Film and Video Production

As Dean of Fine Arts I managed a Faculty of 550 undergraduate and graduate students (including Luther, Campion and FNUniv students); 39 faculty members, including 2 Associate Deans, 4 Dept. Heads and1 Canada Research Chair Tier II; and 21 support staff (19 CUPE and 2 APT). My operating budget was $5.2 million.

Steven J. Ross, professor of history at the University of Southern California, has written a unique book. Although the title Working-Class Hollywood suggests a study of labour conditions in a company town, the subtitle Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America indicates both the real subject of the book and the broad scope of its argument. There have been many studies of the film industry's early years, its east-coast origins and the westward migration of filmmakers and production companies who founded the "Hollywood studio system." Likewise, much has been written on the birth of mass entertainment, particularly of how "going to the movies" became an integral part of urban life in the years before and after World War I. Working-Class Hollywood rearticulates the history of this period in order to emphasize the complex relations between social conflict and the representation of class in popular culture. Prof. Ross contends that "Filmmakers were more concerned with portraying the hardships of worlungclass life during the silent era than at any subsequent time in the industry's history. Movies turned class struggles previously confined to the hidden, private realm of factories, mines, and fields into highly visible parts of public culture."(7) One might quibble about whether the struggles between capital and labour in America had ever truly taken place in 'Lprivate," but there is no denying that the early cinema's ability to portray events in gripping, widely-accessible images, gave a new dimension to public awareness of social conflict. Prof. Ross sees the cinema as doing more than simply informing people about class relations in America: in his view, the film industry provided one of the mechanisms by which class consciousness, and therefore class relation!:, were forged. The eight chapters of Working-Class Hollywood are divided into two sections. Part I largely deals with the period from the 1905 opening of the first "Nickelodeon" to the United States' 1917 entry into World War I. By this latter point, the cinema had grown from novelty attraction to a cultural and communications medium of such importance that President Wilson charged a "Committee on Public Information" with the task of using film (and other media) to align public opinion behind the war effort. By 1917, also, the companies that made America's movies were beginning to coalesce into an oligopoly of "major" and "minor" producers that was to dominate the industry for decades thereafter. Both the war and the formation of the studio system were to have dismal consequences for the movies' portrayal of class relations. Part I1 of Working-Class Hollywood is concerned with those consequences as they were manifested during the 1920s. It describes how a vital tradition of appositional filmmaking was to dwindle and all but disappear by the time A1 Jolson told audiences they hadn't "heard nothin' yet" and the era of the talkies had begun. Film in America gained its popularity in the first decade of the century by appealing primarily to working-class audiences in industrial cities teeming with

Perhaps no decision I have ever taken has been as influential on my academic practice as the choice made during my graduate work to focus on sub-Saharan African cinema. This laid the groundwork for a research philosophy I have always espoused because I quickly recognized that in order to explore these dynamic works, one must develop the open mind necessary to identify and respectfully investigate issues arising from a cultural experience outside of one's own "world-sense," to borrow a term from Nigerian theorist Oyeronke Oyewumi. Not only did this experience force me to seriously explore my own identity and position within world culture, it also enabled me to develop a great respect for beliefs and practices outside my own. The need to understand these cultures within African contexts of experience led me to develop a sensitivity that has set the tone for all of my research practices. During my academic career, I have remained current in the area of sub-Saharan African cinema and have broadened my investigation to include television, cultural, narrative, and new media studies. My work's special focus on issues of nation, identity, and narrative form has led to some interesting results. For example, when I was beginning my career in the late 1980s and early 1990s, my writing focused on representations of women in African film. I feel I was somewhat "slow" getting this work published, and one of the reasons was that my work would be rejected by editors who wanted me to apply Western feminist theory to the films I was analyzing. I felt this was being interventionist in a negative way toward another culture's artistic production. I stood my ground, but published few papers. Two that I am particularly proud of are "Mapping the African 'I': Representations of Women in La noire de. .. and Histoire d'Orokia" (2000) and "Miseria: Towards an African Feminist Framework of Analysis" (1995). "Miseria" made an especially important contribution to television, African and women studies, having a major impact on the international debate surrounding the establishment of an African feminism based on African precepts. More recently, I published the paper, "Pugnacité et pouvoir: la représentation des femmes dans les films d'Ousmane Sembène," in Présence Francophone

This paper brings together the disciplines of media studies and software systems engineering; it focuses on the challenge of finding methodologies to measure, test and decode meaning in digital cultural objects. The authors draw on a variety of examples: interactive online digital art projects; an interactive, immersive screen-based art installation; re-mediated digital art installation; a videogame; and a medical interface example, in order to determine if it is possible to map interpretive strategies that include a blending of old and new criteria, but ultimately promoting an equal partnership between artist and audience, and thus, a community of co-creators.

