Issue 3: Conference Reports
SCMS Goes Global
Society for Cinema & Media Studies, March 31 – April 3, 2005, Institute of Education, University of London, UK
A Report by Rayna Denison & Liza Palmer, University of Sussex, UK & University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA
For a discipline that has become so concerned with issues of globalization and internationalization, film and media studies -- as represented by the Society of Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS), the primary professional organization in this field -- has been heretofore constrained to the North American continent. But SCMS, which struggles annually to keep up with the rapidly changing world of conferences while still maintaining an affordable and accessible fee structure for all involved, finally managed to enter the world arena with its recent 2005 conference at the Institute of Education, University of London. Excitement at this determination to go global could be felt at every stage of the process, from the online forum for panel calls, to the submission of proposals (indeed, the notifications of acceptance were unexpectedly delayed until mid-December, owing to the unprecedented number of submissions SCMS received). One need only consult the tome of a conference program to note the ultimate popularity of this decision of SCMS to venture abroad.
Previous SCMS conferences have been held at hotel complexes, most notably the CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia, for the 2004 conference; such an arrangement always served to facilitate the proceedings of the conference. Like one-stop shopping, you could lodge, eat, and participate all in one convenient site. With this in mind, the decision to host the London conference at a separate institution, and leave participants to the mercy of the lodging market of London, was perhaps unwise. Many attendees were scattered about the city, depending upon availability and affordability. And the lures of London certainly impacted audience attrition rates. But surprisingly, despite these complications, panel attendance was not visibly affected (even minor panels scheduled opposite scholarly powerhouses fared well, and were regularly standing room only). However, the usual camaraderie that distinguishes SCMS conferences was somewhat diminished. With no easy place to adjourn to catch up with old colleagues or network with new ones, the conference seemed less convivial and vital than in past years.
Consistently and across the board, panel presentations were in rare good form this year. As ever, it was an attendee's market, with many concurrent panels to choose from and very little time with which to work; on average, there were seventeen panels during every session. In addition, and when compared to past conferences, SCMS seemed to modify the program proper itself, discarding late afternoon panel slots in favour of plenary sessions. Consequently, the program felt more compressed and inhibiting. And there were the usual troubles with room assignments; Murphy's Law prevailed, as panels that were obviously expected to be less popular -- and, thus, assigned smaller spaces -- perversely turned out to be in high demand. One such panel was the workshop, "Publishing a Journal/Publishing in a Journal", which featured a dynamic line-up of speakers, including: Jon Lewis (Cinema Journal), Ann Martin (Film Quarterly), and Michael Tapper (Film International), amongst others. As one might suspect, the room was filled with scholars and graduate students hoping to glean the secret of getting published in the film and media studies field. In this author's experience, panels like these, designed with a graduate-student audience in mind, are always well attended. Indeed, the SCMS community would surely benefit from more of these practice-centred, nuts-and-bolts presentations -- particularly as the film and media studies market becomes increasingly competitive.
Inevitably, the myriad panels led not just to uneven attendance but to uneven divisions between the traditional and the trail blazing. Of the traditional approaches on offer, the panels on the national seemed most consistent. For example, the Contemporary Japanese Cinema panel, chaired by Akira Lippit (University of California, Irvine), offered much in the way of appraisals of the Japanese nation through its films, using semiotic and impressive high theory methodologies, but without the industrial and commercial analyses that Japanese cinema studies so badly requires. A similar structuring absence was to be found in the Animation and Nation panel chaired by Lora Mjolsness (University of California, Irvine) which, although it traversed continents with papers on online Siberian animation, the émigré impact on Australian animation and a study of the Britishness of Aardman Studios, never really connected these to either cinema and media studies generally, or to the global importance of animation. Best amongst these was the Australian animation paper by Dan Torre (RMIT University) and Lienors Torre (Victorian College of Arts), which plowed through a vast history of Australian animation before focusing on the importance of non-Australians to the success and longevity of that nation's animated films.
