News – CATHERINE GRANT

My Year’s Work in the Audiovisual Essay and Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies: 2017 Edition

2017 has been a momentous year, work-wise, for me.

Below are links to my online publications (including video essays, recorded talks and interviews) and a list of my public lectures. I made quite a few more audiovisual essays than those listed here, several of which will be published in 2018.

So, please continue to watch (and listen to) this space!

I also continued to curate for Audiovisualcy, and to co-edit [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, which has published three issues so far in 2017.

Catherine Grant in Conversation with John Gibbs

“Catherine Grant was to be a keynote speaker at Videographic Film Studies Now, a workshop organised by John Gibbs at the University of Reading in April 2017. As events transpired, the workshop clashed with the interview for what was to become her new post of Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck. She travelled to Reading in advance to record this In Conversation which was then screened in the cinema at the Minghella Studios as part of the workshop. It also means that we can now share her thoughts with a wider audience more effectively than would be possible with a more conventional keynote appearance.”

‘Videographic Star Studies and the “Late Voice”: Carrie Fisher, John Hurt and Jeanne Moreau’, In Media Res, September 1, 2017. Online at: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2017/08/15/videographic-star-studies-and-late-voice-carrie-fisher-john-hurt-and-jeanne-moreau

‘Star Studies in Transition: Notes on Experimental Videographic Approaches to Film Performance’, Cinema Journal, Volume 56, Issue 4, 2017. Open Access PDF: http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.cmstudies.org/resource/resmgr/in_focus_archive/InFocus_56-4.pdf

‘Creative Possibilities’, Viewfinder, July 4th, 2017. Online at: http://bufvc.ac.uk/articles/creative-possibilities

‘Looking at To-Be-Looked-at-Ness: Feminist Videographic Criticism’, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 4.1, 2017. Online at: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/2017/03/12/looking-be-looked-ness-feminist-videographic-criticism

3xSTELLA

(October 2017): The above video was the latest part of my ongoing sensuous-methological research on the STELLA DALLAS adaptations and their relationship to the forms and affects of the maternal melodrama. You can read about the first instalment in this project in “The Marriages of Laurel Dallas: Or, The Maternal Melodrama of the Unknown Feminist Film Spectator”, MEDIASCAPE, Fall 2014. Online at: tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall2014_MarriagesMelodrama.html (this essay has been translated into Spanish by Cristina Álvarez López and published here: cinentransit.com/las-bodas-de-laurel-dallas/)

THRESHOLDS (For Tobe Hooper)

A rapidly and roughly-made–but heartfelt–tribute to director Tobe Hooper (1943-2017) and to three magisterial moments that most terrified me from his work. Assembled on the day of Hooper’s death.

NOT A GRANDE DAME (For Jeanne Moreau)

In memory of Jeanne Moreau (1928-2017).

A video tribute to the intelligence and humility of her acting, made on the morning of the news of her death.

Featuring a film sequence from ASCENSEUR POUR L’ÉCHAFAUD/ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (Louis Malle, 1958, with music by Miles Davis), and segments from an interview Jeanne Moreau participated in with Charlie Rose in 2002 (online here: https://youtu.be/Q1MIYbuV6fk).

AT THE LIMIT (Or, Vice Versa)

Some Deleuzian film-material thinking or -voyaging:

‘The libido does not undergo metamorphoses, but follows world-historical trajectories. From this point of view, it does not seem that the real and the imaginary form a pertinent distinction. A real voyage, by itself, lacks the force necessary to be reflected in the imagination; the imaginary voyage, by itself, does not have the force, as Proust says, to be verified in the real. This is why the imaginary and the real must be, rather, like two juxtaposable or superimposable parts of a single trajectory, two faces that ceaselessly interchange with one another, a mobile mirror. Thus the Australian Aborigines link nomadic itineraries to dream voyages, which together compose “an interstitching of routes” .. “in an immense cut-out [découpé) of space and time that must be read like a map.” At the limit, the imaginary is a virtual image that is inter-fused with the real object, and vice versa, thereby constituting a crystal of the unconscious. It is not enough for the real object or the real landscape to evoke similar or related images; it must disengage its own virtual image at the same time that the latter, as an imaginary landscape, makes its entry into the real, following a circuit where each of the two terms pursues the other, is interchanged with the other. “Vision” is the product of this doubling or splitting in two (doublement ou dedoublement], this coalescence. It is in such crystals of the unconscious that the trajectories of the libido are made visible.’

Text from Gilles Deleuze, “What Children Say,”, ESSAYS CRITICAL AND CLINICAL (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 62-3.

