Tagged / cinema

Bill Douglas Stipend Awarded to CEMP

bill-douglas-cinema-museum-exeter1CEMP’s Professor Julian McDougall has been awarded the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum Research Stipend.

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University Exeter, UK is both a public museum and a rich research resource for scholars of moving image history. The museum is named after the renowned filmmaker Bill Douglas and was founded on the extraordinary collection of material he put together with his friend Peter Jewell. In the twenty years since its opening, the museum has received donations from many sources and now has over 75,000 artefacts on the long history of the moving image from the seventeenth century to the present day.

The stipend enables the recipient to access collections at the museum to undertake significant research that will generate publication or other demonstrable outcomes and a blog post for the museum¹s website about the research.

Julian’s project is ‘Comrades and Curators’: this research seeks to trace the importance of multiple third spaces constructed in and around Comrades, hitherto not conceptualized as such by either Douglas, film commentators or academics. Related directly to the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum’s stated areas of significance, the research will explore the relationship between Comrades as a film text, the curation of the director’s collection of magic lanterns and other optical artifacts, the situating of lanternist as pivotal to the representation of social history in the film and the curation of this social history in museums in Tolpuddle and Dorchester.

The research will be conducted between March and December 2017.

FMC Research Seminar, 4pm, 12 Oct: Prof Geoffrey Samuel, University of Kent: ‘The Paradigm Case: Is Reasoning and Writing in Film Studies Comparable To (or With) Reasoning and Writing in Law?’

Faculty of Media and Communication

Research Seminar Series 2016-17

A Conflict, Rule of Law and Society

Research Seminar

 

Venue: F309, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB 

 

Wednesday 12 October 2016 at 4pm

 

Conflict, Rule of Law and Society Welcomes:

 

Prof Geoffrey Samuel, University of Kent

 

The Paradigm Case: Is Reasoning and Writing in Film Studies Comparable To (or With) Reasoning and Writing in Law?

To what extent can theories or models that have been developed by literary and film theorists inform legal knowledge? Can any such literary and film models offer any serious insights to legal epistemology or are such ‘borrowings’ likely to remain at best rather superficial? The purpose of this contribution is to suggest that there are a number of theories – or at least models – that can prove quite fruitful for lawyers. Three, in particular, will be examined: namely personification theory, representation theory and reception theory. Personification theory is concerned with the notion of persona in cinema, theatre and literature and reflects, in particular, on the relevance of identity in films like Vertigo (1958) and Phoenix (2014). Persona, of course, is both a literary and a legal concept and so there is, however tenuous, a direct conceptual connection. Representation theory (see Bacon extract overleaf) has already had some impact on law – it can be seen as an aspect of fiction theory (see Vaihinger) – and this impact might be revived with the publication of a recent work by Professor Mathieu. Reception theory (see Dzialo overleaf) is more closely associated with hermeneutics which of course as a scheme of intelligibility has attracted much attention from jurists. Nevertheless the categories of text developed by Stagier have, perhaps, a particular reference for the jurist: what is the relationship between legal texts and their readers and does this relationship vary according to the nature of the text in question? One further point will be developed with respect to these theories or models mentioned. Perhaps labelling them as ‘theories’ or ‘methods’ is unhelpful; a more fruitful label might be one mentioned by Bouriau in his examination of Vaihinger’s ‘as if’ (comme si) fiction theory. It is not so much a theory; it is more of an ‘epistemological attitude’ (attitude épistémique).

 

Geoffrey Samuel Born in 1947 in England, Geoffrey Samuel is currently a Professor of Law at the University of Kent and a Professor affilié at the École de droit, Sciences Po, Paris. He received his legal education at the University of Cambridge and holds doctoral degrees from the Universities of Cambridge, Maastricht and Nancy 2 (honoris causa). He has also held many visiting posts in France, Belgium and Switzerland and is still a visiting professor in Rome (Tor Vergata), Fribourg and Aix-en-Provence. Geoffrey Samuel is the author of many books on contract, tort, remedies, legal reasoning and legal epistemology, the most recent being An Introduction to Comparative Law Theory and Method (Hart, 2014) and A Short Introduction to Judging and to Legal Reasoning (Edward Elgar, 2016). His areas of specialisation are the law of obligations, comparative law and legal reasoning.

 

All are welcome and we look forward to seeing you there!

 

About the series

This new seminar series showcases current research across different disciplines and approaches within the Faculty of Media and Communication at BU. The research seminars include invited speakers in the fields of journalism, politics, narrative studies, media, communication and marketing studies.  The aim is to celebrate the diversity of research across departments in the faculty and also generate dialogue and discussion between those areas of research.

 

Contributions include speakers on behalf of 

The Centre for Politics and Media Research

Promotional Cultures and Communication Centre

Centre for Public Relations Research and Professional Practice

Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community (JRG and NRG)

Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management

Conflict, Rule of Law and Society

EMERGE

Centre for Film and Television

 

 

 

Sociological Cinema recommends Jones’ short video for teaching

The Sociological Cinema, (“designed to help sociology instructors incorporate videos into their classes”) has recently recommended one of Dr Kip Jones’ (HSC and the Media School) earliest stabs at visualizing research data via audio/visual production.  Produced in his bedsit and in a friend’s studio in Leicester, Jones used photographs on loan from the National Trust and dialogue retrieved in his PhD research on informal care to produce this short A/V work on an antiquated PC, using an inexpensive camera to film it.

The Sociological Cinema suggests that ‘I Can Remember the Night’ ‘could be useful in a class on cognitive sociology, highlighting how cognitive processes, such as memory, are shaped by socio-cultural events, such as divorce. In addition to using the clip as a way to interrogate biography and narrative as sociological methods of research, the clip could also be a nice launching pad from which to introduce an assignment where students create their own videos, using their own biographical narratives as a window through which to explore larger sociological phenomena, much in the way C.W. Mills suggested’.

The video itself is available on Vimeo and portrays “Polly”, a 65 year old woman from the Midlands in the UK, who recalls the time as a child when her parents sat her down and asked her which of them she wanted to be with. Her story, re-narrated by three players, represents how this traumatic event became an enduring memory throughout the various stages of her life.

Polly’s story is also told in more depth in two academic journal articles:

Jones, K. (2006) “Informal Care as Relationship: the Case of the Magnificent Seven” Journal of Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing, 13: 214-220.

Jones, K. (2005) “The Art of Collaborative Storytelling: arts-based representations of narrative contexts”. Invited paper for: International Sociological Association Research Committee on Biography and Society RC38 Newsletter, October 2005.

Other audio/video productions are also freely available on Jones’ Vimeo pages.

The KIPWORLD blog and website offer further resources.