Sound-Tracking Melbourne – Schedule and Program

Symposium Schedule

Tuesday 12 June – Wednesday 13 June

RMIT University, Swanston Academic Building, 445 Swanston St, Melbourne

SOUNDTRACKING MELB – Final program

Tuesday 12 June – Bldg 80.01.02 (Cinema)

6:00 – 8:30pm Special Screening of Boy in the Trees without dialogue Followed by a conversation with director Nick Verso and composer Darrin Verhagen about the film’s AACTA-nominated score

Wednesday 13 June – Bldg 80.05.12

9:00am – 10:15am Keynote: Emily Siddons (Museums Victoria) “The Sound of Space”

10:15am – 11:30 am Tessa Dwyer: “Mother Tongue: Migrant Melbourne, Home Movies and Accented Voice” Chris Henschke: “Echoes of the Machines” John Cumming and Martin Potter: ‘Sounds from a garage-film’ (An audio visual jam on the experimental soundtrack of Cumming’s 1980s film Obsession)

15 minute coffee break

11:45am – 1:00pm Samuel Whiting: “’Cruising the Streets of Collingwood’: the audiovisual (myth)-making of a music scene” Nick Moore: “The unbridling of Melbourne through music video” Adrian Danks: “‘At the Chat ‘n’ Chew’: Dave Graney, Stephen Cummings, Warren Oates and the Cinematic Re-imagination of Melbourne”

Lunch: 1:00-2:00pm

2:00 – 2:45pm Nick Verso and Darrin Verhagen: How musical experiences in 1990s Melbourne shaped the sonic development of the Boys in the Trees soundtrack – a conversation

2:45 – 4:00pm Djoymi Baker: “Mad Max and Predestination: Uncanny Sounds of Known Places” Diana Sandars: “The Soundtrack of Melbourne’s Outcast Children: Malcolm and Mary and Max” Brett Farmer: “And the Band Played On: Film Music and the Apocalyptic (post)Hollywood Imaginary of On the Beach”

15 minute coffee break

4:15 – 5:30pm Phil Edwards: “The Field Recordings of Tony Woods” Sonia Leber and David Chesworth: Sound Tracking the City in the artworks of Sonia Leber and David Chesworth

5:30 – 6:00pm Dan Golding and Andrew Pogson : “Performing film music live: the symphony, film music, and Melbourne – A conversation”

6:00 – 8:00pm: Closing reception

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Sound-Tracking Melbourne Symposium: free public screening

Tuesday 12 June, 6.00 – 8.30pm
RMIT University, Swanston Academic Building
445 Swanston St, Melbourne
Bldg 80.01.02 (Cinema)

Boys in the Trees (2016) made its world premiere at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival before screening at festivals including Toronto, Busan, Sitges and winning Best Feature at the Austin Film Festival. The film was nominated for a 2016 AACTA Award for Best Original Music Score.

The screening (courtesy of Mushroom Pictures) will be followed by a conversation with director Nick Verso and composer Darrin Verhagen about the film’s score and soundtrack. 

Note: The film will screen without dialogue to focus on its score and soundtrack. While we recommend that attendees see the film prior to the screening this is not essential – a full synopsis will be available.

Nicholas Verso is a filmmaker, AV Designer and DJ. His television and short film work includes directing the Emmy award-winning Nowhere Boys, Hugo (winner of the Grand Prize for Fantasy at the Rhode Island International Film Festival) and The Last Time I Saw Richard (winner of Best Short Film at the 2014 AACTA Awards and Best Emerging Filmmaker at MQFF). Boys in the Trees is his debut feature film.

 

 

Darrin Verhagen is an award-winning soundtrack composer and sound designer. He has released a variety of albums under his own name, as well as a range of pseudonyms. He is also a Senior Lecturer in the Sound Design stream of Digital Media and the director of the Audiokientic Experiments Lab at RMIT University.

 

 

Sound-Tracking Melbourne Symposium 12 – 13 June 2018

While it is recognised that screen media form the connective tissue of Melbourne’s artistic and cultural life, Sound-Tracking Melbourne will explore the importance of sound to the way the moving image is brought to life.