This paper summarizes the discussions at a panel on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Computing at CCECE 2013, showcasing multidisciplinary research at the University of Regina. The panellist were invited from Fine Arts, Arts, Science, and Engineering. They elaborated on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary views of computing, covering various topics such as agents, arts, knowledge engineering, granular computing, environment, mobile computing, multi-media, new media, scientistic computing, teaching, and Web-based support systems. The emerged theme of multidisciplinary computing brings new insights and in-depth understanding of computing. * The coordinator and the moderator of the panel held on May 6, 2013. J.T. would like to thank all panellists for their contributions and constructive discussions. Contribution by planelist Dr. Howard Hamilton is acknowledged.

Par une analyse de contenu et de la structure des films africains, l'auteur examine l'influence de la colonisation sur l'image et la situation actuelle de la femme africaine. The author uses an analysis of film content and structure to examine images of women and oppression in West African film. The nature of this oppression cannot be fully understood without situating African women's struggle within the concept of colonialism. Filmmakers have portrayed women struggling against oppressive forms in African society since the birth of Francophone West African film in 1953l. When attempting to examine the depiction of women's contemporary social position in Africa, it would be inappropriate to ground arguments strictly in feminist film theory. A wider theoretical basis is essential in order to conceptualize a critique of issues involving women in African film. The Kenyan anthropologist Achola 0. Pala, warns against simply projecting Western feminist ideology onto the African woman's struggle. She suggests that women's current position can be described as "an interplay between two parameters": firstly, Africa's political and economic "dependency" on the Occident, from slavery and colonialism to "contemporary neocolonial links", and 4 '. indigenous African socioeconomic norms (eg. in food production, family ideology, Property rights and perceptions of respect and human dignity), insofar as these continue to regulate social behaviour." And she argues that "the problems facing African women today, irrespective of their national and social class affiliations, are inextricably bound up in the wider struggle by African people to free themselves from Poverty and ideological domination in both intra-and international spheres."

The Hip Hop Parliament is a youth-initiative comprised of underground hip hop MCs and artists that began in 2007 in Nairobi, Kenya. Representing itself as a collective conscious movement that has no boundaries and is open to participants from all over the world, the Hip Hop Parliament formed to offer youth a voice and a place from which to participate in the social, political, and cultural processes of Kenya. Drawing on hip hop culture and its mythologies of struggle, resistance, reclamation, and social consciousness, the Hip Hop Parliament released a Declaration as a means to present a unified front on a number of controversial issues concerning ethnicity, gender, respect for human life, reconciliation between communities, violence, youth culture, justice, peace, the use of SHENG as one of Kenya's "official" languages, the importance of good leadership and the responsibility to provide security, education, and health care available to all citizens regardless of economic circumstance. Given this context, in this article the authors begin to explore the following questions: What is the significance of the Hip Hop Parliament and its declaration as a movement/ culture for youth in Kenya? How does hip hop, as an artistic form, work towards the expression of a contemporary Africa? "We're not MPs, but MCs, members of the community" (Hip Hop Parliament rapper Judge Franklin Milan). G lobal hip hop culture offers listeners multiple narratives. Some are conventional and marked by capitalist ideas of success, privilege and power, while others, provide unique accounts of grass roots activism, political dissent, and innovative forms of resistance. As Imani Perry suggests, "To listen to hip hop is to enter a world of complexity and contradiction" (2004:1). Founded upon a mythological history of reclamation, resistance, and empowerment for marginalized African American and Latino youth in New York and more

This essay takes as its starting point Laura Rascaroli’s notion of “epistolarity as argumentation” to probe how North African filmmakers Habiba Djahnine, Drifa Mezenner, and Jawad Rhalib deploy the letter in their documentary films as a strategy to come to terms with personal alienation at a specific point in their national histories. In Letter to my Sister (2006), I Lived in the Absence Twice (2011) and The Turtles’ Song: a Moroccan Revolution (2013), working within reflexive and performative modes of documentary, the filmmakers become protagonists of their own projects and find their personal voice after years of repression or exile. Thus, they ultimately connect their voice with others of the nation as strategy of reconciliation. The essay argues that these first-person documentaries use the epistolary device to allow the filmmakers to rediscover their own voices and place within their own national histories of Algeria and Morocco.

