Author Archives: B Merritt

Arts Week 2013

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By Professor Hilary Fraser, Dean of Arts

 

Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation

Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation

Arts Week 2013 promises to be our best yet. For the first time we are able to make full use of the dedicated new exhibition and performance spaces completed this year, thanks to the generosity of our alumni, to showcase the exciting research and teaching carried out by the School of Arts. This year our focus is on theatre, as we celebrate the launch of our state-of-the-art practice and performance space with a series of public performances featuring work by students and teachers on our theatre and creative writing programmes and Research Fellows associated with Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Theatre. Highlights include artist Tom Lyall’s one-man science fiction epic DEFRAG_, and Andrew McKinnon’s staging of Martin Lewton’s Handel’s Cross, fresh from its world première in Dublin. Audiences are invited to participate in panel discussions on the sensory world of Renaissance theatre (with colleagues from the Globe, with whom Birkbeck offers an innovative MA), on voluntary labour in the arts, and on adaptations of film texts for the theatre.

Birkbeck’s long-standing reputation for field-defining research and teaching in film has been given a new platform with the launch of the Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image (BIMI), under the Directorship of Laura Mulvey, earlier this year. Our award-winning cinema is the venue for a varied programme of screenings and discussions with practitioners, including experimental film-makers John Smith, Mark Lewis and Birkbeck alumna Emma-Louise Williams, and writers David Campany and Michael Rosen. Films shown encompass locations and cultures as different as Hackney and Brazil, reflecting our diverse expertise in screen studies, from local London-based film to world cinema. The visual arts are also celebrated in a talk by Tate Britain curator Martin Myrone, who will discuss the Sublime as spectacle in relation to recent exhibitions on the Gothic and on John Martin.

The School’s new arts space, the Peltz Room, is the setting for a number of readings, discussions, performances and exhibitions that take place throughout the week, show-casing how Birkbeck leads the field in practice-based research in the arts. And our other beautifully restored heritage room, the Keynes Library, plays host to a series of literary panels and discussions. Visitors will have an opportunity to find out about our programmes in dance and music, and also to learn about creative writing at Birkbeck, through the Writers’ Hub Hubbub event, and a panel on ‘Getting Published in the Digital Age’. Birkbeck lecturer in creative writing, Richard Hamblyn, author of The Art of Science (2011), will chair a symposium on science and writing, and two guided tours, one of Bloomsbury’s Squares and the other themed around urban media, offer a literal take on our sense of the School as a constellation of the arts at the heart of a vibrant city with which it is always connected. Arts Week will end, like many an evening at Birkbeck after classes, in the pub, with a pre-match panel on literature and football at the College Arms. All in all, it promises to be a wonderful week for the arts. And who will win this year’s competition, on Bloomsbury Squares?

Hilary Fraser
Dean of Arts

After “Beyond the Fragments”?

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This post was contributed by Ceren Yalcin, an intern at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.

A book that brings together over three hundred people on a Friday evening, 34 years after it was first published has truly passed the test of time. Either because its authors have written an extraordinary piece of work, or that our times yearn for alternative forms of political organisation. In the case of Beyond the Fragments, I’d say, it is both.

The publication of a new edition of Beyond the Fragments was hosted by Birkbeck Institute for Social Research. The book’s authors Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright came together to speak about the ‘after’ and the ‘beyond’ of four-decades of feminist scholarship and political activism. Chaired by Melissa Benn, the authors addressed the fraught question of how to consolidate diverse upsurges of rebellion into effective, open, democratic Left coalitions.

As Professor Sheila Rowbotham explained: “When we wrote Beyond the Fragments we were preoccupied with the process of organising for change. We took a whole of things for granted then that we can no longer take for granted now.” Surely, times have changed since the ’70s – both for the better and the worse. Today, we encounter deepening recession, environmental pollution, growing inequality between women, falling real wages, rising unemployment, continuing sell-off of the NHS, and savage welfare cuts. And, as Lynne Segal pointed out, the politics of austerity are also reflected on an individual level. Living under corporate capitalism gives rise to all sorts of fears and hostilities: fear of economic decline, fear of foreigners, hostility towards those on benefits, fear of weakness and dependency and a sense that we have to be stronger and more competitive if we want to succeed. However, the protests of the last couple of years have shown that there is opposition to the politics of austerity.

And feminism, according to Professor Segal, is on the rise again as austerity hits women first. If the Left wants to succeed, Dr Wainwright emphasized, activism needs to saturate all spheres of political life from grassroots movement to state politics (as recently demonstrated by Syriza in Greece who take legislation and government as a resource to bring about social change).

There was certainly no room for pessimism last Friday evening. On the contrary, the speaker and the participants agreed that new forms of resistance are possible to build stronger bonds of solidarity across class, race, gender and sexuality. Pragna Patel from the Southall Black Sisters (SBS), an organisation struggling for women’s human rights and against gender related violence, stressed that her activism within the SBS was always driven by a desire to be part of a wider left, democratic, emancipatory project. Rosie Rogers’ lively response set the mood for the rest of the evening. She reminded us all of the new exciting ways of engaging in protest, such as UK-wide Stop the Cuts Coalition movement, that require people to work together and to “put their barriers away and stop tribalism”. At the end of the evening, the answer to the question of what is to be done, seemed less complicated than one might have supposed in the first place. All agreed: Come together, mobilize resistance and enjoy the protest.

The Networked Academic: Social Media and your Research Identity

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This post was contributed by Ceren Yalcin, Nelly Ali and Mayur Suresh, interns at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.

Twitter, Facebook, Academia.edu, Youtube, Pinterest, Delicious, Foursquare and many more…The list of available digital platforms is long, but what is the value of social media for academics?