Dates: 12-13 June 2018 Time: 6.00-8.30 pm 12 June, 9.00 am-6.30 pm 13 June
Location: RMIT University, Swanston Academic Building – Bldg 80, 445 Swanston St, Melbourne

To register for Sound-Tracking Melbourne, visit: https://rmit.onestopsecure.com/OneStopWeb/STS_2018

Sound-Tracking Melbourne not only intends to give due critical and creative weight to the interlocking dimensions of sound design found in Melbourne screen culture, but to address the lack of sustained scholarship on the ways in which the city and its environs are imagined and brought to life on screen through particular ‘tracking’ soundscapes, from music videos to audiovisual art installations, and from film and TV to games and documentary.

Following the successful Screening Melbourne Symposium in 2017, Sound-Tracking Melbourne is both a recognition of the importance of sound to moving image culture and an intervention – asking delegates to hear and see sound in newly important ways.

Highlights include:

• Keynote presentation by Emily Siddons (Museums Victoria) – “The Sound of Space”
• Opening night Special Screening of Boys in the Trees (2016) without dialogue.  Nominated for a 2016 AACTA Award for Best Original Music Score, this special screening (courtesy of Mushroom Pictures) will be followed by a conversation with director Nick Verso and composer Darrin Verhagen about the film’s score and soundtrack.

In addition to conference attendance, registration is inclusive of the opening night public screening on 12 June and the closing reception on the evening of 13 June.

Contact: screeningmelbourne@gmail.com

Registration GST Inclusive:
$50.00 Non-presenters, fully waged
$40.00 Non-presenters, students and non-waged
$40.00 Presenting delegates, fully waged
$30.00 Presenting delegates, students and non-waged

To register for Sound-Tracking Melbourne, visit: https://rmit.onestopsecure.com/OneStopWeb/STS_2018

On behalf of the Organising Committee and the Melbourne Screen Studies Group

Jessica Balanzategui
David Chesworth
Toija Cinque
Adrian Danks
Glen Donnar
Claire Perkins
Sean Redmond

Call for Papers: Sound-Tracking Melbourne Symposium

Following the successful Screening Melbourne Symposium in February 2017, the Melbourne Screen Studies Group now seeks to solicit new abstracts for the Sound-Tracking Melbourne Symposium in June 2018.

While it is recognized that screen media form the connective tissue of Melbourne’s artistic and cultural life, the importance of sound to the way the moving image is brought to life, is relatively less well acknowledged. The Sound-Tracking Melbourne Symposium not only intends to give due critical and creative weight to the interlocking dimensions of sound design found in Melbourne screen culture, but to address the lack of sustained scholarship on the ways in which the city and its environs are imagined and brought to life on screen through particular ‘tracking’ soundscapes, from music videos to audiovisual art installations, and from film and TV to games and documentary. Sound-Tracking Melbourne is both a recognition of the importance of sound to moving image culture and an intervention – asking delegates to hear and see sound in newly important ways. The symposium will do this through delegate presentations, panel discussions, industry events, and performance-screenings.

We invite critical and/or creative abstracts, including non-traditional research presentations, for individual 20-minute papers, or pre-constituted panels of 3 x 20-minute papers, on any topic or theme related to the relationship between screen and sound in Melbourne. Industry and medium specific presentations are welcome, as well as those that adopt a broader view of Melbourne’s screen-sound cultures and which make comparisons with national and international case studies.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following areas:
• The Melbourne sound-vernacular on screen – accent, tone and pitch
• ‘Sound-tracking’ gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality – hearing and (not) seeing identity
• Melbourne’s music-image music scene
• Documenting Melbourne life through the sound-image
• Melbourne’s music video culture
• Melbourne’s installation art and video work: sounding experimental
• Sounding the everyday in documentary filmmaking
• Locations and settings: the ‘sound-track’ of place and space
• Melbourne film soundtracks
• Indigenous soundings in Melbourne screen culture
• Melbourne’s local news: ‘sound-tracking’ news in the cities and regions
• Film and television genre soundings. Melbourne as an audio-visual genre.
• Migration, home and exile: the sights and sounds of Melbourne’s populations
• YouTube Melbourne
• Historicising ‘sound-tracking’ or the ‘sound-track’ in Melbourne screen culture
• Technologies and interfaces of ‘sounding’ Melbourne on screen: analogue, digital, post-human
• Exhibiting sound in Melbourne screen culture – exploring the acoustics of ‘venue’
• Composing scores for Melbourne-based film and television
• The art of ‘sound-tracking’ Melbourne
• Gaming sound in a Melbourne context
• Games and cities: sounding Melbourne as an apocalypse
• Starring the Melbourne sound

