Authenticity?
Authenticity?
Reality, Reliability & Access in Performance and Media
Friday 11 April 2008
Film, Theatre & Television — University of Reading
Supportedby the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD)
and the Graduate School in Arts and Humanities, University of Reading.
Welcome to JAM 2008!
Table of Contents
Overview of the Day...... 3
A1: Reception & Authorship...... 4
B1: Engaging with Space...... 8
C1: Public Performance Practices...... 12
A2: Popular Forms & Practice...... 16
B2: Confronting Media Multiplicity...... 20
C2: Visibilites of Performance...... 24
A3: Interpreting Genre in Film & Television.....28
B3: Negotiating Adaption Translation...... 32
C3: Docu/Drama: Portraying the Real...... 36
Biographical Information...... 41
About JAM...... 47
Acknowledgements...... 48
Overview of the Day
9.30 – 10.00Registration (Bob Kayley Foyer)
10.00 – 11.25Welcome and Keynote Panel
Life After PhD
(Bob Kayley Theatre)
11.25 – 11.40 Coffee/Tea (Bob Kayley Foyer)
11.40 – 13.10Session One (Various Rooms)
13.10 – 14.05Lunch (Studio 1)
14.05 – 15.35Session Two (Various Rooms)
15.35 – 16.05Coffee/Tea (Studio 1)
16.05 – 17.35Session Three (Various Rooms)
17.35 – 18.20Wine Reception (Studio 1)
18.20Close/Travel to Reading for Postconference Meal
Panel:A1
Reception & Authorship
Chair: Jonathan Bignell
Room: Studio 2
Time: 11.40 – 13.10
Andrea Dunbar: “The Bard of the West Riding Council-Estate Jungle”
Sarah Bell
Partway through Andrea Dunbar’s first play, The Arbor (1980), the central character revealed her name to be “Andrea Dunbar”, from that point onwards the dramatist was unable to escape a constant focus on her personal life. Dunbar had four productions staged at the Royal Court in the 1980s and all were regarded by theatre critics as representations of her life. Despite repeated denials to the contrary, her plays were understood as ‘truthful’ and ‘factual’ and by harmful association as narrow, naïve and repetitive.
What makes Dunbar’s reception even more problematic is that the Royal Court also promoted her work as authentic. Furthermore, Max Stafford-Clark, Artistic Director of the Royal Court 1979-93, inadvertently still controls the way Dunbar’s work is understood. In 2000/1 his theatre company Out-of-Joint toured Dunbar’s second play Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) with a verbatim piece, A State Affair (2000), formed through interviews in her native Bradford.
This limiting idea of authenticity in Dunbar’s work still continues after her death and is linked to both her personal life and the Northern council estate backdrop against which her plays are set. Central to this is the belief that Dunbar kept writing about council-estate life because it was all she knew. Many critics and some academics have damagingly concluded that Dunbar had little dramatic talent, as all she did was simply record events she had taken part in or witnessed.
It is now time for Dunbar’s work to be reclaimed from the damaging and restrictive concept of authenticity; her plays need to be valued as pieces of dramatic art that present an underrepresented young, female working-class experience.
John Cassavetes and Dogme 95. Authenticity and radical aesthetics.
Angelos Koutsourakis
One of the aims of this paper is to re-read the cinema of John Cassavetes and redeem him as a radical director. Therefore, I will relate his films to the Dogme manifesto and attempt to find signs of connection with radical aesthetics. The films of Cassavetes are rarely acknowledged as radical, or political mainly because his dialogue with Hollywood is not essentially oppositional. However, a critical examination of the formalistic aspects of his films may bring us valuable conclusions regarding of the political aspects of his aesthetics. The main thrust of this paper will be a study in the formal aspects of his films identifying elements that are considered to be authentic and radical. Emphasis will be placed on the spatial and temporal articulation of his films and the refusal to narrate a story through a single character’s point of view. On the contrary, the multiplicity of point of view shots and the treatment of character as a process (which is heightened by Cassavetes’ insistence on improvisation on the part of the actors), the narrative aperture, the avoidance of extra-diegetic music in the scenes of emotional tension, along with the use of direct sound and hand-shaked camera are some elements that locate Cassavetes in the realms of radical cinema. Furthermore, discussion will be focused on the Dogme 95 manifesto, which called for authentic and anti-illusionist films aiming at going against established cinematic practices and audience expectations. Cassavetes’ influence on this movement will be discussed, in order to highlight the radical implications of his films, in order to see the movement from a non-Bazinian point of view. Cassavetes’ insistence on observing things and portraying them beyond oversimplistic distinctions of good and evil, together with the refusal to condense life (a characteristic of classical dramaturgy) and the frustration of preconceived expectations on the part of the spectators firmly opposes the traditional cinematic practices and locates him into the realms of political cinema.
