The FTT Research Seminar Series is hosted by the University of Reading and puts research from scholars in Film, Theatre and Television into dialogue. This celebrates the exciting intersection of these fields within our department and seeks to support collaboration and conversation across Film, Theatre, and Television.

Each invited paper is 25-30 minutes long and is followed by a participatory Q&A discussion. This seminar series is held online for the 2020/21 session.

For more information on the Department of Film, Theatre and Television at the University of Reading please visit our website: https://www.reading.ac.uk/film-theatre-television

Situating Research

Data Visualizations as Critical Approach in Digital Film Historiography

Sarah-Mai Dang

Considering the growing production and application of data in the era of digitalization the objective of feminist film historians to tell a story differently rather than telling a different story has acquired a new urgency. Today, there are a number of online projects that feature women’s achievements in film history. Yet, this presentation makes the case that in order to foster new perspectives and advance our understanding of women’s influence in film culture, we need to further explore new forms of presenting historiographical research by taking advantage of digital tools and methods. In this context, it is argued that data visualizations can offer a productive approach for telling women’s achievements in film history while taking into account ambiguities, contingencies, and blind spots inherent to history.

Dr Sarah-Mai Dang is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Philipps-Universität Marburg’s Institute of Media Studies. She received a PhD in Film Studies from Freie Universität Berlin and published her dissertation on aesthetic experience and chick flicks as a hybrid self-publishing project on her website oabooks.de. Her current research and teaching focus on digital film historiography, data visualization, open science, feminist theory, and media aesthetics. She is the project leader of the international DFG research network “New Directions in Film Historiography” (2019–2022).

sarah-mai.dang@uni-marburg.de

https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb09/institutes/media-studies

https://www.oabooks.de/about/academic-cv-en/

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1960-247X

@SarahMaiDang

Presence, Absence and Intermediality in Harold Pinter’s A Slight Ache (dir. Jamie Lloyd, 2019) and De Thuiskomst / The Homecoming (dir. Nanouk Leopold, 2019)

Catriona Fallow

Much of the discourse on Harold Pinter’s writing for stage, screen and radio has centred on that which is unsaid or unseen, on silences, pauses and absence and the pervading sense of menace that these features create. This paper explores the intersections and distinctions between presence and absence in Pinter’s work by focusing on two recent productions staged in 2019: A Slight Ache, directed by Jamie Lloyd for the Pinter at the Pinter season in London’s West End, and De Thuiskomst / The Homecoming, directed by Nanouk Leopold for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA). Both productions explicitly draw on the conventions of different media – specifically radio and film – to interrogate the underlying tension between what is seen and unseen, present and absent both in Pinter’s original texts and on stage.

Rather than transposing Pinter’s original radio play onto the stage in an analogous setting to what is described, Lloyd’s Slight Ache featured two performers appearing in a radio studio to voice their characters, thereby eroding the boundaries between the conventions of radio and live theatre and calling the identities and motivations of these figures into question. Rather than the traditional naturalistic interior of an East London household, Leopold’s starkly minimalist Homecoming featured video projections and visualisations of the human body as a kind of digital automaton, de-centring the trappings of domesticity to focus instead on the live and mediatized bodies of the characters. Through their different intermedial means of representation, I argue, these productions prompt further reflection on the notion of presence and absence in Pinter’s work and the interconnectedness of his praxis across different media, pointing to how intermediality might define a new era of Pinter in performance.

Dr Catriona Fallow is a Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. Between 2017 to 2019 she was a Research Fellow on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies, based at the University of Birmingham. She has recently co-edited a collection on Pinter’s life and work (with Basil Chiasson), Harold Pinter: Stages, Networks, Collaborations, which due to be released in February 2021. Her work also appears in forthcoming collections on the #MeToo movement (Performing #MeToo: How Not to Look Away, 2021) and the playwright Dennis Kelly (Beautiful Doom: Dennis Kelly's Work on Stage and Television, 2021).

https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sed/staff/fallowc.html

c.fallow@qmul.ac.uk

@CDFallow