Photo by Wan San Yip on Unsplash
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) is hosting their annual conference in Denver this week, and several UBC Theatre and Film faculty members and graduate students are presenting! SCMS is a leading scholarly organization that provides a platform for disseminating research, networking in a supportive environment, and collaborating with other scholars. Before our attendees left, we caught up with them to gain a glimpse into their expectations and aspirations for the event.
Tamar Hanstke
Graduate Student | MA Cinema and Media Studies
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference
I had the wonderful opportunity of participating in the SCMS pre-conference online seminar, “Making Videographic Criticism: Videographic Telephilia”, led by Ariel Avissar and Jason Mittell. Prior to the seminar, participants were provided with a prompt and asked to create a three-minute video essay applying it to the television show of our choice. The prompt asked that we use multi-screen, and that these multiple screens span numerous seasons of the show, evidencing some visual, narrative, or thematic progression over years. All participants screened their video essays for each other during the online seminar, and we had a fantastic Q&A period and discussion afterward.
My completed video essay is on the show Bojack Horseman, examining how the titular character’s history of being verbally abused by his mother has led to deep-seated trauma and mental health challenges. I overlaid clips of Bojack interacting with his mother, taken from multiple seasons of the show, over a continuous scene of Bojack monologuing about how worthless he is, demonstrating how his negative internal dialogue has stemmed from a lifetime of negative comments from his mother.
Can you discuss any particularly exciting or unexpected findings from your research?
This seminar explored the possibilities of analyzing television shows in the video essay format, an exercise not nearly as popular as analyzing films in video essays. One of the main reasons for this disparity is similar to why many academic papers focused on a particular television show will only analyze certain episodes or a specific season: it is difficult to effectively analyze dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of content in a single academic work. Nonetheless, the talented participants in this seminar offered up some fantastic ideas for tackling this problem head-on—featuring such diverse shows as the original Twilight Zone, Gumby, I May Destroy You, Fargo, and Better Call Saul. It really motivated me to keep pursuing this still-niche realm of academic work in the hopes that it continues to gain in popularity.
In terms of my project specifically, while I have written on the representation of trauma in Bojack Horseman before, there is something so much more compelling and visceral about hearing and seeing a series of relevant clips back-to-back rather than simply reading descriptions of them.
What do you see as the future direction of cinema and media studies and how do you envision your own work fitting into that trajectory?
I believe video essays are going to become increasingly vital to our field as time goes on. While I would not want to see them entirely overtake written essays as the dominant mode of our scholarly discourse, they do offer possibilities that the written word simply cannot. I hope to continue honing my skills in the realm of video essays, and I am excited to see how this “genre” of academic work continues to develop in the coming years.
Watch Tamar’s video essay (advisory: coarse language and overlapping sounds):
Angela Morrison
Graduate Student | PhD Cinema and Media Studies
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference
I will be presenting a paper based on research I’ve been doing for my dissertation. My paper, “The Codes of Pop Diva Conduct: Mariah Carey, Excess, and Melismatic Melodrama,” focuses on Mariah Carey’s star image and her status as one of the most compellingly melodramatic pop divas of all time. Her career is largely defined by excess: her monumental achievements (such as having the most Billboard Hot 100 #1 singles of all time), her spectacularized suffering following the critical and commercial failure of her film Glitter and subsequent mental breakdown, her reputation as an extravagant diva, and her powerful five-octave vocal range. Using melodrama as a framing device, my paper explores how Mariah Carey’s star image and artistic output (songs, music videos, films) uniquely engage with larger cultural constructs related to gender, race, emotion, and labour.
What are you most looking forward to about attending the conference?
I attended SCMS last year, but it was entirely online, so I am looking forward to experiencing the delirious excitement of attending such a big conference in person. I am so excited to see my friends’ and my partner’s presentations, and to get to present my own research and connect with the other people on my panel. It gives me so much more energy to be in the same room as the people I am presenting to, plus it’s fun to play video/audio clips on a bigger screen. I am also looking forward to exploring Denver and spending time trying new restaurants and cafes!