By comparison to these traditionally oriented panels were others striving to make inroads into forgotten, under-researched and new topics. Barbara Klinger's (Indiana University) "Karaoke Cinema" was one such paper, at pains to explain the pleasures of re-watching favourite films, and of quoting film dialogue (movie-oke to use her term). She proclaimed home cinema as a process of personalising the viewing experience, but also of enabling film cultures to take refuge in the domestic imagination. Through repetition and memorisation, new cultural capital sources are constructed encouraging the unending recycling of film texts in popular culture.
'Acting Cinematic: New Perspectives on Film Acting' was another broad ranging and exciting panel. It began with Cynthia Baron's (Bowling Green State University) re-thinking of the Prague School of Theatre Semiotics as a "Useful Framework for Analyzing Cinema and Screen Performance". In doing so, Baron showed just how much work remains to be done to bring together the remits and theories of performance and star studies. Following her paper were two other distinct yet focused analyses of particular star performances. The first by Tamar Jeffers McDonald (Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College) traced the acting styles of Rock Hudson across his melodramatic and comedic roles, noting how his physical movements change in each instance. This was followed by Paul McDonald's (Roehampton University) deconstruction of male and female stardom (using Kevin Spacey and Julia Roberts) showing the different seemingly gendered criteria the media and review cultures apply to star acting.
Finally in this panel, Pamela Robertson Wojcik (University of Notre Dame) dealt with "The Sound of Acting". She pointed to the technology of the cinema and its huge potential impact on the performances of actors, citing Andy Sirkis and digital performance. She argued that understanding the impact of recording technologies and postproduction processes on the finished film artefact are essential to any holistic approach to acting styles. This panel was important not only for its attempts to tie together different strands of theoretical argument, but also for the way it spoke to other significant panels at SCMS this year, such as ‘Women at Work on Screen’, which included papers on female stars, characters, stereotypes and acting by Cynthia Lucia (Rider University), Diane Negra (University of East Anglia), Yvonne Tasker (University of East Anglia) and Martha P. Nochimson.
Wojick's paper also tied into another significant strand within the SCMS this year -- sound.
Five panels, 'Film Sound: Technology, Perception', 'Aesthetics; Film Authorship and Film Music'; 'Hearing Things: Sound in Television, Radio, and New Media'; ''Inappropriate' Film Music and Film Sound: Aesthetics and Historical Content', all pointed towards a growing trend in appreciating the role of sound in the media -- in the case of the latter, specifically the roles of music in film. ''Inappropriate' Film Music', chaired by Kevin Donnelly (University of Wales), dealt with an interesting range of topics from the few errant notes of a melody heard in passing through to experimental pop music scores. Claudia Gorbman's (University of Washington, Tacoma) "Musical Crumbs" in particular opened up a space for debate about what counts as film music, scanning the frontiers of music, sound and dialogue for the meanings of these "musical" fragments.
A further panel of note was 'Television as a Cultural Technology' -- chaired by Norma Coates of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater -- which featured several interesting case studies on international television history, both past and present. Mariana Johnson of New York University offered a fascinating account of the United States government-sponsored propaganda television channel, TV Martí, in her paper, "TV Martí from 30,000 Feet: Information Wars and Invisible Audiences". Intended and meticulously programmed for Cuba by Cuban exiles, TV Martí -- as Johnson pointed out -- has no actual audience; Cuba has successfully managed, for years, to block the signal. And yet TV Martí stubbornly persists, pursuing the elusive Cuban satellite-dish owners; it is, in fact, illegal to own dishes in Cuba. Showing clips from typical shows on TV Martí, Johnson demonstrated the "invisible audiences" that the station misguidingly supposes: rather than reach out to present-day Cubans, TV Martí reflects more the mindset of its out-of-touch programmers, caught in some nostalgic time warp, longing for a Cuba that has ceased to exist. So TV Martí remains an incredibly well-funded failure -- just another tax burden for U.S. citizens to bear.