Dr Scott Rodgers, lecturer in Media Theory at Birkbeck College, spoke yesterday about what academics can do with and in social media. He suggested that we should think of social media, a networked media, not as just as a form of ‘networking’. Rather than looking at it as an arena in which we make contacts and disseminate our work and view the work of others, he suggested we look at social media as a different sort of academic environment that develops its own intertia and channels the production of knowledge. The structural logic of social media enables different methods and forms of academic knowledge. In his talk Dr Rodgers presented a variety of popular social media platforms and discussed what sort of academic life each one of these seemed to produce.

The speaker pointed out several things that make social media different from ordinary sites of knowledge production. First that social media is persistent, in the sense that there is automatic recording of whatever you post and this stays online for a long time. Second, replicability. Meaning that once something is posted online, people can, almost instantaneously, make copies and further post it. This leads to the third characteristic: scalability. By posting and reposting by multiple users, there is the collective amplification of material that is posted online. And lastly, searchability. The fact that material that is posted online is persistent, allows for it to be searchable.

When the speaker asked the audience to comment on their own use of social media, one participant pointed out that her activities on Twitter resulted in a successful, international research co-operation. Others stated that they found Academia.edu especially useful as it allows users to share papers and to receive feedback on work in progress. However, there were also some mixed feelings towards social media amongst the participants. One participant said that tweeting during a conference might be good publicity for the event but she found that it also made her less concentrated and distracted from the actual conference talks. Another interesting account came from an academic who pointed out how ‘addictive’ social media can be and how it can prevent doing other and more important work. Further, the discussants commented on the conflicts online profiles may cause. Here, a few participants expressed concern that their work and personal personae may meet, potentially causing embarrassment (we’ve all been there!).

Dr Rodgers pointed out some of the concerns and hopes he had for a networked academia. Some of the concerns included the fragmentation of writing (how do you get a theoretical argument to fit into a tweet?), the need to get as much posted as often as possible, and the view that being logged into these new forms was just another form of academic labour – that in addition to publishing and speaking, maintaining an online persona was another things academics, particular early career researchers, needed to do to. On the plus side, he hoped that new media would engender less formalized forms of academic expression, more honest and generous academia, and a (differently) publicly engaged academia.

Kinetic Connections – Laura Mulvey reflects on her career as avant-garde filmmaker and feminist film critic

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This post was contributed by Felicity Gee, Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London.

On February 7th, The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities held an afternoon event in celebration of Laura Mulvey and her influential body of work; and, as you would expect, every seat in the lecture theatre was taken. I came to Mulvey’s work via the same route that I imagine most film students to have taken, through her famous 1975 Screen essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. The Birkbeck event, chaired by Ian Christie (Birkbeck), was a semi-retrospective of Mulveyan dialectics in feminisim and psychoanalysis, but also a look forward to new developments in film analysis. For me, the most stimulating segment was Mulvey in conversation with A.L. Rees (ICA) discussing avant-garde filmmaking in London during the late 1970s and early 1980s, an account which also seemed to prompt the majority of questions from an enthused audience.

AMY! Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1980, Colour 30 mins.

AMY! Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1980, Colour 30 mins.

This fascinating discussion peppered with frank anecdotes regarding the political climate and funding for film projects in the UK, was accompanied by a rare screening of Mulvey’s film Amy! Using melodrama’s gestural form and a self-conscious avant-garde aesthetic, the film examines the rise to stardom of the first woman to fly solo from Great Britain to Australia, Amy Johnson. Mulvey explained how she was inspired by Brecht’s dictum ‘Happy the lad that needs no heroes’, adjusting it to ‘Happy the feminism that needs no heroines’ for her portrait of Amy.  The film offers imagined scenes dramatising Amy’s reluctance to embody the role of newspaper sensation or national heroine, which are intercut with newsreel footage of the ‘real’ Amy’s public reception, ironically delivered ‘broadcast’ of newspaper headlines, and black and white footage from student film seminars. It is a collection of disparate segments that are juxtaposed to reveal Amy’s private and public identities to tragi-comic effect.

I particularly enjoyed Mulvey’s confessional anecdote on how her ‘naïve optimism’ and penchant for symmetry are thrown ‘off-kilter’ by co-director Peter Wollen’s canted patterns of composition, a combination which, for me, gives the film its counter-narrative politic while retaining a certain pathos. Mulvey’s insights into her work as a filmmaker surely augment any discussion of aesthetics and spectatorship in her more widely known film criticism. Her films have certainly been under-researched, and I hope this event will encourage scholars to engage with them further.

The session concluded with a demonstration and discussion of ideas from Mulvey’s 2006 book, Death 24x a Second, commencing with a short segment from Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life that had been stretched and slowed through freeze-framing. The video aims to reveal ‘hidden’ aspects of the film using this strategy of fragmentation, and effectively illustrates how ‘the opposing iconographies’ of spectacular and maternal femininity are staged. The Mulvey day traced a complete cycle from the manipulation of images by the filmmaker, to the suggestion that manipulation of the image now lies as much with the spectator, who has much greater control over how the film is screened. Pausing, stretching, cropping, and repetition of cinematic time is made possible by new digital formats and file sharing systems, and alters how the gaze and linear narrative function.

By the end of the session I was left slightly hypnotised by a palimpsestic image of Marilyn Monroe that had been contorted and drawn out by Mulvey’s hand, and left to repeat endlessly in the ‘twilight zone’[1] – the enigmatic celluloid repository of cultural history.

[1] Mulvey applies Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘twilight zone’ (the point at which personal memory disappears into history) to cinema: ‘On celluloid, personal and collective memories are prolonged and preserved, extending and expanding the “twilight zone”, merging individual memory with recorded history’. (Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, 2006, 25).