SCREENWISE 
Standorte und Szenarien der zeitgenössischen 
feministischen Film- und TV-Wissenschaften

International Conference, 15. – 18. Mai 2003, Vienna

Lectures, Panels, Workshops II & III, VideoLounge: 
project space/ kunsthalle am Karlsplatz. 1040, Treitlstr. 2

Screenings, Workshop I:
Österreichisches Filmmuseum. 1010, Augustinerstr. 1

Contact and Information:
SYNEMA
1070, Neubaugasse 36/1/1/1
tel/fax: +43-1-523 37 97	mail: synema@chello.at

- Please register with Synema by phone, fax or mail!
- There is no participation fee 

INTRODUCTION

 “Together with a long-overdue inventory of feminist Film and TV Studies here in Austria, the SCREENWISE conference would like to raise questions along the axes of four main themes about the constitution and reflection of the subject in contemporary cinema and TV theory.”

Two years ago, beginning with this programmatic statement, Monika Bernold, Andrea B. Braidt, and Claudia Preschl followed up on Brigitte Mayr’s invitation to draft an event for SYNEMA, the event described in this program. The two guidelines contained in this set of objectives run throughout the lectures, panels, workshops, podium discussion, film viewing, and video lounge. One of the two guidelines is to present and make visible feminist Film and TV Studies in Austria. This type of inventory is, mainly, missing from academic policies. Yet, communicating the lively and diverse research and teaching activities in this area both within and beyond the involved fields, is of prime importance due to the merely isolated instances of institutionalization of Film and TV Studies within Austria. SCREENWISE would like to offer feminist Film and TV Studies scholars a framework to develop common perspectives within the context of an international conference. The second guideline inquires into the subject of contemporary film and TV theory: its constitution and reflections on it that are subsequently employed. This inquiry represents the historical, or theoretical concern of the conference and will be discussed and debated in four thematic areas. 
The four main areas of concentration, developed in a collaboration with the conference’s scholarly committee, are symptomatic for the thematic landscape of contemporary discussion within feminist Film and TV Studies. They are therefore extremely suitable for sketching out the historical theoretical developments in this area:
Visual practices in the context of feminism, sexuality, gender, and politics opens the discursive framework on the relationship between feminist theory construction and aesthetic practice are theorized. Feminist positions on early cinema: The desire for a counter cinema once again raises the issue of early cinema’s potential as a counter model to narrative Hollywood cinema and what is often described as its apparatus-immanent reproduction of gender dichotomies. Discursive and imaginary spaces:  TV's elsewheres and nowheres focusses on the gender specifics of the spatial/temporal dimensions of television and inquires into the reconfiguration of social, political, and also imaginary spaces. And finally, Gender and Genre in Film and TV Studies is concerned with the increasing critique in past years of the theorizing of the relationship of these categories and the simultaneous renaissance which might be agreed upon for gender-specific genre analyses. 
Within the framework of an international call for papers, we have invited two keynote speakers for each of these main themes and put together four panels. 
In addition to the lectures, which will approach the guidelines of the conference along these four main themes, a podium discussion, three workshops, a film program, and a video lounge will offer the opportunity to confront the state of the art and practices of feminist Film and TV Studies at various levels. Whereas the podium discussion will bring together scholars and practitioners to discuss mainly academic policy and aesthetic issues, the workshops are meant to provide a forum for discussion of three areas where feminism connects with film/TV: the programming of film series as feminist practice, the issue of the (lost) audience, and the representation of radical sexual practices in queer/lesbian film and video images. In addition, a film series in the Austrian film museum (curated by Katja Wiederspahn) and a video lounge in the project space/kunsthalle (designed by Miki Muhr), offer the possibility to see a selection of film and video works relevant to these issues.
Our aim is for this first Austrian conference on feminist Film and TV Studies to be followed by others, and for the event to set an impulse for international and national networking and initiatives.