Harrison Wade
Graduate Student | PhD Cinema and Media Studies
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference I am presenting a paper titled “Noisy CGI: The Digital Grain in 1990s Hollywood Science Fiction”. My research is on CGI that calls attention to itself, in particular in Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and Spawn (1997), against examples that are celebrated as functionally invisible, like Jurassic Park (1993). I am interested in the metaphor of communication—if we usually assume a movie’s images are meant to be clear and transmit information, then this kind of CGI is noisy and disruptive. My research is on the value of that noise, following Roland Barthes and Mark Fisher, instead of simply dismissing it as failure. The grain of bad CGI has a lot to say about digital materiality, affective presence, and hope for the future through formal change.
What do you hope attendees will take away from your presentation?
I hope they leave thinking that there’s pleasure in the ugly and that the ugly or noisy might also innovate, even somewhere as banal as the Hollywood blockbuster. In this case, what is usually called bad CGI might imagine futures and bring us back in contact with our bodies and creators’ bodies. I hope they see the materiality of CGI and, more broadly, the digital, and that it’s a very erotic, bodily form when it isn’t trying to hide itself.
Dr. William Brown
Assistant Professor | Film Studies | Cinema and Media Studies
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference I am presenting a paper that is partly on teaching students to make audiovisual poems as a component of their research into film, while at the same time doing so in what fellow UBC scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva (GRSJ) might call a ‘poethical’ fashion. That is, the paper will consider what poetry does or can do in relation to decolonization. So, the suggestion is, that we make poetic(al) films as a (po)ethical act that is especially cognizant of societal injustices, most particularly anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity. What do such films look and sound like? The paper, and the panel of which it forms a part of, will be aiming to think through this issue.
What advice do you have for early career scholars in cinema and media studies?
I am not sure that I have any genuinely useful advice. But as one starts out, it is important to attend conferences, both small and large (like SCMS) to gain feedback on your ideas, meet peers and other scholars, and to begin to get a feel for the field more generally. Even if you are not a full-on conference nerd, conferences are intense and lots of fun. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to talk to people. Don’t be afraid to chair a panel if given the opportunity. And, when applying, don’t be afraid to try to put together a power panel involving your dream collaborators. Who knows? Everyone may just say yes!
What do you see as the future direction of cinema and media studies and how do you envision your own work fitting into that trajectory?
Clearly there will be more work on new media forms—streaming, VR, AR, gaming etc. However, while new media will formally offer up important innovations that must be studied, it will continue to be situated with ongoing and pressing concerns, including the environment and the understanding of difference. My prediction is that we are on the cusp of a sociogenic turn that Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter predicted some time ago, and by which we come to understand that biology, physics, philosophy and effectively all disciplines are products of the social, rather than the other way around.
The ramifications for film and media studies are that biology, physics, philosophy, and those other disciplines are produced by media as much as, if not more than, they produce media. That is, media shape us on a cellular level, while also shaping spacetime as we (think we) know it. Or, if you will, we think that we control media, but in fact media controls us—an idea that has circulated for a while, but which will be understood with new depth over the next 20-30 years (before another “revolution” in thinking takes place).
Dr. Lisa Coulthard
Professor | Film Studies | Cinema and Media Studies
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference
My SCMS paper this year is not part of a larger project, although it is tied to my ongoing research on sound and violence. I will be looking at sound and music in the latest season of Stranger Things, which our panel argues draws more thoroughly on horror tropes than previous seasons. I agreed to participate in the panel because it involves two wonderful scholars who edited a recent collection on labour in horror cinema, for which I contributed an article on domestic work and the female gothic. For me, SCMS is about meeting with colleagues, former graduate students, and publishers; it is an opportunity to attend great papers, support graduate students, and see what everyone is working on. I have an edited collection that I am working on with two brilliant colleagues so I will also be attending papers with an eye to finding contributors for our volume.
What are you most looking forward to about attending the conference?
This is the first in-person SCMS since before the pandemic and everyone is so excited; I am looking forward to seeing colleagues I haven’t seen in years and listening to fantastic papers by my UBC colleagues and graduate students.