Deadline for individual and panel abstracts: 5 February 2018

Individual Abstracts: 250 words, plus a 50-word biography. Please indicate if a postgraduate student.

Pre-constituted Panels: 150-word overview, plus 3x 250 word abstracts, and 3x 50-word biography, plus name of lead contact.

Delegates will be notified of decisions by: 5 March 2018

Please direct all abstracts and any enquiries to: screeningmelbourne@gmail.com

On behalf of the organising committee

Jessica Balanzategui
David Chesworth
Toija Cinque
Adrian Danks
Glen Donnar
Claire Perkins
Sean Redmond

SCREENING MELBOURNE: A Three-Day Symposium

 

Screen media form the connective tissue of Melbourne’s cultural life. From key moments in early cinema, such as the production of the world’s first feature film The Story of the Kelly Gang, to the broadcast of national events like the Melbourne Cup and AFL Grand Final, to early video game developers such as Beam Software setting up in the city, there is barely a section of Melbourne that is not illuminated by screen culture.

This three-day symposium, organised by the cross-institutional Melbourne Screen Studies Group, will chart this vibrant activity through presentations, panel discussions, industry events, and screenings. Feature events include a screening of The Story of the Kelly Gang at the Old Melbourne Gaol plus a curated program of film and video works on the big screen at Federation Square.

This event is held in association with the Universities of Deakin, La Trobe, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT and Swinburne; and in partnership with the Ian Potter Foundation, the Australian Film Institute, and the ARC Centre for Excellence for the History of Emotions.

Registrations: (go to website – https://screeningmelbourne.wordpress.com/)

Faculty:

Early bird (by January 28th) :

$220 (plus GST)

Standard (January 29th-February 4th):

$260 (plus GST)

Student and unwaged

Early bird (by January 28th):

$165 (plus GST)

Standard (January 29th-February 4th):

$185 (plus GST)

New Directions in Screen Studies II

Call for Papers 

Date: Thursday 22 – Friday 23 June 2017
Venue: Caulfield Campus, Monash University, Melbourne
Keynote Speakers: TBC
Deadline for submissions: Friday 3 February 2017

Following the success of the inaugural 2015 conference, New Directions returns in 2017 to offer a forum for new researchers to showcase their work before their peers and develop professional links across campuses around the country and beyond. The conference will also feature keynote presentations from established academics and screen practitioners.

We invite papers from postgraduate students and early career researchers whose work engages in historical, textual and critical approaches to film and television, and related video and new screen technologies. Topics of interest and approaches may include, but are not limited to:

• Celebrity studies
• Digital humanities
• Transnational frameworks in screen studies
• Sites of spectatorship (film festivals/non-traditional spaces/site-specific screen practices)
• Gender and gender identity
• Contemporary understandings of film style, genre and/or narrative
• Intermediality and cross-platform storytelling
• Migration and film/screen
• The animal turn/nonhuman turn and posthumanism

Presentations should be 20 minutes in length. Proposals for panels of three presenters are also welcome. A selection of presenters will be invited to develop their papers for publication as part of an edited collection.

Proposals of no more than 300 words, clearly stating the paper’s title and the author’s name/affiliation, should be sent as a Word document attachment to newdirectionsinscreenstudies2@gmail.com by 5pm Friday 3 February 2017.

The Conference Organising Committee

Felicity Chaplin and Belinda Glynn

http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/new-directions-in-screen-studies-2/

SCREENING MELBOURNE: A Three-Day Symposium

Call for Papers

SCREENING MELBOURNE: A Three-Day Symposium
To be held in association with the Universities of Deakin, La Trobe, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT and Swinburne; and in partnership with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Australian Film Institute, and the Centre for the History of Emotions.

