Submitted by tomski on 9 December, 2020 - 20:00.
WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 45 minutes (+15 minutes for discussion). We welcome all to a talk ONLINE (MS Teams) "Planes, trains, automobiles: The road movie and (dis)embodied travel in American experimental film and video" by dr Kornelia Boczkowska (Friday, December 11, 13:15-14:15).
dr Kornelia Boczkowska
Department of Studies in Culture
Planes, trains, automobiles:
The road movie and (dis)embodied travel in American experimental film and video
ABSTRACT
Although road movies are particularly endemic to Hollywood cinema, they have also appealed to experimental filmmakers who continuously counteract the genre’s gendered and representational nature and challenge the hegemonic master narratives, breaking the taboos and censorship of the mainstream (film) culture. However, despite an unabated interest in automobility, also from the perspective of literary fiction (Pearce) and film genre (Archer), and the growing popularity of the road movie scholarship, recently in the non-American (Mazierska and Rascarolior; Lie) and global context (Duarte and Corrigan), there are no accounts on how the road movie and its derivatives function in experimental film and video. Echoing the new mobilities paradigm and recent turn to phenomenology in film studies (Sobchack; Lant; Marks; Barker), which have revealed the growing potential of experimental films to elicit heighted kinaesthetic response to the image, many avant-garde projects empower the haptic over the optical and revise the road movie’s automotive mobility by both embracing and extending the phenomenology of car use to other means of transportation to provide an exuberantly embodied experience of travel. As road movies’ (auto)mobilization of the gaze clearly articulates a phenomenological sensation of movement, I will follow up on what Osterweil referred to as the corporeal turn in American avant-garde cinema, typically associated with sexually explicit films, to discuss the road movie aesthetics in experimental filmmaking, often informed by the diary film lyricism, home movie performativity, cinematic excess, embodied subjectivity, slow and ecocinema or experimental ethnography and anthropological film practice. Particularly, I will build on various theoretical approaches related to haptic visuality (Marks; Ross), also known as embodied spectatorship (Eisaesser and Hagener), and a spatial-corporeal dimension of mobility (Sheller and Urry 2006) to present how selected films use traditional and new (hybrid) media formats to question the concept of mobility and the “classic” road movie’s conventions, including the genre’s traditional reliance on cultural critique and the representation of a (dis)embodied travel, landscape and gender.Hopefully, this research will contribute to expanding the canon of and filling a lacuna in the history of American experimental film, including highlighting the largely underrepresented work of both women and men filmmakers working on the margins of the avant-garde and outside of feminist theory. It will also shed new light on the extent to which “mainstream” genres can migrate to and function differently in the experimental film community and will help gain a better understanding of the contemporary cultural dynamics between the popular and the marginal.
This research is funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, under the project Lost highways, forgotten travels: The road movie in the post-war American avant-garde and experimental film through the lens of women and men filmmakers (grant no. UMO-2018/31/D/HS2/01553).
Selected references:
Archer, Neil. 2017. “Genre on the Road: The Road Movie as Automobilities.” Mobilities 12 (4): 509-519.
Barker, Jennifer. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Duarte, José and Timothy, Corrigan. 2018. The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys around the World. Bristol: Intellect.
Eisaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener. 2010. Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. New York: Routledge.
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press.
Marks, Laura U. 2002. Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mazierska, Ewa and Laura Rascaroli. 2006. Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie. London: Wallflower Press.
Lant, Antonia. 1996. “Haptical Cinema.” October 74: 45-73.
Lie, Nadia. 2017. The Latin American (Counter-) Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Osterweil, Ara. 2014. Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Pearce, Lynne. 2012. “Automobility in Manchester Fiction.” Mobilities 7 (1): 93-113.
Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38: 207-226.
Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ross, Miriam. 2015. 3D Cinema: Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kornelia Boczkowska is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Studies in Culture at the AMU Faculty of English. She is the recipient of several research grants as well as author and co-editor of two books and circa. thirty other publications on independent, experimental and avant-garde film in addition to new media and astroculture. Her current research is on the postwar American avant-garde and experimental film and is funded by a National Science Center post-doctoral grant. Her other projects focus on the study of slow cinema, eco-cinema and postdigital aesthetics, particularly in the context of independent filmmaking and new media.
