Screening of Black Narcissus (1947), Monday the 4th of November, 6-8pm, the Lupino

Ahead of Paul Mazey’s research seminar on choral music in 1940s British films on the 6th of November (please see the previous post), Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger, 1947, 102 mins) will be screened on campus. This will take place on Monday the 4th of November, 6-8pm, in the Lupino.

Frequent collaborators director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger  adapted Black Narcissus from Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel about a group of nuns who set up a school and hospital in the Himalayas.  Members of the cloistered, and isolated, female community (played by Deborah Kerr, Kathleen Byron, Flora Robson et al) face traumatic pasts, present struggles, and uncertain futures. These suffering women speak to the core of melodrama. In addition, these women’s religious training means that they repress their feelings, though these inevitably bubble to the surface. Such a structure closely relates to the rhythm often seen in melodrama. Godden’s narrative is afforded additional power by film, as images and sounds contribute effectively to its claustrophobic atmosphere and its ratcheting up of tensions.

The BBC is currently producing Black Narcissus as a Television mini-series. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) describes this as an adaptation of the 1947 film, rather than Godden’s novel. This indicates not just the narrative’s continued relevance, but the impact of  Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor film.

The film  is being screened by the Lupino Film Club, part of the Film, Media and Culture Research Group.  The Lupino Film Club screens films every Monday night, starting at 6pm. More information about upcoming films can be found on the research group’s blog: https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/fmc-researchgroup/

 

The sceenings are free and open to all.

 

FREE Digitizing the War Illustrated Tea Dance Launch, 7th of September, 2-5pm, Jarman Building

The Melodrama Research Group is delighted that our friends at NoRMMA will be hosting a tea dance as the official launch of their ‘Digitizing The War Illustrated’ archive! The event will take place on  the 7th of September, 2-5pm, in the Jarman building at the University of Kent. The venue is accessible. 

 

 

Attendees will hear about the project, and workshop participants’ experiences of it, have the opportunity to take part in a tea dance led by a qualified instructor to music from World War I, and be offered a tasty afternoon tea.

The event is FREE, but spaces are limited and must be booked. Priority is given to those who have attended the workshops and/or the Progress Day. Please email normma.network@gmail.com to register your interest,

You can find more information on the NoRMMA blog here: http://www.normmanetwork.com/tea-dance-launch-saturday-7th-of-september-2-5pm/

Please note that the venue has been changed from the original one to the Jarman Building. You can find a map of the Jarman Building’s placement on campus here: https://www.kent.ac.uk/maps/canterbury/canterbury-campus/building/jarman-building/jarman-stud-1 

FREE Progress Day, Monday 19th of August, 10am-5pm, Templeman Library

A brief reminder that a FREE Progress Day for the ‘Digitizing The War Illustrated’ project run by NoRMMA will take place on Monday the 19th of August, 10am-5pm, in the Templeman Library.

The day will give those who have already been introduced to the World War I magazine The War Illustrated on the Internet Archive an opportunity to advance their project. An overview of the archive and guidance with searching will also be provided to newcomers. Those who wish to can then present their work at the tea dance launch on the 7th of September – details in the next blog post!

The venue is accessible, and a free lunch will be provided.

Please email normma.network@gmail.com to book a place.

You can find more information on the NoRMMA blog here: http://www.normmanetwork.com/progress-day-monday-19th-of-august-10am-5pm/ 

 

FREE History Events at the University of Kent in Canterbury during Summer 2019

We’re taking a break from melodrama over the Summer, to turn attention to a project run by our sister network, NoRMMA (Network of Research: Movies, Magazines and Audiences).

We are delighted that the National Lottery Heritage Fund has awarded NoRMMA money for its ‘Digitizing The War Illustrated’ project. The project aims to increase the public’s access to, and engagement with, the important World War I magazine The War Illustrated (1914-1919). By digitizing the magazine’s complete run, and making it available online forever, for all, and for free, we can rediscover these stories of World War I.

Three free workshops will take place at the University of Kent in Canterbury from June to August.  In these, we will introduce participants to the online archive and support them in their own research projects. There will be opportunities for those wishing to gain research skills as well as those looking to enhance current expertise. All venues are accessible, and free refreshments will be supplied.

