i was interviewed and my class was filmed for the project, led by the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Centre for the Study of Higher Education “investigated local and international student interaction within teaching and learning contexts. A key outcome from the project was the development of a six-dimension conceptual framework, the Interaction for Learning Framework”…

i am primarily on the dvd resource at about 1.40 mins and at 13.45 mins there is a bit on tbl (and me!)… just scroll down, the video is embedded…

our paper, entitled “Changing practice, changing attitudes: Using an integrated assessment approach to make intercultural teams work”, co-authored with gabriella pretto from the school of business, was presented on day 2 of the program…

the abstract for the paper… “The capacity to work effectively in a team is a key transferable skill. However, research indicates that many students find group work frustrating and unfair, and do not perceive it to be a valuable learning activity. Such perceptions are compounded by the increasing cultural diversity common in classrooms in the contemporary Australian tertiary context. This paper explores how Michaelsen’s team-based learning (TBL) approach was integrated into a postgraduate course with a predominantly international student cohort in order to improve the integration of international students, increase engagement and produce greater team accountability. Given concrete goals and incentives, the culturally diverse teams functioned effectively and immediately, without the need for scaffolding of teamwork. This approach resulted in more robust and focused debate and an increased capacity to address disagreements and coherently merge course theory with class practice. This case study is part of a larger pilot study of TBL in a metropolitan university, and demonstrates how it is possible to harness the potential of culturally rich teams to enhance learning and teaching outcomes and improve the quality and effectiveness of teamwork in today’s diverse Australian tertiary classrooms.”

from all reports, i.e. from gab, the presentation went well and they dug the video from the ‘finding common ground’ learning & teaching project… i am primarily on the dvd (just scroll down, you will find it embedded!) at about 1.40 mins and 13.45 mins…

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate dream stealer whose team (an excellent ensemble cast) attempts the ‘impossible’ – to insert an idea into a dreamer – so Cobb can return to his children and the wife (Marion Cotillard) who haunts his dreams.

Featuring action sequences that seek to outdo The Matrix (1999), Inception initially compares to cinema itself, the dream factory’s creation of a ‘reality’ so seductive that we willfully let it temporarily confuse our understanding of just what is real, but may actually be more akin to contemporary trends in user-generated gaming worlds.

Regardless, Inception is ultimately about male guilt, memory and redemption – key interests of much recent American cinema – and it is only the difficulty puzzle films have in establishing emotional audience identification (wait, where am I now?) that prevents Nolan similarly achieving his own impossible, a truly great Hollywood blockbuster… but most of us, willfully lost in the thrilling ‘worlds’ Nolan creates, won’t care a jot.

Smiljana Glisovic also makes this interesting – and relevant (for my own research) – observation:

These ideas are weaved in elegantly amongst the bullets exchanged between our main protagonists and their ‘enemies’ without identity, they literally have no face. I wonder about the need to perpetuate this notion of the ‘enemy’. The characters find themselves in various states of warfare at all levels of consciousness. It serves to fulfill the ‘action’ part of what they want to pitch as a huge blockbuster, but it also sustains this fear of the ‘other’ and the need to protect ourselves from them, to eradicate them.

her point on the anonymity of the ‘enemy’ is well made, as is her identification of the state of total war – and the paranoia it implies… however, it seems in the film that the self is feared as much as any Other, and that many Others are indeed projections, constructions…

Containing (the) disaster & mediating experience: Conventionality, Ambivalence & Absence in World Trade Center

Commentators and filmgoers were sceptical of Hollywood’s first forays into directly representing 9/11 – World Trade Center (Stone 2006) and United 93 (Greengrass 2006) – sceptical of its capacity to commemorate 9/11 and represent it accurately and authentically, to avoid hyperbole, distortion and exploitation; of Hollywood’s capacity to, as Jordan (2008) termed in his review of United 93’s critical reception, ‘transcend’ type. This paper will argue that World Trade Center seeks to memorialise 9/11 by using strategies in relation to narration and spectacle to contain the disaster and contain its horror, strategies that reflect characters’ limited perspectives but also seek to gain a measure of control over the tragedy. However, I will further contend that it is World Trade Center’s formal and generic conventionality, its embrace rather than transcendence of ‘Hollywood’ style, that most opens a space for it to mediate 9/11 on the big screen. Ultimately, World Trade Center’s conventional story is inconsistent, ambivalent, resistant to closure, and haunted by loss and absence, yet this may too be the most ‘authentic’ way for Hollywood to memorialise the experience of 9/11 and demonstrates its continued relevance in helping to define and mediate contemporary experience.