Remixed Film: Bits & Pieces nr. 352: New York, man met camera op wolkenkrabber in aanbouw (Eye Film Instituut Nederland, 2011). Online at: https://www.openbeelden.nl/media/104841/BP352_New_York_man_met_camera_op_wolkenkrabber_in_aanbouw

Music: “Velvet Ladder” by Blue Dot Sessions (Free Music Archive Attribution-NonCommercial License. Online at: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/TinyTiny_Trio/Velvet_Ladder)

Thanks for the inspiration to Stanisław Liguziński and Nadine Boljkovac.

ODE

A follow up to my tiny video-curio SPARKLE (about PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and Carol Morley’s THE FALLING), a new remix-comparison of moments in Jonathan MIller’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND (BBC, 1966): https://vimeo.com/157653540). Also related to this video: EFFACE: https://vimeo.com/104309443.

Reordered verses from William Wordsworth. 1770–1850, 536. ODE:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. (See full version here: http://www.bartleby.com/101/536.html)

The SENSES of an ENDING

A video about the ending of Lucrecia Martel’s LA NIÑA SANTA / THE HOLY GIRL (2004), using insights about the film from Deborah Martin’s book THE CINEMA OF LUCRECIA MARTEL (Manchester University Press, 2016) and Sophie Mayer’s chapter ‘Gutta cavat lapidem: The sonorous politics of Lucrecia Martel’s swimming pools’, in THE CINEMA OF THE SWIMMING POOL, eds. Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch (Peter Lang, 2014). FOR STUDY PURPOSES ONLY – NO SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS.

The video is dedicated to pioneering queer and feminist film curator and critic B. Ruby Rich, one of the foremost advocates of the work of LA NIÑA SANTA’s director, and much other queer New Argentine, and Latin American Cinema. Rich’s career is being justly celebrated at a screening and discussion event taking place between June 21-25, 2017, at the Barbican Cinema (and other London venues) as part of their 2017 Film in Focus season. The event is entitled ‘Being Ruby Rich’ and is sponsored by Film London and co-curated by Club des Femmes, the queer-feminist film curating collective. LA NIÑA SANTA, a film championed by Rich, alongside Martel’s other films, will be screened with an introduction by Sophie Mayer at the Barbican Cinema on Sunday, June 25, at 6pm. For further information, see http://www.clubdesfemmes.com/portfolio-item/ruby-rich-22-25-june-2017-save-date/.

Also see the following online celebration of Rich’s work (with lots of links to accessible resources) here: http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/2017/06/richly-resourceful-on-bruby-richs-work.html

THIS LAND OF BROKEN DREAMS

LOVE ACTUALLY provides a rich vein of cosmopolitan material, reworked here for some post-Brexit reflections and lamentations.

All film clips from LOVE ACTUALLY (Richard Curtis, UK. 2003)

MUSIC: Realismo Visceral by Monplaisir, shared under a CC0 1.0 Universal License at the Free Music Archive: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monplaisir/Baisers_de_Sonora/Monplaisir__Cie_-_FAWM2017_-_11_Realismo_Visceral

SPOKEN WORDS: From “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” (1966) by William Weatherspoon, Paul Riser, and James Dean (lyricist)

HURT VOICES (For John Hurt)

A rough and ready lament for the loss of John Hurt (22 January 1940 – 25 January 2017) and much else.

HURT VOICES from: DOCTOR WHO (“The Day of the Doctor”) BBC Enterprises, 2013; 1984 (Michael Radford, 1984, plus images); THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT (Jack Gold, 1975); THE ELEPHANT MAN (David Lynch, 1980); MERLIN (“Diamond of the Day”, Pt 2), BBC Enterprises, 2012.

MUSIC: BONSOIR by Mon Plaisir, Shared under a CC0 1.0 Universal License at the Free Music Archive: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monplaisir/Lack_of_Feedback/Monplaisir_-_Lack_of_Feedback_-_01_Bonsoir

VIDEO: Catherine Grant, January 28, 2017

MOVIE MOTHER (For Debbie Reynolds & Carrie Fisher)

In Memory of Debbie Reynolds (1932-2016) & Carrie Fisher (1956-2016). Featuring Reynolds singing ‘A Home In The Meadow’ from HOW THE WEST WAS WON (1962). Photograph via Mabelman’s Old Hollywood: https://m.facebook.com/503036713042457/photos/pb.503036713042457.-2207520000.1482976376./1408438325835620/?type=3&theater.

Video by Catherine Grant, December 29, 2016

SIMULACRUM (For Carrie Fisher)

Made in memory of Carrie Fisher (1956-2016) on the day after she died (December 28, 2016).

