Pea Arts About

Dr Paula Blair Teaching Fellow in Film, Newcastle University Paula.Blair@ncl.ac.uk [no longer valid] Title slide for my BAFTSS paper in 2014 Belfast had the reason: Vinyl revival, punk nostalgia, and the television archive in Good Vibrations Although Northern Ireland has experienced relative peace since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, it has been argued that the region is only post-conflict in the sense that the thirty-year period of violence known as the ‘Troubles’ has already been archived (Longley, 2011). In response to the Agreement’s authoritative processes of ‘official forgetting’, many contemporary artists and film-makers confront issues stemming from the conflict, often by appropriating and re-presenting archival material to explore the spectral anxieties which tether society to a state of past-presentness (term borrowed from Mulvey, 2010). The Belfast-made film Good Vibrations (Barros D’Sa & Leyburn, 2012) is the commercial apex of this activity. The film chronicles the ...

Back in January, a friend drew my attention to a book series inviting proposals for monographs. Here is my informal pitch that was knocked back within an hour of emailing it to the series editors who said the topic was interesting but wasn't a fit for them. I welcome comments, suggestions and discussion because I'd really love a crack at this and I think there's something in it. Adaptation and Appropriation in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Paula Blair peablair@gmail.com Dear [...], I am writing to propose a volume for your Adaptation and Visual Culture Palgrave series. Provisionally titled Adaptation and Appropriation in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable , the book would examine the intricacies of acts of adaptation and appropriation in Damien Hirst’s major exhibition in Venice, Italy, in 2017. ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ exhibited hundreds of items across two major galleries, many of which were claimed to have ...

I’m settling well in my fixed-term post of Teaching Fellow in Film and Visual Culture. The teaching load is heavy, the days will be manic, and I’m raring to get cracking. We’re covering some great material with which I am very comfortable, and am becoming happily reacquainted with Deleuze’s Cinema texts. The PhD has done something to my brain, reading Deleuze gives me such joy now – what a difference from the frustrated grappling during the MA. Hopefully I can help my second year undergraduates get a decent grasp of him. With only four full-time staff (including brand new short-term me), teaching for the department this semester, we are stretched, but shaping up to be a crack team. There will be little time for our own research endeavours. The commissioning editor for my monograph is happy for me to push my deadline back and make producing the manuscript my summer project. I have major revisions to do on an article that came back from peer review due in March. Considering I threw...