Participants will be encouraged to attend a ‘progress’ day in August to further discuss their projects. There will also be a chance to attend the tea-dance themed launch of the online archive in September.

The first FREE workshop takes place at the University of Kent in Canterbury on the 27th of June (10am-5pm) and is limited to 12 spaces. Please email normma.network@gmail.com to book your place, or if you have any queries about the events. 

 

For more details please visit:

The NoRMMA blog:

http://www.normmanetwork.com/digitizing-the-war-illustrated/

NoRMMA’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pg/NoRMMA-Network-of-Research-Movies-Magazines-Audiences-1440475542919996/posts/

The TWI Twitter: @DigitizingTWI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Frances Kamm’s edited book ‘Gothic Heroines On Screen: Representation, Interpretation, and Feminist Enquiry’ released

Exciting news!

Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Frances Kamm’s edited collection Gothic Heroines on Screen: Representation, Interpretation, and Feminist Enquiry has recently been published by Routledge.

The book (with its amazingly striking cover) brings together several excellent chapters on the gothic heroine in film and television which were originally given as presentations at the first Gothic Feminism conference at Kent  in 2016.

(You can read more about the Gothic Feminism project, including the ‘Technology, Women and Gothic-Horror On-Screen’ conference, which took place earlier this month, on Frances’ Gothic Feminism blog: https://gothicfeminism.com/ )

Many congratulations to Tamar, Frances and all the authors involved. Several of the contributors are from the University of Kent, including:

in the ‘Bluebeard’s Ghost’ section: Lawrence Jackson’s  ‘Bluebeard in the Cities: The Use of an Urban Setting in Two 21st Century Films’ and Tamar’s ‘Blueprints from Bluebeard, Charting the Gothic in contemporary film’

in ‘The Gothic and Genre Forms’ section: Frances’ ‘The Gothic in Space: Genre, Motherhood and Aliens (1986)’ and Katerina Flint-Nicol’s ‘There’s a secret behind the door. And that secret is me. The Gothic Reimagining of Agatha Christies And Then There Were None’

and in the National Cinema section Lies Lanckman’s ‘I See, I see…’ Goodnight Mommy as Austrian Gothic.’

You can read more about the publication on Routledge’s website:

https://www.routledge.com/Gothic-Heroines-on-Screen-Representation-Interpretation-and-Feminist/McDonald-A-Kamm/p/book/9781138711006

Gothic Feminism 2019 Call For Papers

Exciting gothic news! Frances Kamm and Tamar Jeffers McDonald have released the Call For Papers for the University of Kent’s third Gothic Feminism conference. ‘Technology, Women and Gothic-Horror On-Screen’ will take place from the 2nd to the 3rd of May.

The call for papers:

Technology, Women, and Gothic-Horror On-Screen 

2 – 3 May 2019

University of Kent

 

Keynote speaker: Dr Lisa Purse (University of Reading)

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Gothic and technology appear, on the surface, to evoke contradictory connotations. As David Punter and Glennis Byron highlight, the Gothic came to be a term associated with the “ornate and convoluted”, “excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and the uncivilized, a world that constantly tended to overflow cultural boundaries” (Punter and Byron, 2004, 7). Technology, on the other hand, is a term often linked to science, innovation and progressive invention. If the Industrial Revolution is emblematic of what one imagines a technological revolution to be, then technology becomes synonymous with the associations defining 18th Century culture, described by Terry Castle as “the period as an age of reason and enlightenment – the aggressively rationalist imperatives of the epoch” (Castle, 1995, 8).

Yet technology and the Gothic have been linked and have interacted since the latter’s beginnings in fiction. From the earliest reception of the original novels that give our Gothic films their name, fans and critics alike referred to the “machinery” of the narratives, implying that that the mechanisms that made them go were audible. Clara Reeve, who wrote The Old English Baron – itself is a tad creaky – commented on The Castle of Otranto that “the machinery is so violent, that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite” (Reeve, 2008, 3). And Horace Walpole, himself, made reference to the story’s “engine” (Walpole, 2014, 6).  The Gothic can thus be conceptualised as metaphorically mechanical, a link explored within a different context by Jack Halberstam who writes that “Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity … designed to produce fear and desire within the reader” (Halberstam, 1995, 2).