Dr. Alessandra Santos
Associate Professor | Cinema and Media Studies | Film Studies
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conferenceThe research that I will be presenting is on dystopian cinema in Latin America, examining how the science fiction genre may operate as a platform to discuss contemporary hopes and fears in the region, including climate anxieties within global social contexts. Rather than claiming that dystopia is a cohesive genre, my research explores how it operates in transnational networks and uneven systems of production, distribution and consumption, particularly regarding current Latin American instabilities. I explore how dystopian tropes operate in similarities and differences; I examine “archaeologies of the future” (Fredric Jameson), and how specific dystopian films reveal embodied and disembodied unfreedoms, authoritarianism, technologies, and temporalities.
My research is on contemporary films, but I am particularly excited to find out about early Latin American science fiction cinema as a foreign cultural import, and how older film texts exhibited space travel and proto-zombies. It is also curious how often technology is portrayed as a threat in dystopian movies.
What advice do you have for early career scholars in cinema and media studies?
My advice is to combine your personal interests and passions with both established and up-and-coming research. I recommend staying away from trendy terminology and committing to your own version of film studies research.
Dr. Sarah Shamash
Sessional Lecturer | Cinema and Media Studies | Film Studies
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference
I will be presenting the paper: “Beyond Latinx-Canadianness: Imagining Cinema Studies from the Pluriverse” as part of the panel: “Thinking the North Otherwise: Critical Approaches to Latinx-Canadian Film and Media Arts”. My participation underscores the significance of knowledge systems from the Global South as expressed by the radical imaginations of filmmakers from the region. I use the term Global South to signify epistemological and ontological locations and perspectives that exceed geo-spatial borders. I understand the pluriverse as defined by Latin American thinkers (Arturo Escobar) to recognize the co-existence of multiple worlds making up the pluriverse. This idea of a world of many worlds is also relevant to cinema studies as cinema is a (re)worlding art form that has the power to imagine the possibility of different reals.
Some of the questions I explore in my presentation are: How does cinema from Global South, Black, Indigenous, and non-western perspectives teach us about earth justice, racial justice, intersectional oppression and liberation, and ways of co-existing with each other and the planet? What is the role of community, imagined and real, in transformative knowledge production? How does a focus on non-western canons of knowledge shift existing knowledge hierarchies? I will examine how imagining cinema cultures from the pluriverse can play a role in creating and defending other social realities and possibilities.
What do you hope attendees will take away from your presentation?
There is a void when it comes to Latin American culture, diaspora, and cinema studies. This panel not only brings visibility to the rich cultures of Latin American cinema and the exciting work of Latin-American diaspora scholars, but also highlights the significance of Latin American, diaspora, and critical Latinx studies in film in the national context of Canada.
What do you see as the future direction of cinema and media studies and how do you envision your own work fitting into that trajectory?
There is more interest and hunger on the part of students and scholars for understanding cinema studies in all of its diversity and pluriversality. Film departments still have a lot of work to do to update their curriculum from canons of whiteness and Eurocentrism, to better reflect the intellectual developments happening in the field of film studies as well as the intellectual desires of their highly diverse student bodies. I see that there is exciting scholarship on cinema and media studies from more transnational and non-western perspectives. After all, the majority of the world does not reside in the west nor does the majority of the world consist of white men. There is a move to decolonize cinema and media studies to better capture the reality of film and media production and its non-western genealogies in the digital age of global crisis, political reckonings, climate catastrophes, and social revolutions.
Dr. Mila Zuo
Assistant Professor | Film Studies | Cinema and Media Studies
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference
Tell us about your participation in the SCMS conference I am presenting a paper and chairing a panel on the 2023 Oscar Best Picture film Everything Everywhere All at Once. My talk focuses on what I’m referring to as the film’s “multiversal mommy-brain,” as I explore concepts of silliness, stupidity, and racial mania as generative counterpoints to racial melancholia.
What do you hope attendees take away from your presentation at the SCMS conference?
I am hoping that we can think about how films like this provide us with new horizons of playful resilience, especially for Asian diasporic and racialized mothers and daughters.
What are you most looking forward to about attending the conference?
I’m looking forward to connecting with friends and colleagues in person after several years of Zoom conferencing!
Dr. Chelsea Birks
Sessional Lecturer | Cinema and Media Studies | Film Studies
Chelsea won this year’s Best First Book Award for her recently published book, Limit Cinema: Transgression and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Global Film. Congratulations again, Chelsea! Read an interview with Chelsea here.
