Between “the Housewife” and “the Philosophy Professor”: Music, Narration and Address in Ousmane Sembene's Xala

The acclaimed Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene conceptualised himself as a modern day griot (West African oral performer), producing often didactic films that address a diverse spectatorship. Examining Xala, this paper argues that this address cannot be fully understood without attention to the film’s complex music/image relationships, which refigure classical and modernist film aesthetics to mobilise a discourse that recalls oral performance. In this way, Sembene negotiates the tensions of address generated by a spectatorship that is situated in the culturally hybrid spaces between the literate and the oral, the urban and the rural, and the global and the local.

Spectator understanding of error in performance

The development of computer-based devices for music control has created a need to study how spectators understand new performance technologies and practices. As a part of a larger project examining how interactions with technology can be communicated to spectators, we present a model of a spectator's understanding of error by a performer. This model is broadly applicable throughout HCI, as interactions with technology are increasingly public and spectatorship is becoming more common.

For the Good of the Game(?): The Legacy of the Football Trust, the Football Pools & the Dangerous Seduction of Political Promise

During the late twentieth century, the United Kingdom’s football infrastructure and spectatorship underwent transformation as successive stadia disasters heightened political and public scrutiny of the game and prompted industry change. Central to this process was the government’s formation of an independent charitable organization to oversee subsequent policy implementation and grant-aid provision to clubs for safety, crowd, and spectator requirements. This entity, which began in 1975 focusing on ground improvement, developed into the Football Trust. The Trust was funded directly by the football pools companies who ran popular low-stakes football betting enterprises. Working in association with the Pools Promoters Association (PPA), and demonstrating their social responsibility towards the game’s constituents, the pools resourced a wide array of Trust activities. Yet irrespective of government mandate, the PPA and Trust were continually confronted by political and economic obstacles that threatened the effectiveness of their arrangements. In this paper the history of the Football Trust is investigated, along with its partnership with the PPA, and its relationship with the government within the context of broader political shifts, stadia catastrophes, official inquiries, and commercial threats. It is contended that while the Trust/PPA partnership had a respectable legacy, their history afforded little protection against adverse contemporary conditions.

Readjusting our Sporting Sites/Sight: Sportification and the Theatricality of Social Life

This paper points out the potential of using sport for the analysis of society. Cultivated human movement is a specific social and cultural subsystem (involving sport, movement culture and physical culture), yet it becomes a part of wider social discourses by extending some of its characteristics into various other spheres. This process, theorised as sportification, provides as useful concept to examine the permeation of certain phenomena from the area of sport into the social reality outside of sport. In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of sportification which we parallel with visual culture and spectatorship practices in the Renaissance era. The emphasis in our investigation is on theatricality and performativity; particularly, the superficial spectator engagement with modern sport and sporting spectacles. Unlike the significance afforded to visualisation and deeper symbolic interpretation in Renaissance art, contemporary cultural shifts have changed and challenged the ways in which the active and interacting body is positioned, politicised, symbolised and ultimately understood. We suggest here that the ways in which we view sport and sporting bodies within a (post)modern context (particularly with the confounding amalgamations of signs and symbols and emphasis on hyper-realities) has invariably become detached from sports’ profound metaphysical meanings and resonance. Subsequently, by emphasising the associations between social theatrics and the sporting complex, this paper aims to remind readers of ways that sport—as a nuanced phenomenon—can be operationalised to help us to contemplate questions about nature, society, ourselves and the complex worlds in which we live.

O auteur a ver-se a si mesmo ao espelho: as alegorias do enunciador em Jean Cocteau

ABSTRACT - Jean Cocteau, French cinema auteur avant la lettre, has consecrated his uniqueness to the defense of the “poet” and the promotion of its artistic ideals, before the French Nouvelle Vague inspired the break away from the filmic tradition and ahead of the eulogistic tendency to consider the director the undisputed creative entity of the filmmaking process. The Orphic trilogy expresses Cocteau’s cinematic philosophy in action. In other words, it reveals the way by which the creative entity affirms itself as the major filmic enunciator, through an allegorical relationship with vision. Therefore, Cocteau’s self-reflexive metacinema conjoins, in a fertile attunement, the starting point and the ultimate goal, the creation and the reception. Without being exactly a cinema about the cinema, this artistic practice is, nonetheless, very much with the cinema, feeding as it does on its essence. The films Le Sang d’un poète (“The Blood of a Poet”, 1932), Orphée (“Orpheus”, 1950) and Le Testament d’Orphée, ou ne me demandez pas pourquoi! (“Testament of Orpheus”, 1960) recreate, in allegorical form, the double creative function: the look of the directing entity reflects the gaze of the observer, just as this one always restores the presence of the creator. In short: Cocteau’s films, more than anyone else’s, deliberately reflect its auteur as enunciator.

