On Thurs 2nd February, Dr. Michael Pigott spoke as part of the 'Cities on Film' series of events at Oxford University. Michael chose the films Dredd (Travis, 2012) and Side/Walk/Shuttle (Gehr, 1993) to be shown as part of the series and the screening was followed by a discussion between Michael and Dr. Peter Wynn-Kirby, who is an environmental specialist, ethnographer, and Research Fellow in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.

Organised by the Oxford Forum and Stanford University Centre in Oxford

For more information about the event click here

"Films about cities are both part of modern urban experience and a mode of our reflecting on that experience. Over the last century both cinema and cities have been in flux. What have we learned from films that explore cities? About cities? About films? About tradition? About modernity? About fantasy? About reality? About beauty? About ugliness? About living? About ourselves? About making sense or nonsense of any or all of these? In this series of Film events, the Oxford Forum and Stanford University Centre in Oxford are showing entrancing films about cities, followed by dialogues and discussion."

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.

On the 6th and 7th of July the Dept. is hosting a conference on Children's Television, organised by Dr. Helen Wheatley and Dr. Rachel Moseley.

Accompanying the major exhibition ‘The Story of Children’s Television, 1946 to the Present Day’, a collaboration between the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum and the University of Warwick, this conference seeks to combine discussion of the history of children’s programming with analysis and reflection on the current landscape of children’s television and its future. The conference wishes to acknowledge and analyse the significance of children’s programming in the broader context of television production, and to discuss its production as both a creative process and a business enterprise. It will reflect on the place of children’s television in the broader history of the medium, and in relation to notions of cultural heritage, collective remembering and nostalgia. It also offers a space for scholars to consider the impact of change on the production and circulation of children’s television, and for discussion about viewing practices and the particular issues raised by studying the child viewer.

The schedule for the conference can be found here: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/research/childrenstv/