TIMETABLE

Donnerstag/Thursday, 15. Mai 2003

from 15.00 project space
Registration

16.00 project space
Opening and Panel Discussion (in German) with Annette Brauerhoch (Paderborn), Sabine Derflinger (Wien), Carola Dertnig (Wien), Antonia Lant (New York), Marcella Stecher (Wien)
Chair: Claudia Preschl (Wien)

SCREENPOLITICS: The Power of the Political in the field of media 
The panel brings together international film scholars and filmmakers who practice a variety of theoretical and practical approaches. Among other concerns, the activities of feminist confrontations in aesthetics and politics in the 1970s and 80s will be thematized and confronted with contemporary positions. 
This implies, investigating changes in political thought and action, identifying the success and/or failure of past and present strategies, and (re)formulating the situation of individualization versus collective praxis… and much more.

18.00 – 18.30 project space
presentation of
SHIMMERING REELS – SCREENWISE VideoLounge
selection and design by Mikki Muhr (Wien)

The VideoLounge is a platform for video works, contributions to the symposium that open discussion to the area of practice and introduce another level of inquiry on production and reception. 
Compiled are recent productions along the axes of feminist analyses of codes, images, and narrative forms; image production – media usage, wishes and desires; and works that refer to concrete events.
The selection reflects my interest in the various strategies of applying and using video. Included are also several examples from the area of film animation, as I feel that the combination promises to be both informative and provocative. Focus is less on the challenge of something “new,” and more on the attempt to think in terms of the relations between the works. The video selection and the design of the lounge is my contribution, offered for discussion in the framework of the conference. 
Additionally, the VideoLounge should also refer beyond the immediate location and supply information about the facilities that have provided invaluable resources for research on this project, as well as many others. My interest was sparked during the designing of the lounge, which should provide both visibility for those organisations that enable research to take place and information on them. 

SHIMMERING REELS - VideoLounge
Thursday –Sunday project space
with Videos by Karin Sulimma (A), Vicky Smith (UK): Fixation / Sabine Marte (A) / Kowalska/Muhr/Müller (A): Unsere Leistungsbilanz / Dayna McLeod (CAN): Watching Lesbian Porn / Linda Bilda & Ariane Müllner: Zu Zweit / Klub Zwei (A): Schwarz auf Weiss - die Rückseite der Bilder / Park Sunwoo (ROK): They are Speaking / Ricarda Denzer (A): eigen / Hito Steyerl, (D/A): normalität 1 – 7

19.00 Österreichisches Filmmuseum
Opening Reception 

21.00 Österreichisches Filmmuseum
presentation of
IMAGE PLEASURE – SCREENWISE Film Programmes
Concept and Organization by Katja Wiederspahn (Wien)

 (...) im wesentlichen macht die Kamera jeden zu einem Touristen in der Realität der anderen und zuletzt auch in der eigenen. (Susan Sontag)

Image Pleasure is an invitation to discover or rediscover a number of classics and several newer works in feminist cinema – focusing on films from the German speaking countries: aside from fremd gehen. Gespräche mit meiner Freundin (Austrian premiere!), Eva Heldmann’s much discussed documentary film on the sexual fantasies of her friend Annette, the program comprises a number of rarely screened works such as Amy! (Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen 1980), a cinematic approach to Amy Johnson, aviation pioneer in 1930s England, and Die blaue Distanz (Elfi Mikesch 1983), a cool, stylized fantasy about wanderlust. 
A number of common threads run loosely throughout the program. Various themes arise in the individual parts along the ever entertaining, red hot issue of sexual identity(ies), in short: about love, lust and passion – last but not least in the perception of film itself. 
Part 1 is dedicated to documentary works and in particular to the theme of (self-)staging,  with music playing a major role in all three films. 
Part 2 takes a look at the man in women’s cinema – ironically commented on in Pola Reuth’s Kool Killer, and caught in rather tragic self-reflective moments in Love Stinks, a film by Birgit & Wilhelm Hein showing everyday life in a relationship. Almost an ”anti-porn,” the film refuses to”aesthetize” the sexual in any way.
Part 3 introduces experimental short films from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, cinematic reflections that circle around the experience of foreign-ness, travel, excursions to unfamiliar beds, reflections that provide stolen, borrowed, or granted glances in voyeuristic-exhibitionist performances. To celebrate the 30th birthday of the U.S. film distribution company, Women Make Movies, we will show Su Friedrich’s opulent wedding film, First Comes Love. 
Part 4 presents French/Belgian variations of the 1970s cinema inspired by existentialism. The selected works draw attention to the subject-critical traditions of feminist cinema– Duras’s Les Mains Negatives and Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle. 
And finally, part 5 dares to venture into Chinese cinema. The grand finale, Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (Ai Nu, Chu Yuan 1972), a production from the legendary Shaw brothers studios, offers treats in all sizes and colors – from martial arts to lesbian melodrama – a masterpiece of Hong Kong’s liberal 1970s. 

