Science Week: Piecing together the jigsaw of climate change and human evolution

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender, of Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

Dr Phil Hopley, of Birkbeck's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Dr Phil Hopley exhibited replica skulls of our ancestors during Science Week. Photo: Harish Patel

I knew an unusual presentation was in store as soon as I saw six skulls menacingly positioned at the front of the lecture theatre. The exhibits – all different shapes and sizes – immediately caught the audience’s attention, and our questions about their origins were answered in the fascinating hour that followed.

Dr Phil Hopley began Birkbeck’s series of Science Week lectures with a talk on 16 April about the links between climate change and human evolution. He used the skulls – five replicas of our ancestors and one gorilla skull – to illustrate how evolution is all about the changing dimensions of the head as it has become rounder and larger to accommodate a bigger brain over millions of years. In comparison, the gorilla’s skull includes ferocious canines and space for huge powerful jaws – it certainly sent a shiver up my spine being only a few feet away from my seat.

A family tree dating back millions of years
Dr Hopley, of Birkbeck’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, explained how the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and modern humans was on this planet about six of seven million years ago. Both branches of the family tree then developed separately, with chimpanzees on the one hand, and about 20 species of hominins – the ancestors of modern humans – walking on two legs on the other. As the hominins evolved, they became characterised by their tool use, larger brains, language and art, eventually developing into Homo sapiens – our own species. But our ancestral line has not been straightforward, and Dr Hopley highlighted the complexity. He said: “Homo sapiens is the only human species alive today, but for most of human evolution there have been a number of co-existing human species.”

As Dr Hopley explained, hominin fossils have mainly been found in two areas – the Rift Valley in East Africa (dating back five million years), and caves in Southern Africa (dating back 2.5 million years). Yet, hardly surprising, given the awesome amount of time involved, it is very rare to find a whole hominin specimen. What is clear is that the human fossil record is very incomplete, both geographically and temporally, and solving the mystery is a bit like piecing together a jigsaw.

Climate change: from forest to grassland
The question of why our ancestors evolved to become bipedal was then addressed, and this was where Dr Hopley referred to his work studying fossils from caves in South Africa. The study of carbon and oxygen isotypes and climate modelling has shown that the savannah in Africa developed eight million years ago due to the reduction in carbon dioxide and reduction in rainfall. As the grasslands replaced the forests, our ancestors evolved to walk on two feet as they needed to cover large distances to search for food, which wasn’t necessary when they were still living in the forest. Although it’s difficult to build up a comprehensive understanding of how climate change drives evolution, Dr Hopley did present a general conclusion. He said: “Human evolution did occur because of climate change in the broad sense as forests were replaced by savannah.”

I’ve never been to a lecture with skulls on display before and I’ll certainly never forget this one. It was a powerful way to remind us that our common ancestors adapted to the African bush and started walking when the forests began to recede.

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).

“Style Hitler!”

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This post was contributed by Ruth Harriss, a student on  Birkbeck’s MA History of Art.

Dr Despina Stratigakos, ‘Domesticating Hitler: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Führer’s Private Spaces‘, Friday 8 March 2013, hosted by the Architecture, Space and Society Network, School of Arts, Birkbeck.

Before attending Dr. Despina Stratigakos’ talk, it had never crossed my mind that one might think of Adolf Hitler as an individual who possessed impeccable taste – as someone who lived in comfortable, stylish interiors that reflected a refined artistic sensibility.  However I learned how this image of the German chancellor, expertly crafted by his talented interior designer Gerdy Troost, was used with great effect to distance Hitler from the violent crimes he committed across Europe.  In fact Hitler’s ‘domesticated’ persona was so compelling that unbelievably, merely a year after the devastation of Guernica in 1937, his mountain retreat in Obersalzberg was esteemed in the British magazine Homes & Gardens.

The Berghof at Obersalzberg

The Berghof at Obersalzberg. Photo: L. Ammon

Drawing upon research carried out for her upcoming book Hitler at Home, Despina Stratigakos discussed both the Berghof at Obersalzberg and Hitler’s Munich apartment on Prinzeregentenplatz as important and influential ‘backstage’ spaces to the Fuhrer’s public campaigns and performances.  Although only the cultural and economic elite would actually cross the threshold of either residences, their locations and the photographs of the Berghof that were circulated in the media both embedded Hitler into a specifically German context of art and culture as well as representing his vision of an Aryan super state.

