On November 16th Dr. Helen Wheatley gave an invited research seminar at the University of Sussex, on the representation of death and the dead on television. The abstract is below:

Television Death

This paper examines the representation of death and the dead on television. In doing so, it moves off from work on death on film to think about the ways in which television mediates death for its viewers, providing encounters with death which may be disturbing or reassuring, offering viewers the frisson of an engagement with our own mortality or holding death at a safe distance from everyday life. I will explore a series of ‘death genres’ on television, including the ‘human body’ documentary, the anatomy spectacular, and televisual encounters with assisted dying during this paper.

Dr Karl Schoonover will deliver the lecture ‘Can Objects Die?: Max Ophüls and Accumulation in America’ as part of the Cambridge Film and Screen Studies Research Seminars. This lecture comes from Schoonover's larger research project on how mid-twentieth-century American films captured modern culture's abiding apprehension towards a world dominated by waste and its toxicity.

The lecture will happen on Wednesday, the 17th of February at 5.15pm, English Faculty Building, GR05, at the University of Cambridge. For more details, follow this link:

http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/film/research/seminars

An international conference held at the Department of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick, 12-13 November, 2015

Click here for conference details.

Organised by Louis Bayman, Stephen Gundle, Karl Schoonover

The release of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City in September 1945, just months after the Liberation of Italy, is a landmark in both cinema and Italian history. The film’s tale of popular resistance in Nazi-occupied Rome brought Italy to international audiences. It announced a new aesthetics of cinema - neorealism - that would have a global impact, attracting attention and often controversy for its bold assertion of the necessary relationship between art and politics. The film is a central reference point for cinematic realism and aesthetic radicalism, influencing movements from the French New Wave to Brazilian Cinema Novo, British social realism and Dogme 95. It remains a key influence for contemporary filmmakers as well as an important reference point in areas as diverse as cultural geography, gender studies, performance, historiography, aesthetic philosophy, and the study of war, fascism and torture.

Organised with the particpation of DAMS, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Universita' di Torino.