Other standouts of this panel included Jason Jacobs and chair, Coates. Jacobs, from Griffith University, presented his paper, "How (not) to Sell Television to the World: The BBC Television Transcription Service in the 1950s". Perhaps the most engaging presenter, he effortlessly revealed the result of his countless hours of archival research, focusing on how the BBC tried to market its programming abroad in the 1950s despite numerous obstacles and contractual obligations. Like TV Martí, these first efforts of the BBC represent another interesting failure.
In her presentation entitled, "The British Invasion, Televised: The English Look of mid 1960s American Rock and Roll Television", Coates compared two musical-format television shows from the 1950s and 1960s -- "Oh Boy!" in the United Kingdom and its more unsuccessful cousin, "Shindig!" in the United States. Both shows were similar in structure, featuring live musical performances, and were produced by Jack Good. More of an intent to study at this point, Coates' presentation was nonetheless an intriguing initial inquiry into why the brainchild of Good and why his particular brand of music television, did not survive exportation to the American television market of the 1960s. It was interesting to note from the brief clips during her presentation the significant stylistic differences between the two shows, each rendering the televisual space in markedly varied ways. "Oh Boy!" seemed to define the space more sophisticatedly, using standard editing techniques, while "Shindig!" favoured a much more static, theatrical approach. Perhaps this is a further explanation for the relative success of the former when compared to the latter; such a consideration in Coates' future work on this topic would only serve to strengthen what is already a piece of merit.
A final panel of interest was 'The Cinematic Mind: Cognition and Film', chaired by Dale Cohen of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. This unique grouping of scholars featured two -- Cohen and Michael Kubovy of the University of Virginia -- who hold doctorates in and are professors of psychology. Consequently, the views on cognition posited during the panel were informed and illuminating, if only because they were introduced by researchers in the psychology field; such cross-pollinating opportunities at discipline-centred conferences, like SCMS, are certainly worthwhile. Indeed, in many ways, exposure to film and media studies-compatible theories and approaches, undiluted, can be more rewarding than the typical fare. This author would welcome similar experiences at SCMS in future, as it is an amenable way of revisiting contentious topics -- as well as broaching new ones.
In his presentation, "The Cinematic Mind", Cohen supplied a very concise, balanced, and prosaic comparative survey of the cognitive and semiotic perspectives of film study; would that such clarity could always be counted upon where cognition and semiotics are concerned. Todd Berliner, also of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, offered his paper, "The Construction of Film Space", which reviewed, among other things, analytical editing and how film viewers perceive and make sense of film space and film narratives. Of particular interest was the short piece by Heider and Simmel that Berliner screened for the audience. This film, originally made in 1944, depicts simple animated shapes moving across the frame and is a classic within the field of psychology for understanding and studying human cognition. Most humans, even when watching this almost primitive short, insist on imposing a narrative trajectory to the scene (i.e. the large triangle is "bullying" the smaller triangle and circle). Overall, Berliner's points about classical Hollywood style and its relation to cognition were well reasoned and supported. His argument however, would have been further fortified by an appreciation of the economic imperatives behind such stylistic decisions. Rounding out the panel was Kubovy with his "How Much of the Male Gaze is Genderless?", which queried Laura Mulvey's assertion of the male gaze in her seminal work, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema".
Murray Smith of the University of Kent, as respondent, provided the perfect cap to what was already an accomplished panel. By tempering his praise with criticism, and vice versa, Smith ably concluded that cognition, like most theories of film, is flawed when taken as gospel, but nonetheless instructive when considered in context. The panellists were graced with a sympathetic audience for the most part. Indeed, upon completion of the presentations, they inspired a convivial and engaged dialogue, which continued well into the following plenary session -- an assured sign of success at SCMS.
Ultimately, SCMS is to be congratulated for this bold move abroad -- London was the perfect first choice to ease us into the global arena without shocking our system. Such an enterprise could not have been easy to plan and support, especially given the relatively affordable and egalitarian registration rates that SCMS continues to maintain. But, all things considered, the conference was an indisputable success. One can only hope that SCMS will continue to challenge itself and its members with more exotic locales; indeed, going global is key to the strengthening of the film and media studies discipline, and of the scholars fortunate enough to represent it. On to Vancouver 2006!