De l'animation des images fixes dans "Me and You and Everyone we Know" : photographie, vidéo, cinéma

Ce mémoire de maîtrise porte sur l’animation des images fixes dans le film Me and You and Everyone we Know réalisé en 2005 par Miranda July, et tout particulièrement sur les pratiques artistiques de la protagoniste Christine Jeperson, qui est artiste vidéaste. L’objet de cette étude se fonde sur les matériaux utilisés par l’artiste-protagoniste elle-même, et vise en premier la photographie, puisqu’elle travaille toujours à partir de photos amateur, de clichés, d’images banales, qu’elle tente d’animer par le biais de la vidéo et de leur mise en récit. Ces deux dispositifs d’animation, qui à leur façon redonnent du temps et du mouvement aux images, réalisent un déplacement de valeur en en faisant de l’art et déploient du même coup un espace propre à une certaine expérience esthétique du spectateur, car c’est dans son imaginaire que peut véritablement se produire l’animation de ces images. Ainsi, dans ce mémoire, je tenterai tout à la fois de me concentrer sur ce détail du film que sont les œuvres de Christine, mais en cherchant à les mettre en relation avec d’autres moments du film, avec ce qui semble être les motifs privilégiés de la pratique de Miranda July, de même qu’avec d’autres moments de l’histoire de l’art, afin d’en historiciser la démarche. Ce travail servira donc à éclairer une pratique d’images contemporaine singulière, à la croisée entre photographie, vidéo et film.

Expérience hétérotopique du cinéma : approches théoriques et historiographiques du cinéma en salle

Nous exposons dans ce mémoire les principes qui fondent, au sein de la discipline des études cinématographiques, une conception théorique de la réception d’images animées reposant sur la modalité de consommation spécifique du cinéma en salle. Notre analyse d’un ensemble représentatif d’approches théoriques et historiographiques de l’expérience cinématographique permet de relever les principes qui orientent la conception de différentes formes de médialité conférées à l’expérience du cinéma en salle. Les théories du dispositif et du signifiant imaginaire de Jean-Louis Baudry et Christian Metz proposent une conception de l’expérience du cinéma en salle qui met l’accent sur les effets de transparence médiatique de certaines composantes des salles de cinéma sur les spectateurs ainsi que sur le caractère imaginaire, symbolique et institutionnel de ces médiations. La sémio-pragmatique de Roger Odin et l’approche historiographique de la New Cinema History telle que présentée par Robert C. Allen et Richard Maltby proposent une conception de l’opacité médiatique de l’ensemble complexe des effets de médiation sensorielle, relationnelle, sociale et économique de l’expérience du cinéma en salle et dont les spectateurs font l’épreuve sur toute l’étendue de ce type de site d’exploitation et sur toute la durée de son occupation spectatorielle. Au terme de notre analyse, les différents principes relevés permettent de formuler la notion d’expérience hétérotopique du cinéma pour désigner la conception de l’expérience du cinéma en salle qui caractérise la compréhension de la réception d’images animées dans le cadre des études cinématographiques.

Du Linéaire au Stellaire, du film au webdocumentaire : un dispositif de réflexion et de communication sur le réel

Ce texte de mémoire est accompagné du webdocumentaire interactif : De la chaise à la mer, disponible à l'adresse http://www.delachaisealamer.net.

'he perceives himself as a caterpillar […]' constructions of the disabled subject in the critical response to Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rear Window'

This chapter focuses on critical responses to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, especially their construction of disability. The suggestion is that such criticism takes the disabled body to be both necessary and superfluous to the meaning of the film, a difficulty that, I argue, can be read more widely within film theory. Ever since Christian Metz’s ‘the Imaginary Signifier’, the condition of being ‘bound to a wheelchair’ is understood to have a resonance for theories of film spectatorship, but only ever in a sense that does away with the wheelchair as a mark of difference.

Regurgitated bodies: presenting and representing trauma in 'The Act of Killing'

Focusing on The Act of Killing, this chapter examines how an “ethics of realism” operates on three key cinematic arenas: genre, authorship and spectatorship. As far as genre is concerned, the film’s realist commitment emerges from where it is least expected, namely from Hollywood genres, such as the musical, the film noir and the western, which are used as documentary, that is to say, as a fantasy realm where perpetrators can confess to their crimes without restraints or fear of punishment, but which nonetheless retains the evidentiary weight of the audiovisual medium. Authorship, in turn, translates as Oppenheimer’s unmistakable auteur signature through his role of self-confessed “infiltrator” who disguises as a sympathiser of the criminals in order to gain first-hand access to the full picture of their acts. One of them, the protagonist Anwar Congo, is clearly affected by post-traumatic stress disorder, and his repetitive reliving of his killings is made to flare up in front of the camera so as to bring back the dead to the present time in their material reality, through his own body, including a harrowing scene of the actor’s unpredictable and uncontrollable retching as he re-enacts the killing of his victims through strangulation. Finally, in the realm of spectatorship, the usual process of illusionistic identification on the part of the spectator is turned onto its head by means of disguising these criminals as amateur filmmakers, led to shoot, act within, and then watch their own film within the film so as to force them to experience beyond any illusion the suffering they had caused.

