Pertinent seminar for Trauma/Post-trauma month

DEPARTMENT OF FILM TELEVISION AND MEDIA STUDIES SEMINAR SERIES SEMESTER TWO 2009

THURSDAY 13th August, 4.15 PMROOM 501, PATRICK HANAN ROOM, LEVEL 5, ARTS 2 BUILDING

Dr. Allan Cameron (Australian Film, Television and Radio School):History in Real Time: National Trauma and Narrative Synchrony in United 93 and Out of the Blue.

This paper explores the use of 'real-time' narrative aesthetics to represent historical events in two recent films: United 93 (Paul Greengrass, US, 2006) and Out of the Blue (Robert Sarkies, New Zealand, 2006). Both of these films recount stories of collective and national trauma (a terrorist attack and a mass murder, respectively) that originally unfolded on live television. Through parallel, multi-stranded storylines, these films attempt not only to recapture television's real-time narrative effect but also to exceed it by striving for a type of narrational and stylistic 'innocence' that marks the events depicted as pre-televisual.

Drawing upon Paul Ricoeur's notion that historical narrative effects a 'fusion of horizons' between past and present, and Mary Ann Doane's linking of contingency, catastrophe and the liveness of television, this paper will argue that these 'real time' narratives of national trauma enact a fraught negotiation between televisual and cinematic modes of narration, exposing the technological underpinnings of narrative. Ultimately, United 93 and Out of the Blue explore the notion that gaps in historical knowledge are also in effect failures of technology. The foreshortened time frames of these films point towards a radically truncated and tenuous fusion of horizons, in which national identity appears on the one hand as absolute but on the other, paradoxically, as contingent upon just-in-time technological interventions.

ALLAN CAMERON is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and Honorary Fellow in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is author of Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan 2008)

PLEASE JOIN US FOR A DRINK AFTER THE SEMINAR.