Of particular interest was the argument that the Hitler/Troost design partnership forged an instantly recognizable National Socialist vernacular that undermines the ‘bombast’ of Fascist aesthetics that already dominates much of the scholarship.  On the whole Art History has tended to devaluate and disregard the influence of the domestic sphere and consequently Hitler’s private spaces remains unexplored territory.  However I expect that Hitler at Home will apply more than just a fresh lick of paint to the previously overlooked domestic profile of Adolf Hitler and not least in its recovery of Gerdy Troost from beneath the rubble of kitsch Nazi paraphernalia.

Cinema and Human Rights Days

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This post was contributed by Dr Emma Sandon, Lecturer in Film and Television, Department of Media and Cultural Studies

What is the impact of cinema in raising public awareness of human rights? Can films about human rights make a difference and promote political change? These are some of the questions that the Cinema and Human Rights Days addressed at the Gordon Square cinema, Birkbeck, on 15 and 16 March. Timed to coincide with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, Birkbeck hosted a debate on human rights cinema, a screening of Salma and a Q & A with the documentary film director, Kim Longinetto, and heard John Biaggi, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival director and Nick Fraser, the BBC commissioning editor of Storyville, talk about their promotion of human rights films and programmes.

John Biaggi talked about how important it was that ‘good’ human rights films were selected for the Human Rights Watch Film Festival and he explained how that criteria was arrived at, whilst Nick Fraser, in his discussion of the importance of storytelling for any programme that television commissioned, admitted that ‘the spectacle of injustice is always gripping’. Rod Stoneman, former commissioning editor at Channel 4 and director of the Irish Film Board, presented a timely discussion and screening, in the week that Hugo Chavez died, of Chavez: Inside the Coup (also entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised|) (2003), a film that caused media controversy when it was screened on the BBC and which was turned down by the Amnesty International Film Festival in Vancouver for being biased in favour of Chavez. Participants then watched the Human Rights Watch Film Festival screening of Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s film, Fatal Assistance (Haiti/France/US, 2012), an indictment of the international community’s post- earthquake disaster intervention and the failure of current aid policies and practices. The screening was followed by a discussion with the director at the ICA.

Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, from Birkbeck’s School of Law, and I asked participants to consider the politics of human rights discourse in film. What is a human rights film? How has the notion of a human rights film emerged? Can we talk about a history of human rights cinema? How are human rights films selected, promoted and circulated through film festivals, broadcasting, cinema theatrical release, dvd sales and internet distribution? What are the criteria by which a human rights film is judged?

I discussed how the human rights film has been constituted by human rights film festivals, first set up in the late 1980s and 1990s by human rights organisations, to promote human rights advocacy. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival and the Amnesty International Film Festival (now Movies that Matter), the two largest of such initiatives, then established the Human Rights Film Network in 2004, to ‘promote the debate on the ethics, professional codes of conduct and other standards regarding human rights film making.’ The charter of this network seeks to promote films that are ‘truthful’ and that have ‘good cinematographic quality’. It is these criteria of style and taste that become politically charged in the process of commissioning, selecting and curating films. If we look at a range of examples, it becomes clear that the subjects of human rights films are constituted in specific ways. However the way in which film represents human rights and engages viewers and audiences are complex. It is important that we understand the effects of the different audio and visual narrative and rhetorical devices used in films, be they feature films, documentary, newsreel, essay films, community or advocacy video.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera reflected on the dimension of political agency shown in films that represent revolutionary struggle in Latin America. Drawing on his forthcoming book, Story of a Death Untold, The Coup against Allende, 9/11/1973, and screening clips from Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s, Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del Subdesarrollo) (Cuba, 1968) and Patricio Guzmán’s documentary, Battle of Chile (La Batalla de Chile) (Cuba, 1975, 1976, 1979), he weaved a layered narrative of the human potential for change. These important political films engage with the portrayal of what he termed the ‘discourse of anxiety’ and the ‘discourse of tenacity and courage’ in relation to people’s belief in the possibilities of social transformation and their ability to fight for freedom. These films are also tributes as well as memorials to those who have struggled for real social and political change.

The event was the result of a collaboration between Birkbeck, the University of Galway and Middlesex University and was supported by Open Society Foundations. The organisers hope to run this event in conjunction with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival again next year at Birkbeck.

The podcasts of this event are available on the School of Arts website.