MUSIC: SIMPLE by ORBIQUE Licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 International License at the Free Music Archive. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Orbique/none_given_1578/17_-_orbique_-_simple_-_always_now_never_after

IMAGES and AUDIO FRAGMENTS captured and remixed from “Hollywood wild child Carrie Fisher bares all” (https://youtu.be/EMv8XyJFcik), “Princess Leia” GIF (http://giphy.com/gifs/star-wars-princess-leia-vmZ1JygedN6us) and “Carrie Fisher Accidentally Holograms Jimmy Kimmel (https://youtu.be/AW5aDJczD1g)

Keynote Addresses, Invited Lectures, Selected Seminars and Screenings in 2017

Participant in Trinh T. Minh-ha Symposium, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, December 3, 2017

“On Lucrecia Martel, audiovisually,” University of Exeter Film Studies research seminar series 2017/18, November 27, 2017

Participant at Fair Dealing conference, Birkbeck Cinema, Birkbeck School of Arts/Derek Jarman Lab, November 24, 2017 (talk online here and here)

Participant at Film and Fair Dealing event, Birkbeck School of Arts/Derek Jarman Lab, November 6, 2017

“Critical practice on the move: audiovisual approaches to cinema and screen media studies,” Opening Keynote Lecture at SOCINE XXI, the 21st annual conference of the Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual, October17-20, 2017, UFPB, João Pessoa, Brazil.

“Sensuous Methodologies: Or, What can we do with the audiovisual essay?” seminar at the University of the West of England, October 25, 2017

“On Lucrecia Martel, videographically, “Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies research seminar series 2017/18, King’s College, University of London. October 4, 2017

“The Rise of the Video Essay in Film Studies,” British Film Institute Library, October 2, 2017.

“Sensuous Methodologies: Or, What can we do with the audiovisual essay?”, Face of Terror Workshop, September 11-13, 2017, NTNU Trondheim, Norway

Participant in the Film Criticism in Motion: Audiovisual Explorations on Film round table event, Locarno Festival, Switzerland, August 6, 2017.

Five of my audiovisual essays curated in the Interfaces, Bodies, Gazes programme by Daniela Persico, Locarno Festival, Switzerland, August 6, 2017.

Guest Presenter and Scholar-Artist in Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities funded, two week-long event on Scholarship in Sound and Image: Producing Videographic Criticism in the Digital Age – A Workshop at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA, June 2017

“What can the Audiovisual Portrait-Homage do for Film Star Studies?,”Keynote at the annual conference of the Associação de Investigadores da Imagem em Movimento (AIM), Universidade do Minho (Braga), Portugal, May 10-13, 2017.

“Audiovisual Film Studies and Videographic Criticism,”Keynote lecture at “Videographic Film Studies Now”, a one-day workshop for colleagues from across the university sector working in videographic film, television and screen studies, Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading, April 3, 2017 (see video above).

Perfidious Albion, an Essay Film Festival programme, curated by Catherine Grant and Sarah Wood, Birkbeck Cinema, March 29, 2017

“Star Studies in Transition: Notes on Experimental Videographic Approaches to Film Performance,” Invited research seminar, Penn State University, Philadelphia, USA, March 21, 2017

“Sensuous Metholodologies: Audiovisual Film Studies”, Invited research seminar and workshop, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, USA, March 20, 2017

“What can the Audiovisual Portrait-Homage do for Film Star Studies?,” Invited research seminar, University College Cork, Ireland, February 6, 2017

Keynote lecture at #Socine2017

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I was thrilled to be invited to give the opening keynote presentation at the 21st annual conference of the Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual – SOCINE, devoted to the discussion of “The State of Criticism.” My lecture (title, abstract and slides below) was one of the launch events at the magnificent Teatro Santa Rosa in the historic centre of the lovely Northeastern city of João Pessoa (in Paraíba state) on October 17, 2017. The event was brilliantly attended and received attention from the state press.

I can’t imagine that I will ever get to speak in a more beautiful or historic setting than this, or at a more significant time, politically and socially, for such an informed discussion of criticism. I am so grateful to the conference organisers (particularly Marcel Vieira Barreto Silva) and the relevant SOCINE committees (Diretoria, Conselho Deliberativo, Conselho Fiscal and Comitê Científico) for their kind invitation and marvellous hospitality. I enjoyed my time at the host institution, A Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB), and the other conference venues (including Bar Napoleon where the Conference Karaoke was held…) very much indeed. I met some really wonderful cinema and media studies people and heard some fabulous papers, including from my hugely distinguished fellow keynoter Professor Dr. Ismail Xavier.

Thank you Socine!

