Department of Comparative Literature

Date: 16 April 2018 (Monday)
Time: 7:00 to 8:30pm
Venue: Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

1.The Cultural Politics of International Co-production for a ‘small’ National Cinema

Many national film agencies point to the strategic importance of international co-production as a means of harnessing additional finance and distribution potential beyond the support available within a single national film industry. As well as potentially unlocking multiple sources of funding, co-productions are assumed to ‘travel’ better, achieving a release in more international markets than films produced by a single nation. International co-production can also offer the cultural enrichment that comes from the experience, insight and exchange between different film cultures. However, such cross-cultural, transnational collaboration is not without its challenges, especially when filmmakers from so-called ‘small’ national cinemas (where levels of production are relatively low) enter into co-production agreements with larger, more powerful national cinemas. For African and Arab cinemas, who enter into co-productions with producers and funders from the global north, these issues can be further complicated by the imposition of a western, neo-colonial influence on the production that leads to an Eurocentric vision of Africa or the Arab world on screen. This talk will consider the cultural politics of international co-production for so-called small or sub-national cinemas, using the example of contemporary Moroccan cinema as a case study.

Bio:
Will Higbee is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Exeter (UK) and academic lead in the University’s partnership with the London Film School, which includes a PhD Film Practice programme and the MA in International Film Business. He is the author of Mathieu Kassovitz (MUP, 2007) and Post-beur cinema (EUP, 2012) and co-editor of Studies in French Cinema: UK perspectives 1985-2010 (Intellect, 2010) and De-Westernizing Film Studies (Routledge, 2012). He has published widely on contemporary French cinema, diasporic filmmaking in France and questions of national/transnational and diasporic cinema in a range of journals and edited collections. He is currently leading a three-year international research project on Transnational Moroccan Cinema, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), in collaboration with researchers and filmmakers from Europe, Morocco and the USA.

2. Side by Side and Up and Down: Transnational Cinema Studies in the Era of Audiovisual Criticism

Techniques of parallel comparison have always been central to literary translation studies. But what of questions of cinematic “translation,” such as those pertaining to the transnational film remake, for example? Given that “Translation is a process that involves looking for similarities between languages and cultures”— (Venuti 2008: 264) how might the kinds of parallel comparison techniques emerging as a result of the use of easily available and operable video technology for the purposes of film criticism help us in examining questions of audiovisual transnational translatabilty? In this talk, Grant will show and discuss some of hers and others’ work in this new field.

Bio:
Catherine Grant is Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where she teaches and researches on-line audiovisual cultures, audiovisual essay practices, and digital forms of analysis and criticism. Co-editor of the 2006 Routledge volume Screening World Cinema, she also continues to work on questions of transnational media studies. She is part of the programming group for the annual Essay Film Festival, run jointly with London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and serves on the steering committee of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, the Vasari Research Centre, and the Open Library of Humanities. A prolific experimental video-essayist, she runs the Film Studies For Free blog and is a founding co-editor of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies.

Registration link: https://goo.gl/7ubsq1

All are welcome.

Co-organized by:

Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), HKU;

Department of Comparative Literature, HKU