Discussions will be held in the cinema after the screenings; some of the directors will be present. 

IMAGE PLEASURE  – Program 1
Amy!  Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen, GB 1980, 16mm, 30 min., Farbe, eOF
One Pussy Show  Anja Czioska, D 1998, 16mm, 7 min., Farbe 
fremd gehen. Gespräche mit meiner Freundin  Eva Heldmann, D 1999, 35mm, 64 min., Farbe, OmeU
We are especially pleased to welcome Laura Mulvey and Eva Heldmann to this program.

Friday, 16. Mai 2003

9.30 – 11.00 project space
Visual Practices in the Context of Feminism, Sex, Gender, Politics

INTRODUCTION
In the 1970s, feminism’s involvement in the area of cinema/film was characterized by tight bonds between filmmakers, the women’s movement, and theory. The connection between producers and theorists was often articulated as a whole, united in a single person (Laura Mulvey, Michelle Citron, Trinh T. Minh-ha, etc.). In the meantime, feminist film theory and practice has not only become institutionalized in many areas, but has also been massively differentiated and transformed. SCREENWISE’s current thematization of visual practices’ potential in the context of feminism, sex, gender, and politics, remains tightly linked with historical demands to transform the politics of representation. The aim is to motivate practices and insights that propel the critique of exclusionary processes, of hierarchism and normalization, and productively evade identity constraints. This main focus of the conference should, on the one hand, re-open the relationship between feminist theory production and film/image/production, and, on the other, facilitate discussion of concrete theoretical approaches to feminist representational strategies. Likewise, this concentration on practice is meant to raise the question of contemporary conditions and also the possibilities for critical action within the framework of visual practice.

The keynote speakers, Laura Mulvey (London, GB) and Berenice Reynaud (Los Angeles, USA), will span the historical perspective on the issues of the relationship of feminist theory and film production. Whereas Mulvey will talk about this relationship in terms of her own film and theory work, Reynaud will devote her talk to contemporary “post, para, and protofeminist” film practices and raise the question of female agency as authorship and as a mode of representation.
The speakers on the afternoon panel will address various approaches to the concept of gender in contemporary film theory: Andrea Seier looks within feminist film theory for connections to concepts of performance; Eva-Maria Trischak employs the concept of the cyborg for the reading of a Japanese “sci-fi porn feature”; Hedwig Wagner investigates the interfaces between feminist film theory and (post psychoanalytical?) Gender Studies; and Doro Wiese initiates an attempt to allow Gilles Deleuze, among others, to facilitate comprehension of queer desire within (feminist) film theory.  

Lectures (in English) - Chair: Heike Klippel (Braunschweig)

Laura Mulvey (London): Looking at the Past from the Present: Feminist film theory and practice
in the 1970s

Berenice Reynaud (Los Angeles): Post-, Para- and Proto-Feminist practices in a difficult age
I would like to examine how the issue of female agency in cinema – agency being understood both as cinematic auteurship and as the depiction of female characters who are acting as subjects – is posed, explored, re-examined and re-stated by female filmmakers who do not necessarily posit themselves within the realm of feminist practice and/or theory. I will discuss the later works of veteran filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman (Belgium/France) and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (Iran), survey the situation of independent filmmaking in the US (I will probably mention the work of Nina Menkes, Laura Nix, Cheryl Dunye and Sharon Lockart), discuss queer representations by diasporic Chinese women filmmakers (Cheang Shu-lea, Yau Ching) and examine the emergence of female directors in the “Sixth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers (Li Yu, Emily Tang).