Key words: Cinema, Hollywood, 9/11, Commemoration, Containment, Representing history

arguably, the very same can be said of 9/11… indeed, this is my thesis.

smith (13-14) also includes a fascinating full page ad which appeared with the release of ‘tora! tora! tora!’ in the NYT of 16 june 1969, included here in part: “It is an authentic film. [...] to arouse the american public to the necessity for preparedness in this acuter missile age where a sneak attack could occur at any moment. you cannot arouse the public by showing films where americans always win and where we are invincible. you can only remind the public by revealing to them how we once thought we were invincible but suffered a sneak attack attack [although this notion of a 'sneak' attack is not borne out in the film!]. [...] At the time of Pearl Harbor, America was fundamentally isolationist, [...] However, after the blow at Pearl Harbor, overnight we became a united nation willing and ready to retaliate” [...] the purpose of producing this film is to remind the public of the tragedy that happened to us and to ensure that it will never happen again.

re. ‘touch of evil’ and ‘vertigo’: ” … paradoxical partly because of the ambivalence that each filmmaker seems to direct against his monsters, and partly because of the ambivalence that the films provoke, the reversals of the expectations we are conditioned by their generic modes or styles to bring to them” (210). “… most classical hollywood films were genre films, their content regulated by generic expectations” (210); however, by then end of the 50s “controversial subject matter was ever more clearly being ‘read through’” these ‘regulating strategies’ (211).

the films “seem to be pointing in (at least) two directions at once: evincing an easy complacency about an imagined consensus relating to gender and gender roles [...] and simultaneously proffering ambivalence about and opposition to that complacency” (211), filled with ambiguities and contradictions.

films which cannot reconcile their point of view, which are ambivalent about their ‘happy ending’. the film ["bell, book and the candle"] “calls out to be deciphered as something else again” (220).

so many such films “… suggests that the paradoxes that mark these films continue to resonate with our own culture and its anxieties. [...] we too live in a time in which complacency and consensus coexist with unease, confusion and opposition, and in which systems of representation such as commercial film remain significant bearers of the allegorical weight of such concerns” (220-221).

however, what is most interesting in ‘wtc’ is how, not only the attacks, but the desired erasure of difference (we are all americans, all equal… symbolised in the wearing of the uniform) serves to preserve the status quo, if not reinforce white male status.

re. denzel in ‘the pelican brief’: “part of what makes his character ‘acceptable’ is that he is not threatening to change the system; he is working hard to uphold the values of the existing social structure. there is an underlying insistence throughout the film that no other system could be as good”. “the underlying assumption is that he commits to this because he worships, admires, and loves white patriarchal power. … significantly, washington’s character is the ‘good’ black man. he not only accepts his subordinate status, he testifies on behalf of and exults in white male superiority. since he is never portrayed as belong to a ‘black’ community, with family, friends, or lovers, his very existence depends on white affirmation. this imagery reproduces the narrative of colonialism” (108).

“… represent black males and other men of colour as acceptable, even lovable, only when they are willing to drop everything in their lives and care for the well-being of ‘superior’ white men” (109).

henry giroux essay, ‘white utopias and nightmare realities’: defines the ‘new racism’ as one “which suggests that racial difference should be overcome even as it reaffirms white power and domination” (110). to quote, he argues “Dominant groups are now driving very carefully over a cultural terrain in which whiteness can no longer remain invisible as a racial, political, and historical construction. … The privilege and practices of domination that underlie being white in america can no longer remain invisible through either an appeal to a universal norm or a refusal to explore how whiteness works to produce forms of ‘friendly’ colonialism”.