“Vietnam As It Really Was”: The Promotion and Reception of Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986)
Oliver Gruner
“Oliver Stone has come a long way since Vietnam,” declared Platoon’s theatrical trailer “but he hasn’t left it behind.” Released on the back of a marketing campaign that championed Stone’s Vietnam veteran credentials, the film was greeted with a firestorm of media coverage and public debate when it reached cinemas in December 1986. Time magazine announced that it showed “Vietnam As It Really Was”, and a host of similarly triumphant notices appeared in numerous other publications. After a spate of oft-condemned “revisionist” Vietnam films – the Rambo and Missing in Action series’, for example – that had appeared in the early 1980s, Platoon was touted by many as a long overdue “authentic” cinematic chronicle of the Vietnam veteran experience.
This paper will explore the ways in which “authenticity” was promoted through publicity materials and negotiated in subsequent debate that circulated in the media at the time of Platoon’s release. Locating these materials within a 1980s context – the highly publicised construction of the Vietnam War memorial in 1982, the mobilisation of Vietnam rhetoric in political debates, and the apparently increasing interest in first person Vietnam War accounts by veterans in articles, books etc – I will argue that the promotion of Stone’s Vietnam vet persona was central to Platoon’s perceived “authenticity.” For it not only promoted the film as Oliver Stone’s autobiography, but it also offered the opportunity for numerous other Vietnam veterans, in interviews and articles, to recall their own experiences. Platoon, I will argue, became “Vietnam As It Really Was” for the very reason that it acted as a canvas upon which numerous Vietnam stories could be written and re-enacted.
Panel: B1
Engaging with Space
Chair: Lib Taylor
Room: Bob Kayley Theatre
Time: 11.40 – 13.10
The Tangible Performance Space: God Is a DJ
Eirini Nedelkopoulou
The paper explores the merging between the physical body and visual/tactile technologies that create a sensual space of engagement in the performance God Is a DJ staged in Athens in 2001. During the performance the actors record themselves and the audience with video cameras, and this footage is projected on multiple big screens. By considering this ‘chiasmatic’ experience, which combines the physical body and the technologies, I examine the phenomenal presence of a reconfigured performance space. The technologies function asan extension of sensory information and create the potential of performer’s/spectator’s physical contact with an expanded, mediated, and tangible space. In this ‘tangible mediated space’, where technological and performance modes of audience address intertwine, the body of both the spectator and performer becomes immediately experiential. I will address the nature of this sensual engagement with otherness by analysing relationships between the visual and the tactile, and the visual tactility/tactile visuality discussed by Merleau-Ponty. The paper elaborates the convergence of the material body and machine under the phenomenological idea of ‘massive flesh’ that underlines and challenges the intertwining relationship between the live and mediated. Focusing on the moment when a live performer/spectator confronts her mediated other through the technologies of reproduction, the paper suggests that the experience of the self as other in the space of technology can be read as an erotic palpable experience.
Entering the Frame
Jennifer Markowitz
Can the spectator ever experience the authentic environment implied by the play text? Site-based theatre has the potential to create authentic experiences for audiences. Access to the visceral invites audience members to experience a more complete world than what might be merely observed during a proscenium production. However, the very nature of placing a performer within a specific space might create an unavoidable frame of which the spectator might be unable to penetrate. In this paper, I will consider the use (or non-use) of the frame in creating an authentic experience for the spectator. Drawing upon recent site-based work from New York theatre companies, I will explore the different ways the use of site creates frames, both definitive and subtle, and whether or not it is actually possible to avoid framing within the context of a performance.