11.30 – 13.00 project space
Feminist Positions on early Cinema. The Desire for a Counter Cinema

INTRODUCTION
Since their beginnings in the 1970s, investigations into film history and particularly the search for women’s participation in film history, have been an essential element of feminist film theory. In the 1980s, intense theory formation seeking to grasp, in a gender specific way, the concept of the viewer and the constitution of the cinema subject led repeatedly to inquiries about the empirical presence of the audience. 
Within this context, the rediscovery of early cinema provided a focus for rewriting film history. Among other things, feminist film studies scholars made clear that cinema was originally a mass entertainment for male and female viewers and additionally, that it was strongly influenced by the actors’ (both male and female) physical presence. The actors’ possibilities for staging themselves and the picture were (still) more diverse at the time and, by exhibiting the body, offered a subversive view of it. Moreover, cinema in its early years proved to be especially experimental. Searching for forms and trying out occasionally excessive new technical possibilities can certainly be understood today as procedural methods that present alternatives to the classic canon of rules. 
Heide Schlüpmann, author of Unheimlichkeit des Blicks (Uncanniness of the Gaze) and a true pioneer in the research of early cinema in the German speaking area, raises the question of how the awareness of early cinema as “counter cinema” is currently portrayed. Eva Warth, co-organizer of the conference “Gender und Silent Cinema” (together with Annette Förster, Utrecht 1999) and author of numerous essays on the theme, refers in her talk to Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Historiography.
Elisabeth Streit and Birgit Peter take a regional focus, tying the films of the Austrian production company “Saturn,” and the affiliated thoroughly amusing variants of nude female body projections, together with the comedienne Gisela Werbezirk, star of many Austrian film productions. Along with their (own) interest in early cinema, Gabi Babic, Heike Prager, and Nicole Sang devote their talk to the social drama, a maid’s everyday life, flirting, married women, and the acting of Asta Nielsen. Moreover, they offer insight into the problematic of the restoration of silent films. 

Lectures (in German) - Chair: Claudia Preschl (Wien)

Heide Schlüpmann (Frankfurt): Early Cinema as “Counter Cinema” 
Claire Johnston’s contribution to Frauen und Film, “women’s film as counter film” gave rise to the concept in the 1970s. It indicated a cinema that broke with the laws of patriarchal and capitalist Hollywood films. While a theoretical critique of past and present Hollywood films was being carried out, in feminist circles there was an attempt to pave the way for a new type of film in terms of feminist practice.
However, in light of economic, political, and institutional conditions, filmmakers had little chance of realizing their ideas. In addition, they generally reached only a small audience with their works. In the 1980s, the departure élan nonetheless also returned to the institution. This enabled a rediscovery of early cinema and also allowed the desire for women’s counter cinema to evolve: if the future held no future for counter cinema, from now on it would be discovered in the past. Early cinema was completely different than Hollywood; it represented mass entertainment for both male and female viewers. In its own era, it also had the traits of a movement running counter to the dominant bourgeois culture and society. How is this awareness of early cinema as “counter cinema” depicted today? 

Eva Warth (Bochum): Feminist Research Approaches to Early Cinema: Perspectives, potential, and 
problems  
The boom in film studies research on early cinema, set off by the Brighton conference at the end of the 1970s, emerged within the context of a general conceptual and methodological reorientation to (film-) historiograpic approaches. Works that have been involved for the past two decades with gender issues in the context of early cinema present an important aspect of this research area, which nonetheless does not present a uniform paradigm, due to the heterogeneity of the themes and methods and also the lack of mutual reflection.
The aim of this contribution is to systematize and historically contextualize the historical development of feminist research approaches to early cinema in order to critically illuminate the genealogy and productivity of central issues within this context.

