Language in TV & film guest seminar

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I have the great pleasure of reporting from Lausanne, Switzerland, this week. I've been here giving a guest seminar for my friend Jenn's MA linguistics module on language in TV and film. We did this before but via Zoom during lockdown, and this time everything worked out so I could come in person. 

My task was to cover film stylistics and the terminology used in moving image/audiovisual analysis. I also wanted to link to topics such as accent and ethnicity covered elsewhere in the module. My go-to to exemplify all this is No (dir. Pablo Larraín, 2012) as it is a meeting place for television and cinema, the main character (René Saavedra played by Gael Garcia Bernal) has returned from exile to Mexico and is marked as not quite Chilean by his accent, there is a notable absent presence of Chile's indigenous peoples, and it is one of those films whose aesthetics directly impacted by the recording apparatus and the way it has been edited make it an excellent candidate for demonstrating any and all aspects of film language. 

In preparation for the session that involved setting reading, I turned to film semiology as introduced to film criticism by Christian Metz. It was a struggle to find something article-length that felt appriopriate, but in my digging I found his last book Impersonal Enunciation, Or the Place of Film which had originally been published in French around the time of Metz's death in 1993 and had only been translated into English quite recently, releasing in 2016. The translation was crafted with great care by Cormac Deane as his postdoctoral project with Trinity College Dublin. The text itself is also ironically the most personal and personable work of Metz's. My memories of Metz from my theoretical film education were of dense, almost impenetrable, books and articles with barely any illustrative examples from specific films. In Impersonal Enunciation he reveals himself more than ever before as a devoted cinephile and speaks measuredly and eruditely through his observations, even allowing himself moments to meander then correct his course in a fittingly reflexive way. 

What I was drawn to with Jenn's module and looking at No in mind were chapters on exposing the apparatus, films within films, and the question of neutral images or sound. These were a good jumping off point into discussions of the ways that political alignments are more complex and messy than simply right or left in No, and that the mise en scène indicates attitudes towards the Southern Cone's indigenous people that are conspicuous by their absence in what is not said by the white characters of European origin who are the main players.

As I always used to when teaching in formal academia I prepared more than I needed, and so there was a lot I intended to go through in detail in some close sequence analysis. I was happy to be led by the students and their interests, though, so I fielded wide-ranging questions as best I could about production contexts, copyright, ownership, actors as commodities, genre marketing, and all sorts. I also had a good chat with one student afterwards who is researching Derry Girls, which was enjoyable. She rightly said there is not much published yet and she found my podcast episodes about it. A mild frustration for me when I have dallied at academic publishing again has been getting knocked back and told that instead of comparing the use of archival material in Good Vibrations and No, I should look at Good Vibrations alongside Derry Girls. When I started that research, Derry Girls wasn't a notion, but it's also too close to the bone for me to spend much more time with the series. I also can't afford to keep working in that depth for that much time as a freelancer when there is paid work I could be doing. I am happy to pass that particular batton on, and always happy to chat instead. 

It has been a rewarding experience, even if I really can't be doing with air travel any more (of which I'm doing a lot lately, given personal circumstances). Mind you, I felt very smug indeed sailing through border control on my Irish passport, especially when there were Brits who really weren't getting that they needed to go in a different, longer, slower queue. I'm getting snippy so I'll take my leave now. À bientôt!

Slides for Language in TV & film seminar


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