Pea Arts About

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 demonst...

Dr Paula Blair Teaching Fellow in Film, Newcastle University Paula.Blair@ncl.ac.uk [no longer valid] Title slide for my BAFTSS paper in 2014 Belfast had the reason: Vinyl revival, punk nostalgia, and the television archive in Good Vibrations Although Northern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region is only post-conflict in the sense that the thirty-year period of violence known as the ‘Troubles’ has already been archived (Longley, 2011).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 ...

I recently recorded a guest spot on the GeekSweat movie review and news podcast for a segment asking whether it is time the Academy Awards added a stunts category. It was a relatively brief slot that involved me speaking with two co-hosts and many of the notes I had prepared became redundant. It's not an area of film production I've delved into much before, but I am concerned about safety on sets, particularly as I have begun to learn more about the production process through speaking to practitioners for Audiovisual Cultures and listening to The Delta Flyers . Here I've typed up my notes for the recording, which I hope will be of interest to anyone else keen to learn more about what production entails and the implications of prize culture. Stunt work being snubbed by the Academy Awards and other prestigious film and television awards ceremonies is a question of acknowledgement and it is telling that the stunt community in Hollywood has established their own body to redre...