Technology and the Gothic have also intersected in more literal terms, as with the horror created by the intersection of the two in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). On the one hand, the novel stands as a canonical Gothic text, and Ellen Moers argues that the story can be defined as the Female Gothic, a term commonly associated with the women-in-peril narratives which later saw the influence of Gothic literature translated onto the cinema screen in Hollywood during the 1940s. On the other hand, the tale of an unnatural and scientific birth is credited with establishing the generic tropes of science fiction, a mode of storytelling which is indebted to technology and acknowledges “contemporary scientific knowledge and the scientific method”, as Barry Keith Grant suggests. He also continues: “Science fiction, quite unlike fantasy and horror, works to entertain alternative possibilities” (Grant, 2004, 17). However, Fred Botting notes that the combining of science fiction and Gothic – two “generic monsters” – reveals a “a long and interwoven association” whereby both genres “give form to a sense of otherness, a strangeness that is difficult to locate” (Botting, 2008, 131).

 Our conference aims to explore this relationship between technology and the Gothic by focussing upon its intersection as depicted on screen within visual media, with a specific focus on how such concerns impact on gender representations and, in particular, women. This connection may be explored figuratively: the “machinery” identified in Gothic fiction can also be extended to the filmic Gothics which centre upon the Gothic heroine. The Hollywood 1940s Gothics possess noticeably excessive convolutions of plot, as with Sleep, My Love (1948), and one could argue this trend has continued in contemporary returns to the Old Dark House and horror with films like Crimson Peak (2015). Technology may also be physically present within these Gothic-horror films. If the “machinery is so violent” in Crimson Peak’s narrative, then this is additionally foregrounded within the diegesis: Thomas Sharpe’s engine for extracting the red clay from the ground stands as both a metaphor for the genre’s mechanical plot – drawing on familiar tropes which unearth deadly secrets – as well as functioning as a visual spectacle around which the climax of the film shall take place.

Actual mechanical or technological inventions which impact upon the story may be wide-ranging: the railway, cars, telephones, recording devices, electric light and gaslight are just some examples of technologies integrated into the narratives of Gothic films, often with the intention of contributing to the imperilment and oppression of the central heroine. Technology can also do this by evoking the uncanny, itself a phenomenon which forms “the background and indeed the modus operandi of much Gothic fiction” (Punter and Byron, 2004, 286). Tom Gunning demonstrates this when he recounts several versions in early cinema of a woman-in-jeopardy story, Heard Over the Phone, which could almost be Gothic in that the woman is in her own home and menaced there by a male assailant. Drawing on Freud’s musings upon the ambivalent nature of technology, Gunning highlights the ambiguous – and uncanny – position of the telephone: it is a device which brings the absent near through sound, but actually this serves only to underline the actual distances involved. Gothic-type narratives, gender, and technology merge in these early films to reveal “the darker aspects of the dream world of instant communication and the annihilation of space and time” (Gunning, 1991, 188).   

More recent Gothic and Gothic-horror films may update these technologies to include computers, the Internet and mobile phones. Technology also includes film and the moving image itself: this conference will explore how filmic technologies mediate and emphasise the connection between technology, the Gothic, and gender, including through the use of visual effects. Film is a particularly apt medium through which to contemplate these ideas as cinema’s ontology embodies both technology’s scientific roots and the Gothic’s appeal to excess and the supernatural. As Murray Leeder notes: “With its ability to record and replay reality and its presentation of images that resemble the world but as intangible half-presences, cinema has been described as a haunted or ghostly medium from early on” (Leeder, 2015, 3).

