Abstract

The Screen Media Group proudly announces its last seminar of the year and welcomes not one, but two guest speakers to CRASSH .

Alison Fornell (University of Cambridge) will be taking a closer look at the Scandi-crime genre with her paper on ‘Loving Television Theory, Investigating the Scandinavian Crime Series The Bridge’, followed by Prof. Amelie Hastie (English and Film and Media Studies, Amherst College) on more recent French film, with ‘Loving Film Theory, Experiencing Audiard’s Rust and Bone’.

Alison Fornell will be engaging with questions of the body and televisuality through an analysis of the Swedish-Danish co-produced crime thriller, The Bridge. What can the body tell us about television? And vice versa? Her talk looks not only at how we think about right and wrong, but also how television more broadly works in the world and what impact is has on one’s very sense of self.

Amelie Hastie, meanwhile, looks at cinephilia – the term we use for an obsessive love of film. But how do we describe a love of film theory itself, she asks? What is the relevance of love not just for the object of our study but also for a means of thinking about it? And how might this love help to order a structure of knowledge? Her talk will consider the cinephilic drive, in particular theoretical writings as a foundation for imagining both a conceptual and a historiographical ordering of film theory, drawing on Jacques Audiard’s 2012 film, Rust and Bone. Her analysis will be grounded in the provocation that Rust and Bone’s insistence on intimate gestures – made via close-ups, slow motion, quick flashes of movement – is the visual manifestation of emotional experience. But it demands something of us, too – to experience multi-directional movement rather than the linear pull of narrative or seemingly straight-forward emotion. Such “multi-directional movement” might be that, too, of a re-imagining of the history and structure of film theory.

The session starts at 5 for 5.15. Followed by a Q&A and end-of-year drinks reception. Open to all, no registration required!