'I could hardly believe that each morning there were new things to see'
Eirini Kartsaki
Within the realms of contemporary performance the emergence of repetition as a structural and expressive means raises many questions. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s notion of the writerly (Le plaisir du texte), I argue the possibility of a particular mode of experiencing repetition in terms of movement and text. Using specific examples, I illustrate how repetition achieves to construct a space, within which the spectator’s viewing is accommodated.
For the purposes of this analysis, I use two performative examples: Ana Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas: Four movements in the music of Steve Reich and Pina Bausch’s Bluebeard. What I am interested in is the space, in which the spectator does not merely watch (in the same way that the reader does not merely read the text in Barthes’s Le plaisir du texte), but actually performs or ‘writes’ the repetitive in the act of viewing. This constitutes a particular mode of spectatorship, a point of view from the inside: the viewer is not anymore looking at the performance from the outside, since his point of view is now situated within the performance itself. Thus, the viewer’s perception is affected on an emotional level, since the spectrum though which he looks at the piece of art, has shifted. This shifting is crucial in this analysis, as it challenges the idea of the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ in terms of the meaning that it produces.
Panel: C1
Public Performance Practices
Chair: Graham Saunders
Room: BG 78
Time: 11.40 – 13.10
The construction and undermining of authenticity: Persona, performance and lyrics of the Swedish rock-artist Eva Dahlgren.
Anna Biström
The concept of authenticity is essential in describing and understanding the work of the Swedish singer and musician Eva Dahlgren. Generally speaking, Dahlgren’s project seems to be to construct an image of something genuine and real.
In my presentation, I want to identify some different ways in which Dahlgren, as well as other actors, such as media, are “doing authenticity”, and are performing or creating an image of a true self in Dahlgren’s songs. I will show in what way authenticity is constructed in Dahlgren’s simplified and intimate performance on stage, her use of voice and her lyrics.
However, it is equally interesting and important to consider examples of how Dahlgren overthrows her own authenticity, and creates another kind of persona, for instance by parodying the “authentic Dahlgren” in her performance of a song.
I also want to look at in what way the image of Dahlgren as “authentic” is constructed in media. For instance autobiographical interpretations of Dahlgren’s lyrics function as a marker of authenticity, as the “own experience” adds to the authentic value.
Poetry Preserve Us: The Introduction to the Public Poetry Reading
Paul Maddern
What really constitutes the variety act […] is the fact that on each occasion something happens and nothing happens at the same time.
—Theodor Adorno
At every public poetry reading the complex interrelations between introducer, poet and audience forms a discourse community concerned with the dissemination and reception of poetry. In its attempt to authenticate a shared set of values that exists, or that should exist between all participants in the reading, the introduction to the reading provides the framework within which both the reading and the criteria for inclusion in the discourse community are evaluated. The creation of a framework operates at both a micro and macro level, with the individual (micro) reading feeding the generalised (macro) conception of what constitutes a ‘genuine’ poetic act. This paper will ask if the creation of the framework sustains barriers between varied bodies purporting to guard authentic poetic interests. If so, is the introduction to the public reading one of the most potent forces at work in the erection and maintenance of these barriers? Does the introduction perpetuate a culture in which the public reading is little more than a variety act, during which something and nothing happens? It could be argued that the micro-discourse community serves only to ritualise ‘The Poetry Reading’ inasmuch as the content of the reading (the ‘something’ that happens) reinforces pre-existing notions surrounding the macro-discourse community – the community in which the guiding tenet is that ‘nothing happens’ to threaten the framework.
