"Re-imagining animation : the changing face of the moving image by Paul Wells and Johnny Hardstaff" (Book Review)

Advances in digital technology have caused a radical shift in moving image culture. This has occurred in both modes of production and sites of exhibition, resulting in a blurring of boundaries that previously defined a range of creative disciplines. Re-Imagining Animation: The Changing Face of the Moving Image, by Paul Wells and Johnny Hardstaff, argues that as a result of these blurred disciplinary boundaries, the term “animation” has become a “catch all” for describing any form of manipulated moving image practice. Understanding animation predicates the need to (re)define the medium within contemporary moving image culture. Via a series of case studies, the book engages with a range of moving image works, interrogating “how the many and varied approaches to making film, graphics, visual artefacts, multimedia and other intimations of motion pictures can now be delineated and understood” (p. 7). The structure and clarity of content make this book ideally suited to any serious study of contemporary animation which accepts animation as a truly interdisciplinary medium.

Multiliteracies pedagogy : creating claymations with adolescent, post-beginner English language learners

In addressing literacy in high school education, it is important to foreground the particular issues faced by growing numbers of English Language Learners (ELLs). In our increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, this is a matter for all literacy teachers, as well as ELL specialists. In Australia, teachers of ELLs are experimenting with Multiliteracies pedagogy which provides rich opportunities to explore language learning experiences and outcomes that stretch beyond exercises in reproduction in written and oral modes only. This paper documents the practice of a high school teacher who uses a claymation project, producing a movie by stop-motion filming of clay figures, with a class of low-level English literacy learners. Drawing on observations of three particular students, the paper outlines a number of possibilities of this approach for English language learners. These include increased individual agency; enhanced engagement through collaboration; and the opportunity to explore various elements of multimodal text design.

Ich war nie ein Bernhardiner 1933-1983

The memoir was written in New York between 1981 and 1983. Recollections of the Nazi take-over in Germany and their growing awareness of the upcoming danger. Closure of the cabaret of Friedrich Hollaender, where Lotte and her husband were working, due to its "subversive" political views. After the burning of the "Reichstag" (parliament) Lotte and Victor emigrated to France. Life of emigres in Paris. Lotte found work as a foreign language secretary. Victor worked with a film editor. Extradition from France due to their expired carte d'identite. Move to Amsterdam. In 1935 they went to friends in Spain, where Victor had a position as a film editor. They lived in Barcelona until outbreak of civil war. Escape to London via Prague. Exit visas for the United States. Arrival in New York in 1937. Victor was invited by Friedrich Hollaender to Hollywood, where Lotte joined him a few months later. Work as butler and cook in a family. Lotte found only a few engagements in theater and film. Divorce from her husband and remarriage with actor Wolfgang Zilzer (Paul Andor).

Plasmatic Transformation

The session examines the role of the metaphysical and physical in art and animation and how this relates to natural spaces. Soviet Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein saw animation as possessing an ability called “plasmaticity”, the capacity for a being to assume any conceivable form dynamically. He saw each being as “primordial protoplasm, not yet possessing a ‘stable’ form, but capable of assuming any form” (Eisenstein 1989, 21). He was enamoured by the capacity of animation to transform and be liberated, of being able to escape from a fixed and static identity—to embody a "rejection of the once-­‐and-­‐forever allotted form" in which we are held (Eisenstein 1989, 21). Czech Surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer uses a metaphysical approach based on a belief in animism to art and animation. He believes that objects possess a conscious life or spirit, he says ‘Objects conceal within themselves the events they’ve witnessed. I don’t actually animate objects. I coerce their inner life out of them.’ (Švankmajer in Imre 2009, 214) In this animistic world there are no boundaries or rules, no physical or conceptual restrictions; anything is possible, with inanimate objects and places able to become animate and transact in a conscious relationship with humans and each other. This session invites artists, animators and theorists to discuss their conceptions and approaches to using visuals to promote and provoke transformation.

