Stephanie Hemelryk Donald

In the first part of this article, the author reflects on her experience of making film-making workshops with young people in Australia, China and the UK an integral component of a research project on the representation of child migrants and refugees in world cinema. She then sets her approach to these workshops in the context of Alain Bergala's ideas about film education, of which she had initially been unaware. In discussing a couple of further workshops that she ran in the UK and Australia as part of the 'Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse' programme, she focuses particularly on the benign or obstructive role of institutional gatekeepers, who act as intermediaries or agents determining the terms of access to children and young people for film educators, researchers and practitioners. The legal, protective and ethical dimensions of the relationship between educator, gatekeeper and participating students are discussed. The article cites cases in which the interaction worked well, and others in which it proved problematic. The functions, responsibilities and potential drawbacks of gatekeepers are compared with Bergala's conception of the pedagogic role of the passeur-a figure who also holds power in relation to young people's access to film and film-making, but one that connotes positive, even magical, properties.

A ngelopoulos' Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988) meditates on some of the key themes from his larger oeuvre: the repetitions in Greek history, leaving Greece (and staying put), mobility, the courage of children and the fragility of humankind, and God. The key protagonists in the film are two runaway children, the eleven-year-old Voula (Tania Palaiologou), and the five-year-old Alexander (Michalis Zeke), and a young adult Orestes (Stratos Tzortzoglou). Voula bears the name of Angelopoulos' late sister, 1 producing an emotional proximity and equivalence with the filmmaker that supports an argument I wish to make in this paper, namely that Voula is both protagonist and a critical agent within the thinking body of the film. Voula's screen presence (through the performance of Palaiologou) critiques the film's trajectory even as she presents it. I will suggest, for example, that the rape sequence which is crucial to Angelopoulos' narrative of maturing in a hard world is only understood by the actress and Orestes, but not by the filmmaker himself. So, when a male critic writes of Voula, now an abused child, as 'das zur Frau wurde' (now a woman) (Schütte 1992: 37), he supports the bizarre but not unusual notion that rape is part of sexual maturation, rather than a violent repression of the self which may in fact inhibit sexual maturation and development in the victim.

This exhibition was related to my Fellowship on child refugees and migrants on film - but tangentially in so far as we brought several artists and scholars together to consider the idea of the libidinal city - the source of migratory flows (or one source). It was conceived at York University with Elke and Alan.

This chapters is taken from an edited collection by SH Donald and CP Lindner. The chapter shared here is by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald.
The chapter explores the relationship between mobility and immobility through films that treat with death and the city.

This is a paper arising from ARC funded research 2008-2013 looking at posters and post-socialism. I want to thank the many collaborators on that work, not least the artists, but also Ming Liang, Leicia Peterson, and Harriet Evans and more latterly modernist colleagues at UNSW.

http://affirmations.arts.unsw.edu.au/index.php?journal=aom&page=index

A discussion of Landscape in the Mist.
This is an almost final draft of a chapter in a new book coming out on Angelopoulos: http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748697953 edited by Angelos and Mark. Pleas get the book. it's full of amazing essays.

Abstract: This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptualised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way,
the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or constructs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10357823.2014.955835#.VDEBjildWTV

We usually associate contemporary urban life with movement and speed. But what about those instances when the forms of mobility associated with globalized cities – the flow of capital, people, labour and information – freeze, or decelerate? How can we assess the value of interruption in a city? What does valuing stillness mean in regards to the forward march of globalization? When does inertia presage decay - and when does it promise immanence and rebirth?
Bringing together original contributions by international specialists from the fields of architecture, photography, film, sociology and cultural analysis, this cutting-edge book considers the poetics and politics of inertia in cities ranging from Amsterdam, Berlin, Beirut and Paris, to Beijing, New York, Sydney and Tokyo. Chapters explore what happens when photography, film, mixed media works, architecture and design intervene in public spaces and urban communities to disrupt speed and growth, both intellectually and/or practically; and question the degree to which mobility is aspirational or imaginary, absolute or transient. Together, they encourage a re-assessment of what it means to be urban in an unevenly globalizing world, to live in cities built around mythologies of perpetual progress. These new analyses of visual culture’s strategic interruptions in global cities allow a more in-depth understanding of the new forms of space, experience, and community that are emerging in today’s rapidly transforming urban environments.
STEPHANIE HEMELRYK DONALD is Head of the School of the Arts, University of Liverpool.
CHRISTOPH LINDNER is Professor of Media and Culture and Director of Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam

