of theory in which our practice of spectatorship is grounded not in a struggle for control over the moving image but in a form of viewing in which the messiness of emotions and perceptual experience can give way to a sense of—and even demand for—compassion. I want to thus ask: can vulnerability reject secondary (and primary) forms of identification yet allow for compassion not just for characters but for a way of seeing the world in which they—and we—live?
Dr Joshua Yumibe
Michigan State University
Chromatic Modernity: Standardization and Experimentation in 1920s Cinema
Colour today is by and large a readymade, purchased prefabricated with the help of match-able colour cards and digital indexes that allow one to choose the ideal hue, saturation, and combinations for the job at hand. This was not always the case, for at one time most pigments were profoundly expensive and required trained specialists to prepare. Our modern sense of colour as a standardized commodity dates to the middle of the nineteenth century when the colorant industry switched from natural dyes to cheaper anilines, allowing for colour to expand rapidly across media, and cinema’s origins are rooted in this chromatic revolution. As the lecture will detail, this change in colour’s materiality also marked a transformation in the industrial field, as modern colorant, pharmaceutical, and chemical conglomerates emerged to reshape and standardize research and production methods across a range of global industries in the early twentieth century, including cinema. Tracking the industrial standardization of colour and cinema illuminates a structural transformation in knowledge production during the era, which was one of the key factors that enabled cinema to crystalize into a vernacular medium of its own during the chromatic modernity of the 1920s.
