Screen Studies Group - University of London

The SSG holds regular symposia to promote public and academic debate. Here you can find information about upcoming events, and also an archive of our past symposia further down this page.

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The Political Screen
University of London, 19-20 June 2015

Venue: University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

Keynote Speakers: Anna McCarthy (NYU), S V Srinivas (Azim Premji University), Liesbet van Zoonen (Loughborough University)

image: Voices of Malaya, Ministry of Information, 1948 (courtesy the BFI)

image: Voices of Malaya, Ministry of Information, 1948 (courtesy the BFI)

This two-day International conference co-organized by LSE and UCL under the aegis of the London Screen Studies group brings together leading scholars from around the world to examine the complex intertwined histories of global political economy and screen media. Panels and papers address the politics of production, distribution, representation, and exhibition of film, television, and contemporary digital media. The conference is also a forum for considering the practices of a broadly configured screen studies and its utility to the urgent necessity of political and economic transformation.

Conference programme (in PDF format)

For the latest updates in the run-up to the conference please visit:
http://events.sas.ac.uk/support-research/events/view/18125/Screen+Studies+Group%3A+The+Political+Screen

Registration:
Full rate: £50, Speakers/students/unwaged: £35
Rates include a wine reception on Friday evening, lunch on the second day and refreshments throughout. Click here to register online.

Organisers:
Dr Shakuntala Banaji (Lecturer & Programme Director MSc Media, Communication and Development, London School of Economics and Political Science) and Dr Lee Grieveson (Reader in Film Studies, Director of the Graduate Programme in Film Studies, University College London).

Archive of Past Events:

2014

Location London: Portraying the City on Screen
7-8 March

2013

London Screen Studies Group Post Graduate Training Day 2013

Saturday, October 26 - From Montage to Mash-ups

The Screen Studies Group invites all post-graduate students and staff to our annual event, which offers the opportunity to think through a topic of current interest to the field of Screen Studies as well as meet your colleagues from around London and further afield.

Programme

9:15-9:45: Registration
9:45: Welcome

10:00: Key Note Address: Pasi Väliaho
‘Unruly Imagination: Analogy, Anachronism and Critique in Contemporary Video Art’
This talk charts modes of critical political consciousness in contemporary video art.

11:15 Tea Break

11:45 Panel I: Machinima – montage and virtual worlds
This panel explores the relatively new moving image form of machinima: animation made from games and virtual worlds, raising questions about the relationships between film and the digital era, film and popular culture, and film and participatory cultural practices.

Britta Pollmuller (Ravensbourne): ‘Artists, educators and machinima’
Andrew Burn (Institute of Education): ‘Machinima as a multimodal art-form: making films with children’.
Chair: Shakuntala Banaji (LSE)

1.00-2.00 Lunch Break

2:00 Panel II: Viewing Montage
Montage might be thought anew as various practices at work in viewing contexts. The viewer-as-mixer may labour to create meaning between numerous screens or events. Or the viewer may be part of a fan culture appropriating and re-purposing the ‘original’ to create a more obscure ‘original’, or perhaps the demands of digital effects thoroughly transform the viewer’s relation to montage.

Jenny Chamarette (Queen Mary) 'Montage, staging song: Kiarostami and Opera'
Virginia Crisp (Middlesex) 'Collective Modification: Subbing, Cutting and Reviewing Films in Filesharing Communities'
Nick Jones (Queen Mary) ‘The Assimilation Aesthetic: Editing Digital Effects’
Chair: Janet Harbord (Queen Mary)

3:30 Tea Break

4:00 Panel III: Critical Montage
This panel looks at filmic re-workings of photographic still and moving images. By placing the original in a different aesthetic and didactic register, they critique, augment, or comment on that material.

Jakob Hesler (Birkbeck): ‘Cinematic Reading. The Essayistic Demontage of the World and Its Images’
Miranda Pennell (Westminster) ‘Critical Montage: colonial photographs and the moving image’
Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck): ‘The Ghost in the Machine’
Chair: Rachel Moore (Goldsmiths)

5:30-7:00 Reception

Note: Participants will receive a discounted membership in the British Association of Film Television and Screen Studies; Details available on the day.

