School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, has been surprising, delighting and confounding viewers and critics since his first feature, Mysterious Object at Noon (Dokfa nai meuman, 2000). When Apichatpong’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Loong Boonmee Raleuk Chat, 2010) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year, it was remarkable on many counts – one of very few Asian/Southeast Asian films to have won this award; a film shot on Super 16 mm, using old-fashioned techniques such as a mirrors, rather than computer graphics to create a ghostly apparition; and a fairytale quality with bizarre twists such as a catfish and a princess having sex and a long lost son returning as an ape. Internationally, Uncle Boonmee confirmed what many have claimed, that Apichatpong is one of the most important filmmakers of the past decade. But critics and theorists struggle to categorise his films, which appear to defy translation and frequently are described as poetic or mysterious. Like his other features, Uncle Boonmeeis on the one hand, quite simple and on the other hand, extremely complex, with an intricate interweaving of cinematic elements and structure. It bears little resemblance to classical narrative storytelling and particularly explores possibilities in relation to time and space, with a focus on animism, while simultaneously considering cinema and the filmmaking process. This paper, a work in progress, draws largely on Buddhism, animism, and phenomenology to delve into the many dimensions of Uncle Boonmee in order to produce a deeper insight. Dianne Daley teaches at RMIT University’s Melbourne city campus and is a doctoral candidate in Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Clayton, with the thesis topic: “A new dimension for cinema: gazing empathetically at the experimental narratives of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.” She has worked as a journalist, in corporate communications and film and television production, including a Thai documentary film company. Her long-held interest in Buddhism includes the Thai forest tradition.

Tens of millions of people across the world also inhabit a virtual world: they spend hours undertaking numerous activities and interacting with others. Being inworld, or engaged in a virtual world, is a unique experience, shaped differently from other activities. This research examines the factors that allowed virtual worlds to develop into what they have become today. Drawing from personal experience in Second Life and a review of existing literature, this paper maps out an inter-connected web of developments across various fields that influenced the formation of virtual worlds such as Second Life. The advancements identified in the fields of science fiction, video- and computer-games, media, role-playing traditions and communication technologies are analysed as precursors of the qualities of contemporary inworld experience. Previous research has studied the development of individual fields on their own. By undertaking an analysis on a macro level and across fields, this paper offers a new insight in the development of the complex phenomenon of virtual worlds in the 21st century, whereby the evolution adopts the structure of a genealogy. New connections among previously disparate fields emerge. Maeva Veerapen is currently completing her PhD within the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies. Her current research is focused on understanding the fundamental structure of the experience of being inworld and participating in virtual worlds by examining various constituents of the experience such as the user-avatar relation, the quasi-intersubjective interaction with the computer and the encounter of the Other. Her research interests include the phenomenology of new media and performativity of media.

Translation and World Literature

In The Creation Of The World, Jean Luc Nancy introduces the term mondialization or world forming, the making of a world. He prefers this to the term globalization for a variety of reasons. Mondialization evokes, for him, an expanding process throughout the expanse of human beings, cultures and nations. This is unlike globalization that seems to him to be the undifferentiated sphere of a unitotality. Nancy discusses globalization as "the suppression of all world-forming of the world", as "an unprecedented geopolitical, economic, and ecological castastrophe". Globalization leads to the opposite of an inhabitable world, to the un-world [immonde]. His primary concern is to create a world that is "the contrary of a global injustice against the backdrop of general equivalence". I would like to discuss The Flying Circus (FCP), an artist laboratory that takes place in different sites in Asia, as an instance of intercultural performance, through a close reading of Nancy. The FOP can be said to have occurred due to the increased mobility in a globalized world. It was initiated in 1996 when the art world exploded with cultural and artistic exchanges, its artists were both self-confident and hungry to experience the world. Since 2004, most of these artists come from city centers or art metropolises; they are often trained in universities in Europe or the US; they are acutely aware of the speed of world economy and the power of information revolution in its electronic forms; they participate with savvy in the contemporary art market; they embrace hybrid identities, multiplicities as often they come from diasporic backgrounds; they are actively engaged in creation, expression and art in their communities of choice. Despite all this, I would like to argue that the FOP is a study of world forming, closer to mondialization rather than globalization.

