7 Apr 2010 | Events
APRIL 29 2010 – 2PM
MAKING POLITICAL FILMS ABOUT THE NORTH: THEN AND NOW
The troubles in the North of Ireland have long been the subject of film-makers. The film-making landscape has changed over the years, as has the political landscape. Both self censorship and political censorship have been key factors in defining which films get made and which don’t. The panel will discuss selected issues relating to censorship — what forms of censorship influence the work being made? is there any difference to the types of films being made 30 years ago and now?
The panel will include:
Mark Cousins director of The First Movie, screening at the Belfast Film Festival, has a first class degree in Film and Media Studies and Fine Art from the University of Stirling. He has since lectured on film history, been published internationally and made documentary films on arts and political themes. A former Director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, he now presents Scene-by-Scene on BBC television, conducting career interviews with actors and directors including Martin Scorcese, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Shohei Imamura, Jack Lemmon, Sean Connery, Tom Hanks, Dennis Hopper, Kirk Douglas, Rod Steiger, Jeanne Moreau, Lauren Bacall, the Coen Brothers, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Donald Sutherland, Ewan McGregor and Jayne Russell. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
James Flynn commenced his career in the Irish film industry with John Boorman’s Merlin Films International as Head of Development having previously worked for the Investment Bank of Ireland. After working as Business Manager of the fledgling Irish Film Board, he, along with Juanita Wilson, established Metropolitan Film Productions Limited with the intention of making strong, independent and resonant films for the international market. In-house projects developed and produced by Metropolitan Films include H3 and Nora.
He established Octagon Films in 2002. Octagon developed and produced Inside I’m Dancing, written by Jeffrey Caine (Goldeneye, The Constant Gardener) and directed by Damien O’Donnell (East Is East, Heartlands). Produced in conjunction with Working Title/Universal, it won the Audience Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and was released in the UK and Ireland by Momentum Pictures in autumn ‘04. It was screened as Rory O’Shea Was Here at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and subsequently released in the U.S. by Focus. He is currently jointly producing Neil Jordan’s Ondine, starring Colin Farrell, in West Cork this summer and this will be released internationally during the Summer and/or Autumn of 2009.
For more information please visit their website http://www.belfastfilmfestival.org
6 Apr 2010 | Events
April 17 2010, 2pm – 4pm
Project Phakama, a young people’s theatre company, leads a session of participatory drama and discussion to explore different positions on self-censorship, freedom of expression and causing offence.
Phakama’s young people and tutors work together in the UK and around the world to create trailblazing, risk-taking theatrical events in any location with any young person who wants to take part. Phakama’s process, based on the ‘give and gain’ principle, establishes creative equality among everyone and puts the imaginative engagement of different cultures at the core of all activities.
In association with the performance of ‘Behud’ at Soho Theatre, this enjoyable and revealing session will provide a forum for a wider investigation into the themes of the play.
6 Apr 2010 | Events
28 April 2010, 6pm – Free Entry
Lighthouse, 28 Kensington Street, Brighton BN1 4AJ
A screening of art works developed in response to and in counteraction against surveillance technologies, will be followed by a panel discussing the consequences of surveillance and censorship on daily life – how do we respond to or engage with the consequences of censorship and surveillance?
As surveillance technologies become more ubiquitous – from CCTV to data-mining on websites to mobile phones to Google streetcar – it becomes all the more important to consider the implications and to develop creative, radical responses, counteracting and reversing acts of surveillance.
Artist and curator Manu Luksch has selected several works which explore differing aspects of re-activism to surveillance technologies; selected artists include: David Valentine, Caspar Below, The Bureau of Inverse Technology and MediaShed. Manu Luksch is highly celebrated for her work investigating the use of surveillance technologies in artistic practice: www.ambienttv.net In particular her work Faceless has been internationally recognised and celebrated for its approach in exploring CCTV / surveillance technology in society.
Links:
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org
http://www.videoclub.org.uk
http://www.ambienttv.net
6 Apr 2010 | Events
Who Owns the Words?
Sunday 6 June
The Guardian Hay Festival, Wales
Articles abound about the ways the internet, twitter, text-messaging and Facebook status updates have changed the culture of reading and writing across the globe. This year Google scaled back its ambitious project to put the world’s books on the web, but for how long? The potential replacement of our beloved ink and paper objects with cold electronic devices—an eventuality in which many of us still refuse to believe—came one sinister step closer this year. The must-have gift of the 2009 holiday season? The e-book reader.
It’s high noon in the digital age, but many of us are still lounging in bed. We’ve been hitting the snooze button since the 90s, refusing to wake from a dream we began in the nineteenth century, when advancing technologies in mass-production made music and image, film and literature widely available. Copies were cheap, and copyright laws have historically protected artists and allowed distributors to prosper. But technology marches on, dragging the culture behind it, and a little over two hundred years later, copies are no longer cheap—they’re free.
Among the many provocative arguments David Shields makes in his new book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, he argues that the economic model based on the copy is not only no longer sustainable, it’s no longer relevant:
The new model is based on the intangible assets of digital bits: copies are no longer cheap but free and flow freely everywhere. As computers retrieve images from the web or displays from a server, they make temporary internal copies of those works. Every action you invoke on your computer requires a copy of something to be made. Many methods have been employed to try to stop the indiscriminate spread of copies, including copy-protection schemes, hardware-crippling devices, education programs, and statutes, but all have proved ineffectual. The remedies are rejected by consumers and ignored by pirates. Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work.
We have become a culture virtually and literally inundated with “cultural artifacts and debris: all of this is part of our lives, but much of it is off limits or artistic expression because someone ‘owns’ it.” In a world where so much content has become so readily accessible, isn’t it a natural development that artists want to make use of available material? This debate over ownership and appropriation in music is widely known—musical artists have been fighting for the right to creatively “sample” for decades. But the debate has been more subdued, perhaps more settled in literature. Or has it?
Shields’ book is made up of some 600 aphorisms, mini-essays, provocative statements and unattributed quotations. Using both his own words and the words of others, he takes on the nature of art, pits fiction against non-fiction, essay against story and imagination against invention. Citing a a literary history of unattributed copying, cribbing and appropriation that includes Nabokov, TS Eliot and Shakespeare, Shields fought for the right to publish hisManifesto without attribution. He lost.
So the question arises, who owns the words? Who owns the music, the images, the stories and touchstones of our culture? The individual artists, the distributing corporations, or the consumers who purchase it? Index on Censorship and Penguin Books bring together a provocative panel, including Mr Shields, to discuss creative sampling the age of the easy copy, and whether the evolution of copyright—long considered a protection of the artist’s creative output, has actually become an obstacle to the ‘natural evolution of human creativity’.
For more information visit the Guardian Hay Festival website
