Panels

Creativity can be proposed as an activity of exchange that enables (creates) people and communities (Leach 2003). Creativity can be viewed as an emergent property of communities. Marika Luders (2009) observes that creativity ‘is now commonly understood as part of what constitutes human beings. Moreover, creativity is not necessarily an isolated phenomenon’.

This panel proposes to explore the question of collaborative practice among creative communities and collectives that are not situated in geographical proximity but employ networking and communication technologies in order to create (and sometimes, be) together. The questions we pose and that we’ll seek to address are:

• Are distributed, telematic, networked, glocal, or other technologically enhanced communities/collectives creative in ways that are particular to the media they employ in order to ensure their connectivity (and thus, togetherness)?
• If creativity, in itself, ‘creates’ communities (Leach 2003), are all communities –either local, glocal or global- potentially creative?

The DRHA 2011 Conference

Proposal for Panel Session (Exploratory Workshop)

FILM FESTIVALS AS CONNECTED COMMUNITIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

(Chair: Dr Julian Stringer, University of Nottingham)

Participants:

(Chair) Dr Julian Stringer (Associate Professor, Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham, UK)

Dr Armida De La Garza (Associate Professor, Division of International Communications, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China)

Dr Nikki J. Y. Lee (Independent Scholar, South Korea and UK)

Prof. Gwan-gyu Moon (Jeonju International Film Festival and Department of Arts, Culture and Image, Pusan University, South Korea)

Dr Sabrina Yu (Lecturer, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University, UK)

Film festivals are a pervasive global phenomenon designed and staged for creative industries networks and cinephile consumers in “all four corners of the world”. As such they fulfill multiple functions for participants and audiences alike, ranging from the defining and understanding of a range of filmmaking activities to the offering of entertainment and display and the creation and sharing of community. However, film festivals are also currently undergoing a period of reassessment and realignment linked to the proliferation of digital technologies and social networking sites, the rise of ecological awareness and spread of virtual festivals, and the need to pioneer new forms of audience engagement so as to survive the current world economic crisis.

This panel considers the challenges and opportunities currently facing film festivals in the digital age. Specific topics to be discussed by the panelists include:

• The mingling of virtual and physical spaces in the film festival economy (Stringer)
• Engaging children and teenagers for film festival audience development in Mexico (De La Garza)
• The politics of media representation of international film festivals (Lee)
• Digital short film culture at the Jeonju International Film Festival, South Korea (Moon)
• The emergence and development of independent film festivals in China (Yu)

The panel will be organized as an exploratory workshop so as to allow for maximum discussion and exchange of ideas. In addition, it will draw upon the presence of leading film festival practitioner Gwan-gyu Moon who since 2002 has worked as a member of the selection committee and jury for the Jeonju International Film Festival (JIFF), South Korea. JIFF was established in 2000 and is recognized as one of the most important film festivals in Asia.

This panel opens up an investigation into how different imaging technologies are employed to render and depict new forms of digital space in contemporary audio-visual media. The function and affect of spatial imaging will be considered within a broad range of films that include 3-D Hollywood blockbusters, documentary and mainstream narratives, and music videos. All three papers focus upon a different form of media, but examine how the creation of new digital spaces signal and reflect a transformation in human modes of perceiving and conceptualising space and movement. All three presentations remain methodologically linked by a shared Deleuze-Guattarian inflection, which allows them to draw their diverse conclusions together through exposing different thresholds within a larger process: linking the cinema and newer forms of digital technologies in a shared process of becoming.

Aesthetics and Philosophy of the Virtual in Tron Legacy
By Dr Serazer Peckerman University of St Andrews


Tron Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010) is the belated sequel to Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982). The film follows the story of Sam (Garrett Hedlund) who enters the virtual platform game of 'the Grid' in an attempt to rescue his father Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) who disappeared twenty years before. While the real Kevin hides in the 'Outlands' of the Grid – a deep black abyss imaged by lines of light- uncontrollable copies of him (self-producing programs) multiply within the virtual platform. From costumes to vehicles and places, light is used like a pencil to create an appealing and stimulating world of speed and adventure. Kevin's home at the Outlands, on the other hand, is designed as a temple; predominantly white and influenced by far Eastern architecture. The Grid and its Outlands consist of visual references to a wide range of cultural influences and aesthetics such as old computer games, new age fusion life styles, Taoism and Buddhism. The film uses these images to draw attention to distinctions and connections between concepts of ‘the copy’ and ‘the original,’ actual and virtual, real and game, the whole and its pieces. This paper shall discuss the image, architecture and logic of the virtual world in Tron Legacy in relation to recent advances in new digital imaging technologies.

