Centre for Media & Culture Research Autumn 2010 Events

Wednesday 20 October, 12pm, Room VG11, K2 Building

The Estonian Museum Landscape

Ave Tarva (Chief Treasurer, Museum of Tallinn University of Technology)
This presentation will give a short overview of what is going on in the landscape of the Estonian museums, and the role of the Museum of Tallinn University of Technology (TUT). Since the TUT Museum is still in the establishment stage and a new permanent exposition is being created, the talk will cover issues related to that process.

Friday 26 November, 3.30pm, Room K205, Keyworth Street

Reconfiguring Caribbean Literary History

Suzanne Scafe (Dept. of Culture, Writing & Performance)
This session will talk through the findings from a research project investigating the relationship between Caribbean literary production during the period 1930-50 and the news media that ‘housed’ it. The research focussed on a body of literature that has never been recognised as such, but which forms the basis for more familiar forms of national/nationalist and anti-colonial literary texts produced from 1950 onwards and published in London and New York. This talk will discuss how this material has formed the basis of an argument (currently being developed for publication) about literary history and nation-formation.

Living Montage: the Subject & the Interval in the Portrait Film

Patrick Tarrant (Dept. of Arts & Media)
Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001) is a portrait of the filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Daniel Huillét, one that renders an image of the couple living and becoming on screen, while acknowledging that the duration of their lives lies substantially in the intervals between and before shots. Straub claims at one point that psychology in his own films lies ‘in between the shots, in the very montage and in the way the shots are linked to each other, it is extremely subtle psychology.’ And depending on where you look in Costa’s film, one gets a sense that elided duration is the very ground of the film’s performative articulations about presence and about subjects in time. Springing from the author’s own filmmaking, this paper offers an account of how ‘Living Montage’ constitutes both an applied filmmaking methodology and a tool for film analysis, and thereby provides an example of the productivity and dialectical play of practice-led research.