Venue: Beveridge Hall, Ground Floor Senate House, South Block
Registration: http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/study-training/research-training-courses/ScreenStudiesPGTraining2013

Thursday 13 June pm & Friday 14 June 2013:

3D: Yesterday and Today

Film screening and symposium organized by Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) and co-hosted by the London Screen Studies Group

Venue: Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London

Friday 13 June 2013, 6pm - 8pm:
Screening of two stereoscopic films by Zoe Beloff:

'Charming Augustine' & 'Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side'

followed by Zoe Beloff in conversation with Professor Laura Mulvey.

Saturday 14 June 2013, 10am - 7pm:
Symposium: 3D - Yesterday and Today

Contemporary technological developments have led media scholars to look backwards as much as forwards. The resurgence of 3D cinema suggests that it would be fruitful not only to look at its historical evolution, but to also ask questions about the relationship between the screen image and the world it would copy. Does the incursion of the image out of the screen and into our space act as yet another in a series of intrusions into or fusions with our live action world? In short, how does it make you feel?

10:00am-11:00am: Prof. Ian Christie (Birkbeck), ‘Seeing Depth: the long history of stereoscopy, according to Eisenstein’

11:00am-12:30pm: Stereoscopy and the Nineteenth-Century, panel followed by discussion
Dr. Patrizia di Bello (Birkbeck), 'Camera Medusa: re-producing sculptures through 3D photography in the nineteenth-century and now'
Jeremy Brooker (PhD Candidate, Birkbeck) ‘Pepper at the Palace: Professor Pepper’s attempts at projecting stereoscopic images in the late nineteenth-century’

12:30pm-2:00pm: Lunch

2:00pm-4:00pm: Theoretical Approaches to 3D, panel followed by discussion
Dr. Miriam Ross (Victoria University of Wellington), ‘Stereoscopy's optical illusions: Presence and Non-presence from the Nineteenth Century to the Digital Era’
Dr. Rachel Moore (Goldsmiths College) and Dr. Michele Pierson (King’s College) ‘3D’s Radical Edge’ A Conversation.
Michele Pierson questions the relation between illusionism and 3D, drawing on her work on 3D in avant-garde film/media and special effects in popular film.
Rachel Moore, prodded by Michel Chion’s, ‘someday we will refer to flat cinema’, questions whether 3D today doesn’t suffer from problems similar to early sound’s theatricality and constant sychronisation.

4:00pm-4:30pm: Tea Break

4:30pm-5:30pm: 3D Today - and Tomorrow?
Adam May, Senior Producer at Vision3, a company that supplies stereo expertise to the film and television production industries, chairs a panel considering the technical and economic factors that have brought 3D back into the mainstream of these industries. But as a novelty, or as a long-term - perhaps even dominant - presence in the contemporary media scene?

6:00pm-7:00pm: Reception hosted by Screen Studies Group (Venue: Peltz Gallery)

Booking: Tickets purchased in advance online (£15 or £10 student concession) cover both the Thursday and Friday events. For more information on purchasing tickets, please visit: https://www2.bbk.ac.uk/bimi/

2012

Saturday, 27 October 2012, 9am - 7pm:

Post Graduate Training Day: 'Starting with the Senses'

Friday 25 May 2012, 10am - 4.15pm

‘Terror as Usual’ – Media cultures in an age of terror

Symposium organised by Media@LSE and Birkbeck College
with London Screen Studies Group

Venue: Clore Management Centre, Torrington Sq, Birkbeck, University of London
Map: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps/interactive

10.00 Arrive
10.15 Introduction to the day – Shakuntala Banaji, LSE

Session One 10.30-12.00 – Chair: Rachel Moore, Goldsmiths
John Hutnyk, Goldsmiths - 'Sexy Sammy and Red Rosie': from burning books to the war on terror
Mina Al-Lami, LSE – Members to martyrs: crossing the line from online to offline jihadism

12.00-13.00 Lunch

Session Two 13.00-14.30 Chair: Chris Berry, Goldsmiths
Marc Hobart, SOAS - 'Terror As Performance' The Bali bombing on the news
Cristina Archetti, Salford - A communications perspective on terror

14.30-15.00 Coffee/Tea

Session Three 15.00-16.15 Chair: Mandy Merck, Royal Holloway
Guy Westwell - Queen Mary - Terror and conspiracy in post 9/11 US film
Open Discussion: all speakers – What’s old and what’s new?