On Narrative and Ownership: Performance-based Interpretation in The Museum
Polly Williams
Museums usually have the effect of endowing everything that is contained or displayed there as authentic. But what happens to this authenticity guarantee when what is displayed is a performance based on its collections? The re-enactment or dramatisation of past lives, whether they are Victorian servants or Tudor gentry necessarily includes elements of fiction or fantasy. The status of the history that these re-creations are based on is in any case uncertain, based on knowledges that are partial, incomplete, polyphonic and reconstructed. The question of who has the authority to interpret history and reproduce historical narratives in the museum is problematised when the task is given to the actor/interpreter who may consider that the moment of interaction with their audience to be the ‘real’ truth and that in the interests of enlightenment or understanding, create their own stories.
This paper is based on my ongoing PhD research at the University of Leeds, School of Performance and Cultural Industries and the National Coal Mining Museum for England. This museum, which is also a ‘real’ coal-mine uses two quite different forms of performed interpretation. One is a more obviously dramatic form based on the practices of ‘living history’ and is carried out by interpreters who are both actors and educators and which ‘brings to life’ past ‘characters’ from the mining industry and mining communities. The other is carried out by miner-guides who are genuine ex-miners and who both embody and interpret what is a comparatively recent history. This paper will interrogate the status of authenticity as it shifts across performance practices.
Panel: A2
Popular Forms & Practice
Chair: Lisa Purse
Room: Studio 2
Time: 14.05 – 15.35
The Signification of (In)Authenticity in the ‘Cinema of the Suburbs’: Ambiguity and Ambivalence in Pleasantville, The Truman Show, and The Stepford Wives
Tim Vermeulen
It is certainly a truism, if, indeed, not a cliché, to say that suburbia – at least in the ways it is commonly stereotypically represented in popular cultural discourse – and inauthenticity are often associated with one another (Mumford 1966; Jurca 2001; Silverstone 2001; Beuka 2004).
This can certainly be said with regards to those recent films set in, but also, more importantly, about suburbia, a lot Felperlin (1997) and Muzzio (2002) have termed the ‘cinema of the suburbs’. Suburbia’s meticulously ordered, tree-lined streets, homogenous, 1950s-like, pastel coloured, semi-attached, picture-window dwellings, inhabited by white middle class nuclear families, exist, so these films have it, on the principle of exclusion and repression of ‘otherness’, in architecture as much as in ethnicity, class, sexual preference and psychological disposition. In this ‘place myth’ (the persistent connotation of a place with certain norms and values to the extent it becomes wholly signified by (one of) them (Shields, 1991)) the inauthentic is thus put on a par with the undifferentiated.
Authenticity then, I will argue in this paper through an analysis of Pleasantville (Ross 1998), The Truman Show (Weir 1998) and The Stepford Wives (Oz 2004), is effectively envisaged as all that which has been excluded and repressed which returns and dislocates the ‘place myth’. That is to say, it is the plurality of difference (in architecture, in ethnicity, etc), and, more complex, that which could not be categorized, ordered: the ambiguous, the ambivalent. This process, I will show, is both a narrative pattern and a visual trope: it is signified not only by the deterioration of the houses, the disintegration of the families, but also by the sudden change in mise en scene, colour, tone and sound. I hope to show that in this particular instance, the inauthentic and the authentic are inevitably and necessarily in a tension, bound up with one another, and so contribute to a different understanding of former and latter.
Unrealism and the Hollywood Happy Ending
James MacDowell
This paper is related to my ongoing research into issues surrounding the ‘Hollywood happy ending’ – a subject that, despite its apparent prevalence, has received surprisingly little sustained attention from the field of film studies.
Apparently signifying the epitome of cinematic artifice, the ‘happy ending’ of Hollywood cinema is often assumed, within both academic and popular discourses, to be a narrative device that reveals fundamentally ‘unrealistic’ or ‘inauthentic’ impulses. In instances in which a critic wishes to defend a particular ‘happy ending’, it is common for the defence to be mounted in terms that describe the ending as constituting an ironic, self-consciously false, inflection of the trope. David Bordwell, for example, has said that ‘unmotivated happy endings’ can ‘force us to recognize the conventions that rule classical cinema,’ and ‘flaunt the disparity between what we ask of art and what we know of social life’.