Wednesday 22nd–Friday 24th February 2017

Venues to include: ACMI, Deakin Edge, Federation Square, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

Confirmed keynote: Lesley Stern, Professor Emerita University of California, San Diego.

Selection of the best papers to be published in Senses of Cinema.

Screen media form the connective tissue of Melbourne’s cultural life. From key moments in early cinema, such as the production of the world’s first feature film The Story of the Kelly Gang, to the broadcast of national events like the Melbourne Cup and AFL Grand Final, to early video game developers such as Beam Software setting up in the city, there is barely a section of Melbourne that is not illuminated by screen culture. This three-day symposium, organised by the cross-institutional Melbourne Screen Studies Group, will chart this vibrant activity through presentations, panel discussions, industry events, and screenings.

We are inviting submissions for research papers, panels, and non-traditional research presentations for this exciting event. Industry and medium specific presentations are welcome, as well as those that adopt a broader view of Melbourne’s screen cultures and make comparisons with national and international examples. Proposal topics might include, but are not limited to the following, areas:

• Melbourne on Screen
  From dramas like Romper Stomper to suburban soap opera Neighbours and the superhero adventure Ghost Rider, the diversity of Melbourne’s landscape, architecture, and people allow the city to tell any number of screen stories. We encourage papers that consider how Melbourne is depicted on screen for local and international audiences, as well as proposals that explore how the city is used as an anonymous space. Related topics might include multiculturalism and migration, celebrity, authorship, special effects/affects, authenticity, emotional histories of Melbourne screen culture, Melbourne as a city of affect, and tourism.
• Screen Cultures in Melbourne
  Melbourne offers a fertile example of how a city can engage with screen culture, from historic movie palaces and film societies to public screenings and events. Proposals that examine screen cultures, including the institutions that support them, are welcome. Explorations of the interrelated roles of gaming and advertising in citizens’ everyday and screen-related experiences of place and aesthetics are encouraged, as are proposals that address the documentary and experimental forms. We also invite proposals on photography, pre-cinema screens and the use of mobile screens, especially framed in relation to film culture, narrative and/or aesthetics. These proposals could range from research papers to practice-led approaches to capturing Melbourne’s screen memories and experiences.
• Seeing Difference
  As a city, Melbourne’s identity has been actively cultivated through references to difference, political action and alternative culture. Screen texts as diverse as Annie’s Coming Out, Head On, and Please Like Me are suggestive of the variety of ways in which difference has helped bring Melbourne to the screen. We invite proposals that consider these intersections between politics, identity, and difference.
• Early and Silent Melbourne
  Melbourne is home to many milestones and major works of early and silent cinema, including the 1896 Melbourne Cup carnival, the 1900 multimedia work Soldiers of the Cross, and, of course, the 1906 feature film The Story of the Kelly Gang. Proposals are invited that chart this energetic early period in Melbourne’s screen life.  
• Melbourne on Page and Screen
  Melbourne has inspired artists in a range of forms. We encourage papers that consider how Melbourne-set stories have made the transition from page to screen such as Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, On The Beach, and The Slap, as well as texts that utilise transmedia paradigms.

Conference Organised by the Melbourne Screen Studies Group  https://melbournescreenstudies.wordpress.com/

Proposals of 250-300 words for individual presentations or full panels (3 or 4 papers, 250-300 words per paper with lead author nominated) should be sent to screeningmelbourne@gmail.com by September 1st 2016, along with a 150-word bio. Queries can also be directed to this address.

John Ford, Ireland, and The 1916 Easter Rising

Soul of the Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics by Ilona Hongisto

Book Launch
by Prof. Angela Ndalianis (Screen Studies, Melbourne University)

Deakin City Centre, 550 Bourke Street, Melbourne
Thursday December 17, 4.00pm–5.00pm (following MSSG seminar)
R.S.V.P. ilona.hongisto@unimelb.edu.au

Book Description:
In Soul of the Documentary: Framing,Expression, Ethics (Amsterdam University Press, November 2015), Ilona Hongisto stirs current thinking about documentary cinema by suggesting that the work of documentary films is not reducible to representing what already exists. By close-reading a diverse body of films – from The Last Bolshevik to Grey Gardens – Hongisto shows how documentary cinema intervenes in the real by framing it and creatively contributes to its perpetual unfolding. The emphasis on framing brings new urgency to the documentary tradition and its objectives, and provokes significant novel possibilities for thinking about the documentary’s ethical and political potentials in the contemporary world.

