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...

Post-Agreement Cinema: The Northern Ireland Conflict in Contemporary British and Irish Screen Cultures Abstract Film and television production in Northern Ireland has experienced significant shifts since the Peace Agreement was signed in 1998. During this time, major changes in views of the Northern Ireland conflict in other parts of the British Isles have emerged. This project will analyse the landscape of contemporary film and television across the UK and Ireland with a particular focus on inter-regional productions that engage with the conflict’s legacy. As well as major publications and a vlog, outputs will include curating an exhibition of visual art relevant to the project and a series of film screenings with talks. Details of current and past research My research interests lie in contemporary film and visual culture focusing on conflict and post-conflict themes. I am drawn to convergences between cinema and visual art, particularly inv...

In March 2012 I introduced a screening of Ordet/The Word (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955) at the Queen's Film Theatre, Belfast. It's all a blur, really, and I can't remember anything to tell you about it. I was becoming very strained, running out of money and being flooded by rejection just months after the high of passing and very quickly graduating with my PhD. The three years of intesnive hard work in that moment felt as if they'd been for nothing. I imagine that was my state of mind when preparing these notes. Today I know that things just are what they are and don't inherently have a purpose.   Ordet intro Carl Theodor Dreyer (b. 1889) of Swedish decent but grew up in a Danish foster home and was adopted by a strict Protestant family. 26yrs after The Passion of Joan of Arc he depicted spirituality even more piously in Ordet/The Word (1955). The film-maker based Ordet on a play by Kaj Munk, which he praised for its ‘astonishing courage’. It tells a tale of...

On the morning of Wednesday 23 November 2011 - the day after my PhD viva voce (big scary conversation with examiners who decide whether you're awarded the degree), and two days after my 27th birthday - I introduced a screening of Tim Burton's short animation Vincent (1982) and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (dir. Henry Selick, 1993) at the Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast put on especially for school groups. Although the timing was ridiculous, I jumped at the chance to perform this introduction. The Nightmare Before Christmas has always been special to me. It came out shortly after my dad died, and, for all its problems, it was a comfort and a mainstay for me in those early years. I have seen it more times that I can tell you. I know the whole film almost word-for-word, beat-for-beat. Sally the rag doll has been a profound influence. At a major time in my life with such a big absence, it was meaningful to draw my personal and professional lives together, eve...

Application for Lecturer in Film and Television Dear Prof. ___ and Selection Panel, I felt tremendously enthused when learning of this post as it is exactly what I am looking for to re-enter academia after a period away due to illness. As my CV indicates, my postgraduate studies involved a blend of film and visual culture and my subsequent research has been underpinned by concerns with convergences between different modes and practices in contemporary moving image production. Informed by these research specialisms, my teaching will be a great asset to the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media. Knowledge of television has figured significantly in my research on contemporary film, visual culture and moving image production, largely in the ways artists and film-makers engage with television archives. This is the focus of my article currently under review at Screen which compares the ways historical narratives of real events in 1980s Chile and Northern Irela...

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'm job-hunting at the moment and have had a go recently at putting in for academic posts. It is now five years since the deep unpleasantness I experienced in my last lecturing post at University of Salford. I reckon I'll be bottom of the pile for life. I'm reflecting on my relationship with academia quite a bit right now amidst the UCU strike action currently underway. I think I'm pretty bonkers for even entertaining going back into that noise. It's just that I worked so hard for so long and I was really good at it. I mean properly really good at it. But a lot was stacked against me and my economic difficulties, the strain of shifting my life from one city to the next year after year, and spending all my time on a contract trying to secure the next one, then encountering bullying in a toxic, corrupt environment when I finally landed a 'permanent' post, well it nearly ended me. So I don't know, I just saw some jobs and thought I 100% won't get these...

I wanted to highlight my latest lecture video about Shirley Clarke because she's a film-maker who represents a lot of what I feel is my unfinished business in film studies. I had so wanted to research her in depth and some day visit the UCLA archives of her work. Never say never, I guess, but I'm sure there are people working on her and doing a fine job of progressing what scholars such as Lauren Rabinovitz initiated in redressing the shameful marginalising of Clarke's work in film histories. I use plural histories here because she crossed the too-oft gate-kept boundaries of documentary, social realism, experimental, independent and avant-garde cinemas. I find her work utterly fascinating, and I've only been able to see a little of it first-hand. It has galled me since I learned of Clarke (after my own formal film education I might add, and from my mentor Dr Des O'Rawe who was doing his own 'decolonising' of his knowledge and teaching, which he passed onto m...