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Research Seminar 3 May 2017 – Intertext, Anxiety, Iconography: Mapping the Meaning of the Moors Murderers and Yorkshire Ripper in Popular Music and Culture

Het Phillips, University of Birmingham, will explore the representation of the Moors Murderers and the Yorkshire Ripper in pop culture in our latest research seminar.

Canterbury Christ Church University
School of Media Art and Design
Research Seminars 2016-2017
3 May 2017
4.15pm-5.30pm
Powell Building – Pf06
North Holmes Road Campus

Intertext, Anxiety, Iconography: Mapping the Meaning of the Moors Murderers and Yorkshire Ripper in Popular Music and Culture
Speaker: Het Phillips, University of Birmingham

This lecture will use popular-musical representations of the ‘Moors Murders’ and ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ cases as case studies to examine the ways that pop culture has responded to and shaped, firstly, the figure of the celebrity murderer in general, secondly, the mythology surrounding these crimes specifically, and thirdly, designations of what is considered exceptional and what as ‘ordinary’ violence. In so-doing I will examine ways in which such self-consciously ‘rebellious’ forms construct themselves as questioning official history and respectable interests.

Featured in songs from punk, industrial and indie music from the 1970s to the present day, these killers’ proliferation as musical cultural commodities has emerged alongside the development of ‘alternative’ popular music and out of (and in turn fed back into) its mixed and often self-contradictory concerns around authenticity, fame, image, commodity, self-expression and transgression.

Drawing on Professor Lisa Downing’s work on the construction of the figure of the murderer as exceptional, as overlapping with the figure of the artist, and as the epitome of the individualised neoliberal subject (The Subject of Murder, 2013), and David Schmid’s analysis of the particular cultural forces that have shaped the modern serial killer into the apparently obvious and self-evident figure of fame and fascination (Natural Born Celebrities, 2006), I will demonstrate that the construction of these celebrity killers and that of the celebrity musician share many important facets and are mutually self-supporting in their mythologies and the kinds of cultural intertext they draw upon to create and maintain their exceptionality and commodity status as society’s ultimate outsider insiders.

Het Philips is a doctoral researcher at the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music, University of Birmingham, and her research interests include Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, James Joyce, marginal landscapes, the uncanny, hauntings, the body and late twentieth/early twenty-first century popular music.

Powell Building – Pf06
North Holmes Road Campus
Email Dr Andrew Butler – Andrew.Butler@canterbury.ac.uk – for further details
— All welcome —

Research Seminar: 18 January 2017: Andrew M. Butler on Star Wars and Kevin Smith

Senior lecturer Dr Andrew M. Butler has been invited to contribute a chapter to a book on transmedial Star Wars and is presenting the work in progress.

Canterbury Christ Church University
School of Media Art and Design
Research Seminars 2016-2017

18 January 2017
4.15pm-5.30pm

Invoking the Holy Trilogy: Star Wars in the Askewniverse
Speaker: Dr Andrew M. Butler, Canterbury Christ Church University

 

Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) were among the first of many blockbusters that (in Stephen Paul Miller’s words) attempted to eat their audiences and created the tentpole film phenomenon that dominates mainstream cinema to this day. They were a huge influence upon the taste and habits of Generation X and the directors who emerged in the 1990s.
 
Star Wars-fan Kevin Smith was one such director and he both inserts references to such films in the dialogue of characters in his films and makes allusions to the tropes of the films. The eponymous Clerks and Mallrats of his early features are clearly fans of the original trilogy, Episodes IV-VI, and argue about the minutiae of the films. By the time of Clerks: The Animated Series (2000-1) and Clerks II (2006), the prequel trilogy of Episodes I-III was being released and the characters have a more ambivalent reaction to the franchise. In addition, by the time of Clerks II, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2001-3) challenged the centrality of the trilogy to the geek psyche. In this paper I want to examine the impact of Lucas’s studio auteurist franchise on Smith’s quasi-independent auteurship and the developing critique of film viewer as worker in relation to the commercial property of Star Wars.
 
 
 
Andrew M. Butler is author of Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s (2011), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2014), as well as books on Philip K. Dick, Cyberpunk, Terry Pratchett, Postmodernism and Film Studies. He is coeditor of Extrapolation. He is the non-voting chair of judges for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. In his spare time, he investigates real ale and collects shiny trousers.
 

Powell Building – Pf06
North Holmes Road Campus
Email Dr Andrew Butler – Andrew.Butler@canterbury.ac.uk – for further details

— All welcome —

Research Seminar: Alan Meades and Karen Shepherdson on Arcades, Archives and our Coastal Communities

Alan Meades and Karen Shepherdson of CCCU’s Centre for Research on Communities & Cultures will be discussing an photographic archive of seaside arcades recently acquired by SEAS Photography.

Research Seminar: 9 November 2016 – Sinéad Murphy

Sinéad Murphy (King’s College, London) will talk about Palestinian artist, photographer, filmmaker and installation artist Larissa Sansour as part of our research seminar series.