Nocturne

Chris Denaro is a Brisbane-based animator whose work incorporates a blend of physical stop motion and digital motion graphics. This exhibition, Nocturne, uses animation to embody the genius loci of the former Peel Island Lazaret on the island of Teerk Roo Ra in Moreton Bay, Queensland. This project developed a form of animation that harnesses animation’s plasmatic quality to express an in-between state of being, and examines the capacity of animation to push and pull at the boundary lines between what can be apprehended as the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’. The Nocturne constructions cycle forever, with no beginning and no end,only a slightly familiar hypnotic rhythm to describe a continual process of adaptation and renewal. These artworks consider the animation loop as a mental state, rather than a sequence of events which illustrate a narrative. The loop can also be an anxious, compulsive place, divorced from the linear nature of reality, hypnotised in a trance like repetition. Nocturne investigates how conceptions of place are overlaid by aspects of history, memory and the imagination.

Uncanny Nature

In Uncanny nature, Merri Randell and Chris Denaro use animation and surreal photography to make us rethink what we understand about nature.

Nocturne #39

Creative Work as part of the Nocturne series

Devir-câmera: A relação dos estudantes com os equipamentos de produção de imagens em movimento

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo cartografar o devir câmera de um grupo de produção audiovisual para verificar de que forma as novas tecnologias de captura produzem uma transformação na relação com as imagens que poderá ser considerada como produção de uma nova subjetividade. Encaramos como devir câmera o resultado do acoplamento estudante/ câmera de vídeo em suas várias manifestações tecnológicas (handycams, câmeras de fotografia digitais, telefones celulares). Como nosso objeto de pesquisa é formado por alunos de ensino médio-técnico e de graduação, também pretendemos apontar possibilidades para a utilização do audiovisual na educação atuando na construção de novos territórios existenciais, no sentido de gerar processos de singularização através da educação pela arte. Nosso campo conceitual tomará consistência através do uso de autores como Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault; Kastrup, Escóssia, Benevides, Passos, Suely Rolnik; Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Peter Pal Pelbart, Gilbert Simondon, McLuhan, Pierre Lévy; Jonathan Crary, Pierre Barboza, e Phillipe Dubois, além da bibliografia técnica/tecnológica da área.

Film and literature in the legal classroom

The way in which law and lawyers are portrayed in popular film and literature is a fascinating subject not only for the social scientist but, more importantly, the lawyer and law student. Increasingly in law schools, films and classic literature with a legal theme are being used to identify various aspects of legal activity ranging from legal practice (i.e. intrinsic lawyer skills including legal argument, negotiation and advocacy) to various aspects of the legal process (e.g. the function of the judge and jury) as well as important elements of legal and ethical theory. This article focuses on the Law Through Film and Literature option which is offered to law students in the final year of their LLB (Hons) degree at Greenwich. The aim is to show how law-related film and literature can be a useful tool in the legal classroom, as well as providing some insights into how students have responded and developed as a result of their experiences on the course.

Longing and (un)belonging: desire and displacement in the cinematic city

This paper explores the spatial conceptualisation of the themes of diaspora, displacement and desire in cinema, particularly in the work of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Uzak) , Fatih Akin (Gegen Die Wand) and Michael Winterbottom (Code 46). All three directors explore the imagined cinematic city as a site of multiple (un)belongings and interrogate how notions of identity are displaced and disrupted by geopolitics, by the city and by cinema itself. Both Ceylan and Akin’s visions of Istanbul are haunted by Beyoglu, both as the site of Istanbul’s contemporary cultural regeneration and by unspoken histories repressed by the Republic’s offical rhetoric of Turkish identity. In contrast Akin and Winterbottom’s heterotopias of the hotel and the hospital provide possible metaphors for these dislocated global identities. This paper will engage with a series of questions. What is the (imagined) place created between the viewer and the screen, or is it a non-place? Do the identities/ memories created there produce a ‘third space’? This paper uses Winnicot, Soja and Bhabha to ask what that third space might be and its consequences for a contemporary global Turkish identity. If these films depict a (Freudian) screen memory of dislocated subjectivities then what is being suppressed and sutured?