Registration: Registration is free but places are limited, so please pre-register by May 23rd via e-mail to: terrorasusual@gmail.com

2011

Friday, 28 October 2011, 6pm - 10pm;
Saturday, 29 October 2011, 10am - 6pm:

Post Graduate Training Night and Day - Researching the New

‘Researching the New’ aims to address the methodological and theoretical issues/ opportunities that arise when confronting either new objects of study, or problems that require new intellectual approaches. The character of research has changed significantly over the past ten years, such that inquiries into the nature of different screen media –
their interactivity, in art installations, as projection, via computers, their digitisation, the politics of their distribution and reception – has emerged alongside more traditional perspectives and topics. At the same time, cultural, technological and political shifts have led us to re-address screen history, as the new generates unexpected perspectives
on the old. These shifts also demand further reflection on theory and how we might analyse modes of engagement and subjectivities that characterise our image world today. This event is intended to help students articulate questions that arise while trying to place their research in the current and continually evolving production of ‘The New’.

programme: (click here for a PDF version of the symposium programme)

Friday, 28 October Plenary - 43 Gordon Square Lecture Room B04

6:00 pm Thomas Elsaesser:
‘The Return of 3-D: Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the 21st Century’
8:00 pm Reception, Keynes Library

Saturday, 29 October – Birkbeck Malet Street Main Building
Entrance via Torrington Square Room B36

10:00 am ‘Tracking the Moving Image, Mapping the Screen’ Janet Harbord (QMUL), Rachel Moore (Goldsmiths)
11:00 am Tea and Coffee Room B02
11:30 am New Approaches: This panel will present new theoretical approaches that have been prompted by recent cultural, historical or technological shifts. Chair: Mandy Merck (RHUL)

Pasi Valiaho (Goldsmiths): ‘Tracking the Contemporary: Virtual Realities, Brains and Wars’
Gabriel Menotti (Goldsmiths): ‘Projection Studies’
Mary Harrod (KCL): 'Genre as Working Tool: A New Cultural History of French Cinema through Romantic Comedy'

1:00-2:00pm: Lunch Break
2:00 – 3:30 New Things: The conspicuous newness of technological gadgets, software and formats, as well as the new venues in which moving images now turn up, appear to pose challenges for researchers that are both methodological and theoretical in nature. This panel presents research generated by these new things. Chair: Shakuntala Banaji (LSE)

Diane Carr (IOE): 'Researching Online Multiplayer Games'
Tiago Baptista (Birkbeck): ‘YouTube and the cinema of attractions’
Zlatan Krajina (Goldsmiths): ‘Methodological site-specificity in the exploration of everyday encounters with urban screens’

3:30-4:00 Tea Break B02
4:00-5:00 New Histories: This panel presents work that deals with the re-writing of histories in the light of changes in technology, and new ways of thinking about, doing history. Chair: Janet Harbord

Rachel Moore (Goldsmiths): ‘Tesseract’: Photography and Film Re-visited’
Ian Christie (Birkbeck): ‘Screen History: beyond cinema’

5:00 General Discussion.

venue: Friday Events Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square; Saturday Events Malet Street (Entrance via Torrington Square), London.

registration: This event is FREE to postgradate students from participating colleges, however places are limited and you must register by emailing: ssgregistration@kcl.ac.uk
This event is sponsored by the generous contributions of the University of London Colleges, and the organising body, the Screen Studies Group.

2010