13.00-15.00 break

15.00 – 17.00 project space 
Panel 1:Visual practices in the context of feminism, sex, gender, politics

Papers in German - Chair: Gabriele Jutz (Wien)

Andrea Seier (Bochum): Performativity and/in film: Film studies reflections on gender performativity 
As a rule, gender and the media are defined as being closely linked. Gender Studies and Media Studies are correspondingly considered two directly intermeshed areas of research (see, for example, von Braun 2000). In the context of Film Studies, two aspects are thereby striking. First, feminist film theory, which can meanwhile be classified as classical, is said to have arrived at a “standstill” (see, e.g., Schlüpmann 1998). For the most part, it is considered “outdated” and in the meantime is looked at mainly from a historical perspective. Second, the theoretical approaches of Gender Studies – following from performativity theory – have been developed in many cases with recourse to media representations of gender identities. This is clearly illustrated by the dominant concepts, for example: gender performance, gender representation, and gender performativity. These concepts are primarily associated with a question that is central for gender research: in which ways do forms and procedures shape the gendered subject? Both the “old” media such as film and television, as well as the “new” media play a central role in this issue. In my contribution, I would like to deal with the following problem: it appears that with the changed perspective on gender, a “gap” has arisen between the approaches of gender theory and Film Studies. This “gap” gapes between a cultural-technological concept of gender performativity on the one hand, and the specific way it is fleshed out in the various media and film on the other. Cinematic gender performances are often drawn in as “proof” of the theses of performativity of gender identity, yet their medial composition is simultaneously suppressed. This occurs, for example, when Judith Butler, in the foreword to her book, Gender Trouble, (a title that harks back to John Waters’ film, Female Trouble), claims that Divine’s presentation of femininity in John Waters film refers implicitly to the performativity of gender identity in that she exhibits this as “a persistent impersonation… that passes as the real.” Refrained from here, at this point, is a differentiation between the gender performance of a cultural technology in the broadest sense, and the cinematic staging of sexual identity. In my contribution, I would therefore like to ask about the specifics of cinematic performativity and the possibilities of analyzing these details, as well as the possibilities for connections of the concept of gender performativity with the previous approaches of feminist film theory. 

Evamaria Trischak (Wien): Cyborgs in film, based on the example of I.K.U. (2000)
Flyers announce I.K.U. (2000) as a “Japanese sci-fi porn feature.” It picks up directly from the narration of the 1982 film, Blade Runner. This independent Japanese film is therefore particularly interesting in that it mirrors Haraway’s thoughts on the cyborg relatively well – in complete contrast to most other cyborg films.
This independent film is one element in a larger story that crosses into various media, including a webpage on which the writing of the narrative continues. The cyborgs in the film appear as IKU Coders, but the question of the border between human and machine in this film – in contrast to other well-known films such as Blade Runner (1982) or Terminator (1984) – remains in the background. The IKU Coders Reiko and Sasaki are busy with problems just as humans are; they are dedicated to their jobs and present no danger to humanity. The border between human and machine is perhaps clear, yet the object of artificial origin appears here as only one of a number of non-essential identity characteristics. Therefore, the IKU Coders, in contrast to the replicators and the terminators, are equal to humans. http://www.i-k-u.com