Endorsements:
Documentary does not simply document what is; it presses reality to reveal what is to come. This thrillingly original and well-argued book brings a shot of energy to studies of documentary cinema, film theory, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Ilona Hongisto shows that documentary cinema is an active space of becoming, whose power lies not in indexicality but in capture, the selection of certain aspects of the real to actualize. Her analysis of the aesthetics of the documentary frame, which captures and expresses according to the distinct operations of imagination, fabulation, and affection, will inspire scholars and filmmakers alike.
––Laura U. Marks, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University

With this book, Hongisto breaks new ground. She introduces a fresh vocabulary to explore our experience of documentary reality as a becoming, a transit zone between what is and what is not yet. There is a deep purpose here: to reconsider how we engage with and understand documentary film, and perhaps cinema itself.
—Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary and a regular consultant with filmmakers

Ilona Hongisto is an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Media Studies at The University of Turku, Finland, and an Honorary Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne.

Paperback copies of the book will be available for purchase at the launch ($30.00 cash only). An open access version is downloadable from:
http://oapen.org/search?identifier=579464;keyword=Hongisto

Documentary Film Studies Panel

Melbourne Screen Studies Group, Presentation
Thursday December 17, 2015, 3.00–4.00pm
Deakin City Centre, 550 Bourke Street, Melbourne

Monash University and University of Melbourne
Chair: Constantine Verevis (Monash U)

1. Framing as Immanent Evaluation: Capturing Change in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe —  Ilona Hongisto
This presentation maps the work of the frame in capturing the transition of Eastern Europe after 1989. With examples from longitudinal documentary projects from the region, the paper argues for the centrality of the frame in capturing and expressing the sociopolitical changes that took place after the fall of the Soviet Union. The argument belongs to a larger project of moving away from the index and re-theorizing documentary cinema from the point of view of “the aesthetics of the frame”. This, I will argue, enables considering the work of the documentary as immanently entangled to the real as process.

Ilona Hongisto is an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Media Studies at The University of Turku, Finland, and an Honorary Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Soul of the Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics (Amsterdam UP) and her work has also been published in such journals as Cultural Studies Review, Transformations, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema and Studies in Documentary Film.

2. Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image
— Belinda Smaill
Documentary is increasingly the preeminent format for rendering nature, especially animals, onscreen. This presentation outlines the substance of a forthcoming book that identifies a new documentary terrain. There is a tide of new filmmaking wrestling with the pivotal ecological debates of our time: species loss, food, production, and the problem of science. This project adds to our understanding of the documentary genre by bringing together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde non-fiction and developments in new media. Regarding Life explores how films render humans and animals and what political ends.

Belinda Smaill is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010) and co-author of
Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (2013).

3. Utilitarian Filmmaking in Australia 1945–1980
— Deane Williams
This presentation will outline the Australian Research Council funded research project
Utilitarian Filmmaking in Australia 1945 – 1980 successfully proposed by Ross Gibson, Mick Broderick, Joe Masco, John Hughes and myself to commence in 2016. Focused on the post-WWII decades prior to the proliferation of video in the late-1970s, this project will map, analyse and work to compile an archive of what we are calling Utilitarian Cinema (clientsponsored, instructional and governmental filmmaking existing outside the conventional theatrical contexts by which cinema is usually defined). After a brief overview this presentation will outline some of the key challenges for the project and some of the first steps to be undertaken.

Deane Williams is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. His books include (with Noel King and Con Verevis) the three volume Australian Film Theory and Criticism (2013-16), (with Zoe Druick) The Grierson Effect (2014) and Australian Postwar Documentary Films (2008). His new book The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of Place has just been published by Wallflower Press