November 2023 blog post – A Glimpse at Our Research Team’s Conference Presentations

In our June 2023 blogpost we presented our group panel proposal on Cultural Traumas for the conference Miscommunication in East-Central European Cinemas. The lively and insightful two days in Bucharest were organized by SNSPA’s Denisa Oprea and UNATC’s Liri Alienor Chapelan, and below you may see some photos from the event. Our research group, and colleagues, listening to Anikó Imre’s keynote on relationships between populism and popular media: 

And our group members presenting their well-received papers:

A final group photo of tired, but happy participants closing the conference:

Four further individual presentations happened in October and November, demonstrating that besides contemporary cinema, the medium of television, as well as concepts of social class and cultural canon(s) theory offer important possibilities for the examination of how cultural traumas are articulated in small national filmic/audiovisual narratives.

PhD researcher Mihály Lakatos presented the paper “Local Answers for the Trauma of Extinction: Nature as an Affective Background in Post-Millennial Romanian Music Videos” at the conference Affective Intermediality, organized by the Centre for Cinematic Intermediality and Visual Culture at the Media Department of Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Cluj-Napoca, 20-21 October 2023). The starting point of the presentation was the assumption that climate trauma has propelled eco-centrism in Western music, legitimizing it institutionally and individually. This trend spans mainstream and underground scenes, impacting visual representations. In some Romanian music videos since the 2000s, nature plays a central role, addressing eco-issues or symbolizing folkloristic myths. The presentation examined the socio-cultural dimensions of a few music videos, arguing that in them, nature consistently conveys ideological meaning.

Our PI presented “Televisual Modes’ and Midcult Aesthetics in Limited HBO-Series on Eastern European Collective Traumas” at the Biennial Conference of the Television Studies Section of ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association) and entitled Redefining Televisuality: Programmes, Practices, Methods (Film University Konrad Wolf, Postdam, Germany, 25-27 October 2023).

Her abstract might give you an insight:

“In his 1993 article “Televisuality as a Semiotic Machine: Emerging Paradigms in Low Theory” John T. Caldwell identifies four televisual modes – painterly, plasticity, transparency, intermedia – which together “work to overcome a number of perceived limitations in the technical apparatus itself –linearity, immateriality, coarseness, and the physical isolation of the viewer” (37). Non-linear, tangible, HD, and hyperreal, multimodal, and enabling sociality through mobile and/or outdoor screens, 2020s televisuality has apparently overcome those “limitations in the technical apparatus” on the material level of programming and objects of display. Yet I think the four “videographic modes” of the painterly, of plasticity, of transparency and of intermedia are still with us, similarly to what Caldwell names “the aestheticization of television”: “in which artistic styles have been suburbanized, proliferated, and mass-marketed to middle-class consumers” (44). Arguing for this suggestion shall involve the analysis of the production process and the aesthetic features of three recent, limited TV series hybridizing American cable and quality TV traditions with Eastern European collective traumas. 2019 Chernobyl (creator: Craig Mazin), 2022 The Informant (creator: Balint Szentgyorgyi) and 2023 Spy/Master(director: Christopher Smith, script: Adina Sadeanu) were produced by HBO, with important regional and local input into all levels of the creative processes touching upon the 1986 Ukrainian/Belarusian nuclear catastrophe, late 1970s Romanian, respectively 1980s Hungarian secret service operations within (communist) dictatorships. The historical audio-visual narrativity emerging from these series shall be demonstrated to lean towards midcult aesthetics – in line with Caldwell’s suggestion referring to how “artistic styles have been (…) mass-marketed to middle-class consumers”, and in line with how midcult/middlebrow aesthetics is understood as a formation mediating between elite high art and the culture of the masses, re-coding the former for plain understanding (Halford). Actualizing especially the painterly and the intermedia videographic modes, this HBO-type “aestheticization” of Eastern European collective traumas also ’translates’ classical film culture – including ‘global’ genres – into ‘everyday’ (streamed and localized) televisuality. Caldwell himself ends his article with referring to such social traumas as the Gulf War, describing how “[s]cenes of reality, chaos, and suffering were immediately rendered as pictures, reflective surfaces, and flying text-image projectiles,” (45) pre-figuring Richard Grusin’s theory of premediation (2010), which attributes to post 9/11 mediatized/televised images of collective catastrophes and traumas the role of ‘training’ us for the next impact. The proposed presentation shall end with positioning the HBO-limited series Chernobyl, The Informant and Spy/Master within a production and consumption context of cultural trauma processing, suggesting that current ‘televisuality’ has a specific role in ‘premediating’ the next catastrophe within the specific conditions of linking three communicative generations: ‘filmic’ victims, ‘televisual’ forgetters, and ‘platform’ mourners of the represented late 20^th century catastrophes.”

In the first weekend of November our PhD researcher, B. Farkas presented a paper – “Édentől keletre: Személyes trauma, kulturális trauma és traumafeldolgozás a Larry c. filmben” [East of Eden: Personal trauma, cultural trauma and trauma processing in Larry] – at the annual conference of the Hungarian Film Studies Association, which was organized by the Eszterházy Károly Catholic University (Eger, Hungary, 3-4 November 2023). The paper aimed to reflect on the representation of personal and cultural traumas in Szilárd Bernáth’s first feature-length film, contextualizing the creation of rap songs as a trauma processing tool analogous to the methods of music therapy.

In the second weekend of November A. Virginás participated with “Midcult Aesthetics and Cultural Memory Work: ‚Translating’ between Historical Events, Media(l) Narratives and Class Positions in 21st Century Eastern Europe” at the conference Screening Social and Economic Transformations in East-Central Europe, organized at our home institution, the Faculty of Film and Theatre of Babes-Bolyai University ( Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 10-11 November 2023):