These ideas may also be explored by expanding upon the original notion of Moer’s Female Gothic: if the literary Female Gothic is defined by female writers working in this mode, then this conference would also like to explore how female filmmakers have made use of Gothic-horror conventions. It is significant to note that the most iconic examples of Gothic films focusing on stories about the victimisation of women, particularly in the 1940s, were directed by men. By thinking about the technology behind the screen, this event will also consider what influence women filmmakers have had upon this tradition, including within present day, and what further reflections may be offered between this relationship of the Gothic to gender and technology.

With this third annual Gothic Feminism conference, we invite scholars to respond to the theme of technology in the woman-in-jeopardy strand of the Gothic and Gothic-horror film or television.

 

Topics can include but are not limited to:

– the tension between Gothic and technology as the supernatural, fantastic and paranoia versus the rational, reason and logic. How do these elements intersect with the representation of gender in film and television?

– the traditions of the Gothic heroine on-screen and her interaction with technology. Does technology help the female character or is it another agent of terror used against her?

– the technology behind the screen. How have female filmmakers used the genres of Gothic-horror to express themselves?

– the technology of the screen. How has the technology of cinema, including visual effects, been used, and how do these aspects interact with the representation of the central female protagonist/s?

 

Please submit proposals of 500 words, along with a short biographical note (250 words) to gothicfeminism2016@gmail.com by Friday 15th February 2019.

 

We welcome 20-minute conference papers as well as submissions for creative work or practice-as-research including, but not limited to, short films and video essays.  

 

Conference organisers: Frances A. Kamm and Tamar Jeffers McDonald 

https://gothicfeminism.com/

https://twitter.com/GothicFeminism

 

This conference is the third annual event from the Gothic Feminism project, working with the Melodrama Research Group in the Centre of Film and Media Research at the University of Kent. Gothic Feminism explores the representation of the Gothic heroine on-screen in her various incarnations. 

          

References

Botting, Fred. (2008). Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions. London and New York: Routledge.

Castle, Terry. (1995). The Female Thermometer: 18th Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gunning, Tom. (1991). “Heard Over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology.” In: Screen. 32:2. 184-196. 

Grant, Barry Keith. (2004). “‘Sensuous Elaboration’: Reason and the Visible in the Science Fiction Film.” In: Redmond, Sean. (ed). Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader. New York, Chichester: Wallflower Press.

Halberstam, Jack. (1995). Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Leeder, Murray. (ed). (2015). Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality From Silent Cinema to the Digital Era. New York and London: Bloomsbury.

Punter, David and Glennis Byron. (2004). The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Reeve, Clara. (2008). The Old English Baron. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Walpole, Horace. (2014). The Castle of Otranto. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

 

 

The BFI’s Dirk Bogarde Collection of Journals

As noted in the last post, the melodrama research group will be screening several of Dirk Bogarde’s films from the 1st of October. This is because I was recently lucky enough to access the British Film Institute’s Dirk Bogarde Collection of journals. These magazines were gifted to the BFI by the late actor’s estate and provide a fascinating insight into the reach of the star across different types of publications and countries.

Over the next few weeks, Lies is very kindly posting 8 blog posts I’ve written about my work on the collection, and Dirk, on the NoRMMA blog. You can find the first here: http://www.normmanetwork.com/introduction-the-dirk-bogarde-collection-project/ 

I’ll also be sharing some film-specific material from the collection in advance of each screening.

Screening Schedule for the Autumn Term

We now have a provisional list of films we’re screening in the Autumn Term. We’re focusing on several films of the British star Dirk Bogarde. (Apart from our Halloween offering on the 29th of October which dates from 1930 and stars Chester Morris.)


 

1st October Esther Waters (1948, Ian Dalrymple and Peter Proud, 108 mins)

15th October Hunted (1952, Charles Crichton, 84 mins)

29th October The Bat Whispers (1930, Roland West, 83 mins)

12th November EITHER A Tale of Two Cities (1958, Ralph Thomas, 117 mins)

                                 OR Libel (1959, Anthony Asquith, 100 mins)

26th November The Singer Not the Song (1961, Roy Ward Baker, 132 mins)

10th December I Could Go On Singing (1963, Ronald Neame, 99 mins)

 

More detail on each film will be posted in advance of its screening.

 

All are very welcome to join us on these dates, from 5-7pm, in Jarman 6.