“since there is little public discussion about the way in which existing popular representations of black masculinity serve to reinforce and sustain existing structures of domination, these images are reproduced again and again” (113).

key tension: shielding and revealing

containing (the) disaster

masculinity & uniforms – performance & masquerade (inc. vulnerability, insufficiency & masochism tied to punishment)

masculinity and fatherhood – rescuing and restoring agency

calling father home – hegemonic masculinity, ethnicity and women

ambivalence, absence, slippages (inc. absence of the Other)

conclusion

keane also asks “How are we to look back on disaster movies in the wake of events such as these [9/11, katrina, etc.]? and how have recent disaster movies [...] responded to this new relevance and responsibility?” (2) … this establishes both their social currency and way to look at them (re. responsibility).

recent genre criticism, e.g. altman (99) and neale (2000), “look at the processes through which genre has come to be understood” and ask what properties “might go towards identifying a film as a disaster movie”.

keane notes there are three key sources: sontag’s ‘the imagination of disaster, maurice yacowar’s ‘the bug in the rug’ (77) and nick roddick’s ‘only the stars survive’ (80).

he argues there is a danger in including too many films, so favours a “focus on identifiable historical genres” (4).

keane’s book explores the ideological and the industrial. “ideological readings [...] generic cycles are sparked by resonant ideas, that they are acutely reflective of social, cultural and political developments”. “conversely, the more practical, industrial reasoning is that it only takes one commercially successful film to spark an interest in bringing certain [...] genres back again” (4). industrial imperatives “do not preclude subsequent ideological readings of individual films and overall cycles [...]. in order to appeal to audiences, films must also reflect the times in which we live”. And disaster movies “are said to be borne out of times of crisis” (5).

keane also notes that “most of all disaster movies provide for solutions in the form of a representative group of characters making their way towards survival” (5) … it is interesting that ‘wtc’ does this, but that ‘united 93′ or ‘cloverfield’ do not.

“… the question of who will survive is central to the basic narrative pleasure of disaster movies”, particularly where identification is facilitated by stars. “yet disaster movies quite simply would not be disaster movies without key disaster sequences”, describing representations as having a “rather ‘negative’ appeal” tied to the cinema of spectacle (5).

spectacle: “aesthetics, technology, and the industrial and commercial bases underpinning [...] the need to attract spectators. spectacle has traditionally been criticised as cosmetic, mechanical thrill-seeking [...] that spectacle offers scale over subtlety, eliminating character development and reducing narrative to a succession of thrills and spills”. recent studies (e.g. king, 2000 & 2002) have emphasised that cinema has always relied on ‘pay and display’ and ‘attractions’ (5).

however, disaster sequences are also used “within the narrative structure of disaster movies [... and] often excessive scenes of disaster and destruction can be said to take on more reflective, contextual meanings” at times (5).

bazin, writing about the early cinematic roman epics, used the term ‘nero complex’ to describe how “audiences are able to sit back in emotional involvement and awestruck contemplation for the comfort of their picture palaces” (see lubin 1999).

the 1950s showed renewed in ancient-world epics and sci-fi b-movies, located within the context of the cold war. sontag argued: ‘from a psychological pov, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another. but from a political and moral pov, it does” (224). “these films were clearly metaphorical yet both generic packaging and special-effects splendour can be taken to task for simultaneously simplifying the issues and glossing over the pressing realities of the time” (11). however, as sontag concludes, “the films perpetuate clichés [...] not serviceable in our present extremity. but collective nightmares cannot be banished by demonstrating that they are, intellectually and morally, fallacious. this nightmare – the one reflected, in various registers, in the science fiction films – is too close to our reality” (225).

as roddick clarifies: “what then is a disaster movie? clearly it is not just a movie with a disaster in it: it must be ‘about’ the disaster” (246). “in oder to distinguish ‘disaster-ridden movies’ from disaster movies, roddcik lists a number of important requirements. the actual disasters must be ‘diegetically central’; ‘factually possible’; ‘largely indiscriminate’; ‘unexpected (though not necessarily unpredicted)’; ‘all-encompassing’; ‘and finally, ahistorical, in the sense of not requiring a specific conjunction of political and economic forces to bring it about’” (13). as such, disaster movies operate withing the realm of the possible, rather than being about monsters from space [that said, dixon still chooses to write about 'war of the worlds'!]. in short, roddick argues that “People must believe ‘it’ could – indeed, very well might – happen to them’ (246)” (13).

yacowar notes they “tend to take place in contemporary settings and the characters represent a cross-section of american society” (14). as such class and other representative conflicts occur … although not in ‘wtc’ quite significantly. moreover, “all the marks of ‘civilisation’ – from moral codes to technological systems – duly fail in the disaster” and character fates generally revolve around ‘poetic justice’ (96-105)” (14).

roddick also argues that 70s disaster movies were primarily concerned with class-based readings. “the typical disaster movie’s characters are distinguished by their jobs, status or standing in society. how these characters fare when ‘society’ breaks down thus provides for the ultimate test” (14).

