Evolving Perspectives
It's Not Gay, It's Art : Pedro Almodóvar and the Commercial Art Cinema Auteur
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Macpherson
This paper charts the discursive shifts in Pedro Almodóvar's persona from emissary of the gay underground, to symbol of Spanish national identity in the post-Franco environment, to international art film auteur. Where many commentators claim that this trajectory reflects the director's maturation, and that this maturation is expressed through his films, I instead draw from reviews, trade press documents, and interviews to demonstrate the particular ways that critics, audiences, academics, film festivals, and studios positioned Almodóvar's identity according to their own agendas, as well as Almodóvar's own intervention within this process. When Almodóvar's films began to circulate in American independent film festivals, gay audiences and critics embraced the director as a champion of gay cinema, while the straight press labeled him a "Spanish director." However, since establishing himself as an international auteur, audiences have tended to align the homosexual associations with Almodóvar's brand with a preexisting discourse that considers the films of gay art cinema directors to be addressing universal, social themes through their form, rather than satiating the pleasures of gay audiences with their content. Profiling the multiple, often over-lapping meanings of Almodóvar's identity demonstrates how gay art cinema directors operating in a commercial context have a particular agency in guiding the reception of their films, and the interpretation of their brands.
Terence Malick’s Voyage of Time: A New Odyssey of the Image?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Evy Varsamopoulou
Taking the question in my subtitle from the first line of Jacques Rancière’s book, The Future of the Image (2003), I explore the juxtapositions of image, word and sound in Terence Malick’s Voyage of Time (2016) in terms of the variable range of effect, and the political significance of responses within that range. The cinematographic approach to space-time in the documentary film that was for Malick himself a forty-year odyssey is heavily charged with ethnic-aesthetic configurations of feeling and meaning that bear particular relation to the environmental arts and humanities. This arguably demands an ecocritical approach to cinematic experience, which also entails an ecocritical dialogue with Rancière’s theses in The Future of the Image, testifying as it does to the generic interplay of the idyllic, the elegiac and the apocalyptic in its story of life/nature/the universe; all three being genres that have a long history in the European literary tradition. The emphatic insistence on temporal flux in the montage of moving images signals the philosophical relevance of Bergson and Deleuze when asking what kind of imaginative use is being made of the visual medium. Do Malick’s powerful images conjure an alternate reality of their own as well as an alternative history, inviting us to experience la durée within the recent tradition of the experimental, environmental documentary? If so, what may be the implications for our understanding of the moving image?
Moving Image as a Pre-Show Teaser: Heightening Anticipation and Immersion in Pop and Rock Concerts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Logan Peter Austin
In the hubbub prior to the appearance of the artist at a concert, the pre-show teaser competes with many other areas of immersion. Discussion flows freely as members of the public try to analyze the visual before them and anticipate what is coming. This paper looks at video trailers, film adverts, and other types of pre-show entertainment to better clarify the position of the pre-show video teaser. Phenomenology, qualitative research and lived experience are used to examine the rise of minimalist video, as a pre-show teaser, in pop and rock concerts visiting Auckland, New Zealand. The paper asks where this sub-genre of stage design began and why it has only recently started to appear in pop and rock concerts? It seeks to generate a further dialogue of this expanding area, so as to highlight the importance of this immersive theatrical device in the creation of memorable experiences, anticipation, and connection between audience and performer. In particular, the paper examines two specific pre-show teasers. “Adele’s Closed Eyes,” designed by Es Devlin for an “Adele Live” concert, March 2017, and “Woman at the Beach” designed by TAIT for the Roger Waters/Pink Floyd “Us and Them” concert, Jan 2018.