Categories & order systems: Claude Parent and The Serving Library intersections of architecture, art and editorial design

This paper discusses the work of Claude Parent and The Serving Library, considering the critiques generated by their intersecting of architecture, art and editorial design. Through focus on the ways in which hosting environment, architecture and forms of expanded publishing can serve to dissolve disciplinary boundaries and activities of production, spectatorship and reception, it draws on the lineage of 1960s/70s Conceptual Art in considering these practices as a means through which to escape medium specificity and spatial confinement. Relationships between actual and virtual space are then read against this broadening of aesthetic ideas and the theory of critical modernity.

Anglo-Indians in Hollywood, Bollywood and arthouse cinema

Apart from a few disparaging remarks about offensive stereotypes by Anglo-Indian writers and politicians such as Gloria Jean Moore, Frank Anthony and Gillian Hart, critics have paid very little attention to the representation of “mixed-race” Anglo-Indians in the cinema. Drawing on screen theory and recent theories of cinema spectatorship, this essay provides a comparative analysis of how Hollywood, Bollywood and arthouse films represent Anglo-Indians. More specifically, it analyses three paradigmatic films: Bhowani Junction (1956), Julie (1975), and 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981). Combining formal analysis of narrative structure, mise-en-scegravene and genre with historical analysis, the paper examines the ideological work performed by these texts, which use Anglo-Indians to dramatise specific political conflicts in India such as those generated by the British partition of India in 1947 and the more recent issue of globalisation.

Clichéd gaze of the migrant on the Australian screen

The thesis takes up the question of the representation of the migrant on the Australian screen in terms of a specific set of concerns around the notions of stereotype and self-reflexivity. The stereotype is read as a self-referential image: hence, as a question of film spectatorship and identity; in short as an unconscious reflex or self image. The text of the thesis is in two parts: part one, comprises the production of the film ‘Italians at home’. It is the major component of research and text which, for this purpose, has been copied and submitted hereto on VHS video cassette. Part two, includes an analysis and discussion of the television documentary ‘The migrant experience’, and an exegesis, of the production, narrative and reception of the film ‘Italians at home’. The migrant experience is read and discussed as an exemplary text of dominant, stereotyped discourse of cultural difference; while ‘Italians at home’ is proposed as a parallel text and a self-reflexive reading and criticism of such a text. Both the television documentary and the film, deal with the representation and problematic of homogenised representations of ethnicity. In the case of ‘The migrant experience’, it is argued, that the figure of the migrant as other and self-image, functions as an object of Australian culture and discourse of national identity within a logic of representation of binary structures; while the film ‘Italians at home’, the question of self-referentiality is seen in terms of the viewing subject and a problematic of film representation; thus, the film attempts to make such signifying structures, visual codes and agreed assumptions of otherness visible, while, at the same time, attempting to displace them or pose them as a problem of representation or reading for the viewer.

Women as consumers of a male domain : Australian Rules Football and its female fans

Looked at from a global perspective, sports are mostly male preserves. Those played by women seldom attract a large spectatorship and the numerous at-ground viewers of men’s play mostly are men. An exception is Australian Rules Football (AFL), a male sport that since the 19th century has drawn a considerable female following, with women accounting for about half of the ‘live’ crowds. From single-person and focus group interviews conducted with female AFL fans, we examine how women voice their support for a sport characterised by hyper-masculinity in players’ on-field and off-field behaviours, in the organisation and control of the sport, and in the ‘natural’ authority credited to men’s voices in commentary and interpretation of it. Given their marginalisation in AFL and in sports generally, what do women fans gain from their avid support of AFL and how does this influence the construction of their identities as women? We examine these issues from a perspective supporting the idea of multiple, fragmented identities.

The future of football is female : a case of fan-tastic imaginings?

Consistent with FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s proclamation that the future of football is female, the Australian Football League (AFL) has instituted a range of initiatives in an attempt to present a ‘female friendly’ face and garner women’s support for the national game. Given the large number of women who follow the AFL, especially in comparison to other football codes nationally, it’s worth considering the motivations behind the AFL’s tactics. To what extent does what the AFL think women want correlate with women supporters’ experiences and realities of being a football fan? This paper presents findings from semi-structured and focus group interviews with female AFL fans to gauge their perceptions of being an Australian rules football supporter and its impact on their lived experiences and sense of self. The responses of women supporters are critically assessed in order to contemplate how women negotiate gender identity through their support of a male dominated sport. As well as offering insights into the role gender plays in leisure pursuits such as sport spectatorship, this paper considers how femininity and masculinity might be contested and/or remade through the practice of following football in the Australian context. By demonstrating the range and diversity of women’s experiences, this research has the capacity to generate alternative imaginings of fanship and sporting community beyond gender stereotypes.