What are the chief pleasures and tensions embedded in the circulation of indigenous performances as global commodities made available for 'reading across cultures?' To probe this question, my paper focuses on the Olympic Games as a potent, if highly controversial, stimulus for the expression — and consumption — of indigenity in the neo-liberal marketplace. While the signal events for my analysis are the Sydney, Salt Lake City and Vancouver Olympics, all in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a longer historical view will help to weigh the exoticising effects of spectacle against the argued benefits of national and global visibility. Specific pageants and protests are discussed as constituent parts of performance clusters intricately connected to each other by the spatial, economic and conceptual structures of individual host cities. Conceptually, the argument draws from recent work in cultural geography and urban studies as well as in performance theory. The overall aim is to begin a comparative materialist analysis of pro- and anti-Games performances of indigeneity while offering some grounded theoretical insights into the ways in which such 'inhabitations' map into local and translocal commodity cultures.

This paper considers the choreography and work of New York 'black dance' artist Eleo Pomare in the Netherlands and Australia during the 1960s and 1970s. With the 'double consciousness' of black subjects from the transatlantic (Gilroy), Pomare helped to create a radical dance aesthetics based on observation of everyday life, poetic expression, and social commentary. However, this 'angry dancer' adopted a position outside cultural hierarchies, by leading an integrated dance company and challenging black and white stereotypes. In discussing Pomare's history, I will consider his role in challenging racial segregation in the Australian cultural establishment through the discourses of black power and modern dance embodiment;; strategies which have been adopted subsequently by indigenous dance practices.

The Wars of Metaphors

Imaginaries of Violence, Cruelty and Power

Reflections on Violence—Three Theses

Imagining Violence

Intimate Tyranny: The State, Individual Agency and Embodiment in Rohinton Mistry’s ‘A Fine Balance’

Trauma, Memory and History in Marlene van Niekerk’s ‘The Way of the Women’

Atrocious Imagination: the paradox of affect – the imagination of violence

Very recently, in a much-discussed Film Comment article by David Bordwell, and in the project of a fascinating book titled The Language and Style of Film Criticism (Routledge 2011), an old-fashioned line has been redrawn, separating the work of criticism proper (evocative, descriptive, evaluative, lyrical, etc) from the so-called ‘formalism’ of close, textual analysis (frame and audio analysis, structural segment/part breakdown, etc). I reject this distinction. In the lead-up to the WORLD CINEMA NOW conference this September at Monash, I propose taking seven and a half magnificent minutes – one complex scene in three parts – from Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, India, 1965) – and seeing how deeply we can dig into its sharp audiovisual beauty. Ghatak (1925-76), only now receiving the full international recognition he deserves, is a key figure for any history of cinematic forms: using the melodramatic tradition as his pivot between classicism and modernism, he elaborated a moment-to-moment style that was a form of fluid mise en scène shot through at every moment with the kind of disruptive ‘intervals’ beloved of his Master, Eisenstein. In Ghatak, scenes do not simply unfold: they open up into multiple, contesting worlds, man versus woman, old versus new, feeling versus reason, body versus song … Along the way of this demonstration, I hope to offer a model of how film analysis might be done, or at least how I try to do it: its possible protocols, procedures, pay-offs. Seven and a half cinematic minutes with Ghatak, plus around two musical minutes with Abdullah Ibrahim, amounting to around sixty minutes …

In this paper I provide an introduction to a large, team-based ARC project, which examines lifestyle TV in China, India, Taiwan and Singapore. Lifestyle programming in Asia includes a range of popular factual formats, from cooking and health shows to reality-style make-over shows and consumer advice programmes. What unites these shows, from Singapore's highly popular Home Decor Survivor to the Indian version of MasterChef, is their concern with instructing their audiences in 'good taste', aesthetics and everyday life skills while often showcasing the latest consumer products. These increasingly ubiquitous forms of advice television thus offer a useful lens through which to examine emergent social and cultural identities in the region. Drawing upon a 'multiple modernities' approach, this paper examines the kinds of cultural values and modes of selfhood promoted on these shows, foregrounding the way in which television can be seen to model forms of lifestyle that are shaped by local, national, regional and global influences.