In a series of films made after Shijie/The World in 2004 – Sanxia haoren/Still Life (2006), Dong (2006) and, most significantly, Er shi si cheng ji/24 City (2008) – Jia Zhangke has charted a vivid and personal engagement with internal migration, social change and class displacement in China since the Reform programme initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. His films have consistently described the alienation of migration and urban encounters, and show how communities become fragile and fractal as a result of historical transitions being brutally under-resourced and employment being under-regulated.1 Jia is also acutely aware of the economic ambitions that dictate the social infrastructures of everyday life: he identifies emerging class groups by distinguishing them from one another visually and aurally; he shows social behaviours that define the losses and gains of the new economy; above all, he reveals the violence that is wreaked on the poor through the conditions of their labour.

Jia's films are situated in the present, or near-present, and they seek to dramatize and record the processes of disappearance, destruction, restructure and renewal that characterize the social, demographic and subjective consequences of the Reform programme. His earlier films, Zhantai/Platform (2000), Ren xiao yao/Unknown Pleasures (2002) and especially The World and Still Life, articulate his understanding of these changes as micronarratives of Chinese modernization. In films such as Dong and 24 City his work starts encompass a longer view, making the argument that forced mobility and massive social change, though precipitated under different rationales in different eras, have been features of the Chinese economic–political system for many years, if not centuries.

Hundreds of people look at this paper every day. For the wrong reasons. This is about Tang Wei, yes, and I discuss sex, yes, and I am most interested in highlighting the prurience of old male censors. But it's not a pornographic piece and the photos included are stills from the film, so please read it but don't download if you're yet another bloke looking for a thrill.

The paper focuses on the relationship between pedagogy, historicity and memorialisation in Xu's work, drawing on theoretical frames in which it might be evaluated both in and beyond Chinese art practice. It is informed by Sara Ahmed's work on emotion and Gerhard Richter's notion of the blur as a clarification of the historical moment.

It's a look back at Jia and Chen's works on landscape (Still Life and Yellow Earth). It is also drawing on fieldwork in China in 2005-7 amongst an emerging urban middle class and discusses their environmental concerns as well as what is happening in cinema.
An older piece now but may still be of interest. Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, Landscape, Chinese film.

17 RESPONSES TO CRISIS Convergence, content industries and media governance Michael Keane and Stephanie Hemelryk Donald In this final chapter we look at some possible futures for the communications media in China in the context of rapid technological change and ...

In 2012-2015 I worked with first generation child migrants in Australia, the UK and China in a series of workshops we called The Dorothy Project. Allied to a parallel programme of film analysis and archival work looking at child migration on film, these workshops invited young people to engage with ideas of colour, scale and transitional objects to create film narrative on the theme of separation and journeys. Their responses and ideas fed into my parallel work and enlisted them as co-researchers. In all cases the films made were within a structured brief and were not intended to require the film makers to engage with their own stories too literally. However, the results were exceptionally rich in subversive and suggestive material. Themes that were shared amongst all groups were - how to manage extreme uncertainty, the problem of violence, and loneliness. The presentation will address these themes through the work produced by the participants/co-researchers and will also discuss my own responses to their feedback on a new canon of film that captures the conditions of arrival and settlement for the young migrant today.

A study of child migration and film, beginning with the fantasy of The Wizard of Oz and encompassing films from Little Moth (Peng Tao, 2008) to The Leaving of Liverpool.
The work includes co-research with younger people of migrant experience.