‘Real’ Cinematic Spaces: Mediated through the digital.
By Dr David H Fleming University of Nottingham, Ningbo

Examination of digital cinematic spaces should not be limited to special effects imaging, 3-D rendering, or worlds created entirely by computers. In a series of modern narrative and documentary films we can identify new trends emerging for depicting and representing ‘real’ space. These trends are aetiologically linked to previous cartographic representations of movement and space that helped define 20th century cinema, but increasingly utilise new digital and satellite imaging technologies to perceive, render, move through and explore space. Cinema has always incorporated dominant technological modes of perceiving and constructing space, utilising globes and animated maps to chart character journeys and pinpoint locations. Increasingly, new digital technologies and imaging modes are replacing these older techniques and help illuminate a complete sea change in how space and movement are being perceived and visualised by modern humans. In this paper I will explore how new imaging technologies increasingly become folded over and onto filmic representations of geographic space and illuminate new ways of imaging and perceiving our world in the modern technological era. Using modern documentary films like Catfish (2010), I will attempt to describe how digital GPS and Google Earth aesthetics have territorialised and virtually striated filmic representations of geographic space (folding together the actual and virtual), and help reterritorialise smooth cyberspace by folding it back into the real. This is outlined as a bifurcating movement of digital de- and re-territorialisation with human perceptions of space and geography.

Digital, Mosaic and Global: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s music videos
By Yun-hua Chen University of St Andrews

Digital technologies increasingly provide new tools to construct and explore spaces in cinema, or fabricate fantasy spaces that move beyond the capabilities of analogue special effects. In this paper I argue that digital technologies that allow filmmakers to seamlessly inter-connect distinct, diverse and distant spaces, help create a more diverse range of what I call “mosaic space”: a form of space that foregrounds spatial juxtaposition, illusive spatial coherence and body transformation for the inhabitants moving through this space. Through the digitised mosaic space, the impacts of globalisation and its consequent social inequalities can literally be rendered “visible” on screen. The music videos of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu will be examined as illuminating examples of this phenomena, with the illusion of one coherent space being digitally created within the “Avietame” of Café Tacuba in synthesis with more traditional cinematic techniques. Within the videos, we find various melodramatic moments joined together as if unfolding in an identical space. The cinematic space thus digitally creates an illusion of continuity while linking individuals of diverse socio-economic backgrounds together in the same virtual plane. These videos, I argue, provide interesting digital representations of new globalised space.

Dr David H Fleming is a lecturer in Film, Media and Communications at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo China. Since gaining his PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2010 he has been working on completing his first monograph (Blowing Minds and Breaking Bodies: The Philosophy of ‘Extreme’ and ‘Event’ Cinemas (Intellect, Forthcoming)). He has published film reviews, and articles on Deleuze and digital cinema, schizoanalysis and film, the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, and co-edited Cinemas Identities and Beyond (Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2009).

Dr Serazer Pekerman recently acquired her PhD from the University of St Andrews Film Studies Department. She is currently working on the representation and perception of female body and intimacy in contemporary auteur cinema. She has previously published upon issues surrounding the depiction and construction of the body and space within different world cinemas. She is currently interested in digital filmic space, transforming bodies, transnational cinemas, and schizoanalytic approaches in film studies.

Yun-hua Chen received a BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University and pursued an MSc in Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, a Master II at the Université de Grenoble III Stendhal in France, and an MSc in Film Studies. After submitting a research dissertation on City Spaces in Michael Haneke's films, she embarked on a PhD at the University of St Andrews under the supervision of Dr David Martin-Jones. Her current research interests include transnational auteurs, spatial aesthetics and world cinemas.