KEYNOTE ABSTRACT

“Critical practice on the move: audiovisual approaches to cinema and screen media studies”

In much of the last decade, Catherine Grant has been exploring the production and circulation of user-generated media forms, like blogs and online video, through personal and professional practice in the contexts of film research and scholarship, and digital cinephile culture.

In this illustrated talk Grant will argue that film and screen media criticism and scholarship have been greatly enriched by the use of readily available digital post-production and distribution tools, which facilitate audio-visual forms of film analysis and publishing, and favour creative/critical methods that turn on immersion and immanence. Indeed, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, a champion of such methods, if all criticism is an experiment on the work of art, contemporary screen criticism is literalizing that experiment, and digitally generating new audio-visual frames for the kinds of perceptual possibilities also invoked, some twenty-five years ago, by Italian critic-scholar Umberto Eco: “The poetics of the ‘work in movement’…sets in motion…a new mechanics of aesthetic perception…It poses new practical problems by organizing new communicative situations. In short, it installs a new relationship between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art.”

With reference, primarily, to her own videographic experimentation (with making, teaching and publishing) over the last decade, Grant will demonstrate how the “sensuous methodologies” of audio-visual essays often frame particularly persuasive kinds of phenomenological possibility for time-based media studies. As well as an exposure to audiovisual argumentation (involving selection of evidence, montage and mise en scene, titling, sound editing and other creative effects), they offer an active viewing process, one of live co-research, or participant observation. Unlike written texts, they don’t have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us. And we can feel, as well as know about, the comparisons these videos enact, enabling us as scholars “to critique affect by means of affect,” as Richard Dyer has recently written.

Grant will show some of her most recent video-essay work which focuses on Latin American cinema studies subjects.

All videos shown in the keynote are collected online here.

Keynote presentation slides are here.

Thanks to Luís Mendonça and Arthur Tuoto for kindly allowing me to screen their videos as part of my presentation.

See a curated collection of video essays in Portuguese here.

Featured image credit: Yebá Ngoamãn

Video essays and roundtable at the 70th Locarno Festival

I was very honoured to be invited by Locarno Festival Critics Academy director and festival programmer Daniela Persico (one half of the marvellous Filmidée film criticism and film education duo) to screen some recent and new video works and participate in several roundtables and workshops at this year’s festival in southern Switzerland.

Five of my audiovisual essays (see below) were curated in the Interfaces, Bodies, Gazes programme by Persico, alongside a selection of videographic works by Kevin B. Lee and Oswald Iten. The screening programme followed the Film Criticism in Motion: Audiovisual Explorations on Film round table event on August 6th, 2017, which also featured my collaborator and [in]Transition co-editor colleague Chiara Grizzaffi, who presented the trailer for the fantastic Per una controstoria del cinema italiano project.

The Secret Thoughts of Laura Jesson (as Voiced by Celia Johnson) (2017), 5’ 53’’
Beast Fables 1: “Your mother can’t be with you any more” (2017), 2’ 57’’
Beast Fables 4: “You should have told me, Mother” (2017), 5’ 56’’
Beast Fables 5: “You’re so very cruel” (2017), 2’
Therese & Carol & Alec & Laura (A Brief Encounter) (2015), 1’ 19’’

Screenshot from BEAST FABLES 4 — Screenshot from Beast Fables 4: “You should have told me, Mother” (Catherine Grant, 2017),

New post at Birkbeck!

I am thrilled to announce that, from September 1st, 2017, I will take up the post of Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. I will be based in the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Arts, housed at the wonderful 43 Gordon Square building. I am thrilled to continue my association with Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (including being a member of the programming group for the annual Essay Film Festival). And I look forward very much to making new connections with research institutes and centres there, including the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology and the Centre for Technology and Publishing.

Perfidious Albion, an Essay Film Festival programme curated by Catherine Grant and Sarah Wood

What does it say about British identity that from as early as the 13th century foreign states have shared a single Anglophone slur to describe British double-dealings overseas? Perfidious Albion: the name for Britain when its government operates dishonourably, is treacherous, or betrays a promise.

The promise of British identity has been much discussed in the last twelve months. Two versions are in competition. Britain in the world, outward looking and open. Britain as an island nation, insular, self-interested, maybe closed. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, as Britain floats off the coast of mainland Europe and dreams its future, this programme looks at how essay filmmakers have analysed the promise represented by modern Britain and estimated to what degree the country lives up to its perfidious reputation. Curated by Catherine Grant and Sarah Wood, it features two recent works by Wood, alongside works by Derek Jarman, Humphrey Jennings, Margaret Tait, Isaac Julien and the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, and Cordelia Swann.

For further info and booking details: http://www.essayfilmfestival.com/session-10-perfidious-albion-programme-curated-catherine-grant-sarah-wood/