9/11 “had a seismic effect on the ways in which we might regard the status of disaster movies”, both those after and those before, since “there was also a certain, chilling, retrospect; the uncanny feeling that we had seen something like this before” (89).

“… the events of 9/11 represented a startling reality bordering on the hyperreal (see dixon 2004; king 2005)”, ‘like a disaster movie’ (90). the attacks were “a strike at the heart of the american imaginary that also resonated for all of the world to see” (90).

geoff king argues that “where contemporary hollywood cinema has worked in convincing us of the reality of its spectacle, television and documentary reconstructions of the events of 9/11 have presented us with a form of reality as spectacle. [...] conveyed through the sort of narrative and grammar found in disaster movies, the most mediated disaster of all time was to become the most cinematic in terms of its initial scope and subsequent re-construction (47-57)” (91). dixon argues this was done to help us understand and make sense of what happened in a visual language we are familiar with, not to reduce events to media spectacle and disaster movie.

feil (2005: 4-5) observes that video and dvd rentals of disaster movies reached unprecedented demand following 9/11, even though [or perhaps because] tv refused to show them… “the invitation being to regard them as simultaneously far-fetched and not so far-fetched” (91).

on elements of the post-9/11 ‘imagination of disaster’: “the ‘spectacle’ of urban destruction; the ideologies of national security and international terrorism; [...] the new paranoia, of unexpected attack and of a sort of internal breach as distinct from the theme of invasion, for example, in that we have already been infiltrated”. and while “action and disaster movies have always been domestic, [...] now, it would appear, they have a new responsibility to face up to” (93).

ken feil argues that 9/11 “compels critics and filmmakers firmly and rigidly to separate sadistic pleasure, comedy and irony from disaster. maintaining these distinctions exemplifies tasteful reverence for the victims and survivors of 9/11″ (2005: 124).

on the sum of all fears: also marked by post-9/11 sensibilities with disaster a “low-key” sequence and political backdrop of film giving it “an old-fashioned quality” (94).

on ‘the day after tomorrow’: “works in simultaneously reflecting and distancing itself from the events and psychological after-effects of 9/11. on one level the film cannot be read in terms of anything other than the post-9/11 imagination of disaster”. 1. uses NYC and 2. “in contrast to its looser treatment of la for example – the approach to ny ["an appropriate degree of seriousness and sensitivity"] is a particular indication of post-9/11 sensibilities”. “what is particularly noticeable, however, is that ny ultimately survives [...] it remains a beacon of hope” unlike in 90s disaster movies (96).

“rather than being used as a mere spectacular location [...], ny becomes the main location for the remainder of ‘the day after tomorrow’. [...] much more central in terms of narrative” (99). significantly, son, sam (gyllenhal), has to become the leader until his father, jack (quaid), the “potential disaster movie leader figure”, arrives. that said, “survival is still the topical order of the day”.

the film also uses omniscient shots following the wave and first-person wave shots. also, “In correcting itself [the planet] has also redressed ingrained imbalances in the current state of the world as a whole” (103) … and is therefore much more of a traditional disaster movie, unlike ‘cloverfield’ for example.

“from the 1990s onwards there has also been an attempt to ‘characterise’ that subsequent, impersonal spectacle, not so much to represent the natural disaster as the villain but as a monster unleashed (for all intents and purposes we have caused the disasters [...]” (101).

a “common criticism of disaster movies”, that characters “are dwarfed by the issues and hyperbolic spectacle” (103) … has now been invested with greater ‘reality’, given the events of 9/11 did just that. thus, in a sense the containment of the disaster in ‘wtc’ is figured in the foregrounding, the reasserting, of the human element!

keane notes that there is “a current context where so many films can be read as ‘disaster films’”, from signs to vendetta, flightplan, as distinct from disaster ‘movies’. he further surmises that film directly about 9/11 “will lead to a clear demarcation between” the two types (106). note also the failure of poseidon (2006) – too safe, too retro, unreflective of current climate and “a further retreat form the present” (106).

“perhaps this, then, will be the main distinction between disaster movies and disaster films, spectacle on the one side and a form of ‘new realism’ on the other”; “more sober” (106).

“either way, disaster movies have new responsibilities to take on [...]: not the seduction but the involvement in spectacle; intelligence and empathy rather than functionality and simple entertainment; an awareness [...] which will above all provide disaster movies with enduring relevance” (107).