Driven by the debate between "specialist" and "generalist" methods of analysis in the study of world literature, we embarked upon a case study consisting of a textual analysis of the dialogical relationship between patient and therapist in "factional" Irish and English novels. By appropriately encoding text passages and using suitable visualization techniques, we aspired to provide a methodology that could be utilized at both national and international levels of study. This paper will argue that both the findings generated by the software developed, and those discovered through the development process, serve to visibly enhance both traditional textual scholarship and work in the field of Digital Humanities.

Perhaps no decision I have ever taken has been as influential on my academic practice as the choice made during my graduate work to focus on sub-Saharan African cinema. This laid the groundwork for a research philosophy I have always espoused because I quickly recognized that in order to explore these dynamic works, one must develop the open mind necessary to identify and respectfully investigate issues arising from a cultural experience outside of one’s own “world-sense, ” to borrow a term from Nigerian theorist Oyeronke Oyewumi. Not only did this experience force me to seriously explore my own identity and position within world culture, it also enabled me to develop a great respect for beliefs and practices outside my own. The need to understand these cultures within African contexts of experience led me to develop a sensitivity that has set the tone for all of my research practices. During my academic career, I have remained current in the area of sub-Saharan African cinema and h...

This essay focuses on three “accented cinema” films that creatively blend the autobiographical, performative, fictional, and documentary to interpret how identities are created at the intersection of displacement and belonging and are shaped by selective and multiple affinities to colonial cultures, ancestral cultures, and adopted host cultures. The films represent historical “moments” and follow a historical chronology, highlighting the permanency of being displaced and displacement in France, the said Republic of Equality. Watani: un monde sans mal (Watani: A World Without Evil, 1998) by Med Hondo depicts several racist incidents in Paris, including the Sans-Papiers Affair of 1996; La Marche (The Marchers, 2013) by Nabil Ben Yadir recreates the 1983 Marseilles to Paris “Marche Pour l’Egalité et Contre le Racisme”; and Paris Stalingrad (2019) by Hind Meddeb and Thim Naccachechronicles refugees struggling to make a home for themselves in street camps in the Stalingrad district of Pa...

Philippe Lacôte's latest feature film, Night of the Kings, blends themes of incarceration, performance, and storytelling to create a fabulist tale set deep in Ivory Coast's Banco forest, where the notorious MACA Prison-Maison d'arrêt et de correction d'Abidjan-is nestled at the edge of a clearing. Its otherworldliness is hinted at during the opening of the film, as a helicopter high angle tracking shot takes the viewer on a flight over the forest to the isolated institution as intertitles explain, over a static extreme long shot of the building, that MACA Prison is a world with its own rules. The main law is that the "Dangôro" ("Blackbeard"), the supreme leader of the prisoners, has all rights over the others. When he becomes ill and can no longer govern, he must commit suicide. This opening sequence is followed by medium close-up shots of a young African man (played by Bakary Koné) in a yellow t-shirt being transported to the prison in the back of a half-ton police truck, defiance etched into his gaze. Dangôro (played by Steve Tientcheu) spies on the new arrival from his small barred window as he puffs on an inhaler. Clearly ailing, he confers with his "gang," Lass (Abdoul Karim Konaté) and Half-Mad (Jean Cyrille Digbeu), informing them he is choosing a new "Roman," (storyteller). Once Roman has been processed, he learns from Blackbeard that he is the new "Roman" and that when the red moon appears that night he must tell stories to the inmates. A hesitant Roman takes up his role of storyteller, buying a clearly ailing Blackbeard more time in the world of the living. What Roman is not aware of, however, is that in order to survive, he must never finish his story. The film's narrative structure borrows from African Futurism, as Lacôte builds a layered narrative that suggests a time and space outside of this world. This speculative story space is rooted in Indigenous African experiences and aesthetics in which past, present, and future exist simultaneously. The first half of the film develops slowly, as Lacôte introduces the prison setting and characters. Blackbeard's gang is already planning his succession and new prison management. Lass covets the top position, declaring that under his rule, prisoners would become the gang's customers, rather than their slaves. He consolidates his power