JAM 2017 Registration NOW OPEN + Conference Schedule

Registration is now open for:

JOURNEYS ACROSS MEDIA (JAM) 2017: Worldhood and World-making

Tuesday April 11, 9am-5:30pm

Minghella Studios, Whiteknights Campus

University of Reading

This year’s keynote speaker shall be Dr. Daniel Yacavone (University of Edinburgh) and the keynote’s abstract as well as the conference programme are available to view below.

To register, please visit: http://www.store.reading.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/faculty-of-arts-humanities-social-science/film-theatre-television/journeys-across-media-jam-2017

The fee is £30, which includes lunch and refreshments.

Registration will close on the day of the conference, but those with specific dietary requirements are recommended to register as soon as convenient.

Further information and updates can be found here: https://fttreadingnews.wordpress.com/2017/03/13/journeys-across-media-jam-postgraduate-conference-2017

“The World-in and the World-of: Fictional, Narrative and Artistic World-Making in Cinema and Beyond…”

What does it mean to say that a film or other moving image work is a world or that it presents a world? How does conceiving a work’s creation as a form of ‘world-making’ add to a better understanding of its communicative, expressive and aesthetic dimensions? Are the worlds of narrative films only ‘fictional worlds’? In what significant senses do we experience films as worlds?

These are some of the ramified questions addressed in Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (Columbia UP: 2015). Central to their answer is a fundamental distinction between the worlds represented in films and the presentational worlds offilms.  Focusing on this distinction throughout, and following the book’s general lines of argument, in this talk I will highlight some of the ways in which world-making in film and beyond has been addressed in relevant film theory, literary theory, and the philosophy of film and art, including from analytic/cognitive, semiotic, and phenomenological perspectives. I will note the key insights of these views, while arguing that each is fundamentally partial with respect to theorising cinematic works and worlds in their totality, and as profoundly multi-leveled and multi-aspect wholes. Reflecting my current research interests, I will also suggest the relevance of the transmedial world-in/world-of distinction, and related ideas, to an alternative account of self-reflexivity in cinema, partly developed in dialogue with Christian Metz’s (late) semiotic and textual pragmatic account of ‘impersonal enunciation’ (i.e. a film’s extra-narrative reflexive/commentative address to viewers) in the context of authorial style and artistic expression.

Dr. Daniel Yacavone is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and currently Director of the Film Studies Programme within the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. A former British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, with a background in philosophy as well as film studies, his interests include film aesthetics, modern and contemporary film theory, European and North American cinema, cinema and painting, and the philosophy of art. He has published on these and other topics in journals including New Literary History, Studies in French Cinema, and Film-Philosophy. His 2015 book, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (Columbia University Press), has been widely reviewed in four languages and was shortlisted for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Monograph Award. He is currently writing a monograph reappraising the theory and practice of self-reflexivity in modern and contemporary cinema from a variety of theoretical and philosophical perspectives.

Journeys Across Media (JAM) Postgraduate Conference 2017

The Journeys Across Media (JAM) Postgraduate Conference, run by postgraduate students for postgraduate students, is back for 2017 and will be taking place on Tuesday 11th April in Minghella Studios. This year, the theme of the conference is worldhood and world-making in film, theatre, television and beyond.

Worldhood and World-making

In his essay ‘Where is the World?’ film critic V.F. Perkins (1936-2016) laments the lack of attention paid to the ‘fictional world’ and invites a new engagement by way of what he terms as worldhood — i.e. the qualities and aspects that make a fictional world a ‘world’, rather than what makes it ‘fictional’ (2005: 22). For Perkins, ‘understanding the events of a movie as taking place in a world is a prerequisite of the intelligibility not only of plot, but also of tone, viewpoint, rhetoric, style and meaning’ (39). Theatre critic Gay McAuley asserts that, ‘the spatial organisation of the fictional world is always to be perceived in terms of ideology’. (Gay McAuley, Space in Performance, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1999, p18) suggesting that the world of the stage or the performance, however realistic, is always negotiable and provisional.

In memory and honour of Perkins, but also in keeping with the interdisciplinary spirit of JAM, this conference shall bring together emerging postgraduate researchers and practitioners to investigate this malleable concept of worldhood in works of film, theatre, television and other art forms. What are the strategies that govern the conjuring of fictional worlds? What are their devices and mechanical underpinnings, and how can we best understand them? Do their boundaries extend beyond the film frame and performance space? How do film and theatre makers and performance artists reconcile the challenges of instilling ‘suspension of disbelief’ in their audiences? What discrepancies are there between the fictional world of the artist and the real world of the spectator? And to what extent is the imagination of the spectator complicit in the completion of these ‘worlds’?

Confirmed Keynote speaker

We are pleased to announce that the keynote for JAM 2017 shall be delivered by Dr. Daniel Yacavone, Lecturer in Film Studies and acting Director of the Postgraduate Programme in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2014) and a forthcoming monograph on the concept and practice of self-reflexivity as a narrative and aesthetic strategy in modern and contemporary cinema.

More details to be announced soon.