Canterbury Christ Church University
School of Media Art and Design
Research Seminars 2016-2017
9 November 2016
1.00pm-2.15pm
Producing the nation:
Larissa Sansour’s Dystopian Visions of Palestine
Speaker: Sinéad Murphy (King’s College, London)

Ideas of nation and politics of self-determination have long dominated representations of the Palestinian-Israel conflict, to the extent that “the conflict is understood primarily as a clash between ‘narratives’” (Anna Bernard) – a clash which artists, writers and filmmakers are frequently expected to negotiate. Utilising what she describes as the “odd mix of nostalgia and accomplishment” which science fiction affords, Larissa Sansour creates and interrogates narrations of the nation in Palestine and Israel through film, photography and installation. Sansour’s dystopian visions reinvigorate long-standing questions of identity and belonging in the context of conflict and displacement in Palestine.

Sinéad Murphy is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature in King’s College, London. Her research is an AHRC LAHP-funded project on contemporary Arab speculative fiction in English. She completed her BA and MA degrees in University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the administrator for the Kings Fantastic Talks series, and the co-organiser of the Department of Comparative Literature 2016 PGR conference, Seeking Refuge (http://seekingrefugekcl.com/). Her primary research interests include science and speculative fiction, contemporary Middle Eastern literature, postcolonial theory, and theories of comparative and world literature.

Email: sinead.murphy@kcl.ac.uk; https://kcl.academia.edu/SinéadMurphy; http://www.lahp.ac.uk/sinead-murphy/ Twitter: @S1nead_Murphy.

Powell Building – Pf06
Canterbury Christ Church University
North Holmes Road Campus
Canterbury
CT1 1QU

Email Dr Andrew Butler – Andrew.Butler@canterbury.ac.uk – for further details
— All welcome —
Feel Free to Bring Your Lunch!

Research Seminar: 10 February 2016 Charles Williams

Canterbury Christ Church University
School of Media Art and Design
Research Seminars 2015-2016

10 February 2016
4.15pm-5.30pm

Improvisation, Form and Narrative
Speaker: Charles Williams, CCCU

Charles Williams, Senior Lecturer for Painting in the Fine and Applied Art programme, is putting together a PhD (PAR) proposal, looking at his studio practice and theoretical background. The areas he is looking at specifically are Observational Drawing in his training background and its role in determining the realisation of form in his work, the role of improvisation in the studio process, and the layering of narratives in the work. Charles will present a slide show of the work and supporting imagery and would welcome suggestions and comments on these elements.

Born in Evanston, Illinois, USA, Charles Williams was educated at Kent College in Canterbury, Maidstone College of Art and the Royal Academy, London. He was elected to the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1996 and in 1999 was a founder member of the Stuckist group. He has shown his work in London, the UK and abroad, including a solo exhibition at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in California. He is the author of Basic Drawing (Robert Hale, 2011) and Basic Watercolour (Robert Hale, 2014).

Powell Building – Pf06
North Holmes Road Campus, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 3QU
Email Dr Andrew Butler – Andrew.Butler@canterbury.ac.uk – for further details

— All welcome —

Research Seminar: A Wild West Hero: Motifs of the Hollywood Western in four movies about Hadrian’s Wall

25 November 2015

4.15pm-5.30pm – Powell Building – Pf06, North Holmes Road Campus, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, CT1 1QU

Speaker: Dr Tony Keen (Open University)

One odd factor in the boom in ancient world movies post-Gladiator is the relative dearth of Roman settings, as opposed to Greek, especially in comparison with movies of the 1950s and 1960s. However, some Roman movies have been made, and this paper focusses upon four of them: King Arthur (Antoine Fuqua, 2004), The Last Legion (Doug Lefler, 2007), Centurion (Neil Marshall, 2010) and The Eagle (Kevin McDonald, 2011). Though not produced as a series, these form a convenient thematic set. Not only are all four set predominantly or entirely within Roman Britain, but the most significant portion (and in some cases all) of the action takes place on Hadrian’s Wall or in the barbarian territory beyond. Three of them also involve the Ninth Legion – the exception being King Arthur.

One noticeable thing about these movies is the degree to which they employ the plot structures and mise-en-scène of the classic American western. The villa north of the Wall in King Arthur, which makes no sense in terms of Roman settlement patterns, becomes comprehensible as the equivalent of the isolated homestead that needs rescuing by the US Cavalry. Centurion, as Neil Marshall freely admits, steals substantially from the prolonged chase of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, including a virtual recreation of that scene’s climax. The Seal People of The Eagle are visually coded in costumes and make-up reminiscent of recent cinematic depictions of Native Americans, such as that seen in Dances with Wolves. Only The Last Legion avoids that approach, choosing instead to appropriate the mysticism of Star Wars (which has itself been described as a Western in disguise). Why are such elements so attractive to makers of Roman movies that they want to use them to supplement the more traditional tropes of the epic? Why does The Last Legion choose a different route? If moviemakers are so keen to make disguised Westerns, why are they not making real Westerns? Perhaps there is a certain portrayal of the Other that is no longer acceptable when applied to Native Americans, but can be applied on a different continent and at a greater chronological remove.

Tony Keen is an Associate Lecturer and Honorary Associate with the Open University, and Adjunct Assistant Professor with the University of Notre Dame London Global Gateway. He writes on reception of Greece and Rome in modern popular culture, in particular in cinema in science fiction. He is planning a co-authored book on the depiction of Roman Britain in cinema and television.

Email Dr Andrew Butler – andrew.buttler@canterbury.ac.uk – for further details

All welcome