Hedwig Wagner (Weimar): Gender theoretical guidelines in the cinematic discourse on prostitution 
It is obvious: there are multifold testimonies to socially constructed gender in the media at the interface of Gender Studies and Media Studies; the technical medium, the medium as a discursive dispositif, and so on and so forth … and the medial conditionality of gender naturally shows up when the social construction of gender is highlighted. “Gender Media Studies,” however, does not exist. A methodology for gender theoretical film or media analysis is still not to be found in research. Feminist film theory set a precedent by bringing together feminist theory and film studies. The methodology, based on psychoanalytical (cultural)theory, gave rise to what became the dominant theoretical and analytical figures.  If one takes the claimed paradigm break between feminist theory and Gender Studies seriously, then as a consequence, feminist film theory must be found outside of Gender Studies. The required paradigm change must necessarily come about by crushing the mésalliance between feminist film theory (in which the ambivalent film figure of the prostitute was, and had to remain, absent from theory) and psychoanalysis, thus reflecting a new methodology: differences in gender-theoretical guidelines as categories for analysis. Sex and gender as categories of analysis are conditions for relationships that are constantly being newly constituted. These conditions must be examined and unraveled in terms of their involvement with other major conceptual dualisms such as culture/nature, consciousness/body, our image of self /others image of us, etc. Thus, until the present time, the prostitution discourse has been swept along by a schism (see Carpenter 2000 and Cornell 1998), expressed in an entangled debate of the positionings “‘pro-sex’ and ‘anti-sex.’” I will show the entanglements of standard (feminist) film critique as reflected in the prostitution schism, how it interacts with mutually defining dualisms and their accompanying naturalization. Using Drucilla Cornell’s ethical-political category of “imaginary domain,” I will turn to self and sexuality in a new conception of subject in the field of feminism, to join her in presenting an interpretation-guiding analysis of visual practices. For the analysis, I will seek out differences in legible guidelines that can be concretized in genuine cinematic parameters and are of gender theoretical relevance.

Doro Wiese (Hamburg): Moved desire, or reflections for a cinema of poetry 
Although feminist film theory has clearly become more diverse since its origins, nonetheless, many approaches still contain the basic assumption that cinema and films direct the viewers’ desire and in this function, perpetuate the inequality of gender relations. Psychoanalytically oriented theories commence from the assumption that cinema is an apparatus allocating viewers a textually guided subject position as part of its arrangements. Despite the existence of other promising theoretical possibilities, their texts share the idea that desire is commonly connected with sexuality and sex. At the level of description, the norms of two sexes and heterosexuality are always let in through the backdoor, with no questions asked. 
Taking  this as a starting point, “moved desire” will search for models that allow a resistance of these assumptions without abandoning the queer-feminist issue of unequal power relations. With the assistance of Gilles Deleuze, Elspeth Probyn, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and maintaining a discursive text model, the aim is to draft a desire that remains unpredictable, insatiable, and indeterminable. Interplay between the (female) viewer and film can open unfamiliar contexts and perspectives: “moved desire” does not want to abandon this form of resistance, but rather, include it in its own theory production. 

15.00 – 17.00 project space 
Panel 2: Feminist positions on early cinema. The desire for a counter cinema

Papers in German - Chair: Alexandra Seibel (Wien)

Gaby Babic, Heike Prager & Nicole Sang (Frankfurt): Movement – Turbulence 
Reviewing our visual experiences and work using film material, which we collected as film studies students, we would like to now turn our attention to the women of the early cinema: women actors and women in the audience. 
We watched a number of extremely diverse films from the Frankfurt Film Studies archive as preparation for our contribution. In doing so, we concentrated on those main themes that ran through all of our studies. As examples we have chosen: 
•	The social drama, which smuggled us into the everyday life of the maids, coquettes, and married women of the early twentieth century, and also allowed us to develop a sense of the former audience.
•	The Asta Nielsen films, through which we were able to experience her acting, expression, and physical presence. We see her as an independent actress, who through her acting and screen presence is capable of timeless portrayal. 
•	The restoration of silent films and with that, a technical aspect of film. We will report on how we dealt with the material of film and its transitory nature as well as our practical experience in restoration work gathered through the Archimedia Programme and at the restoration laboratory L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna. 
We have developed a sense for early cinema and a desire to watch silent films through our intensive work with and on films, which we would very much like to share. In addition to our great pleasure in watching, the films also carry further significance: they show something about the social position of women at the start of the last century, and additionally, offer us the possibility to discover the mainly female audience that saw these films and, last but not least, they also lead us back to ourselves and our experiences. 
Our contribution will be rounded off with an evening film program. 

Birgit Peter & Elisabeth Streit (Wien): Comic Strategies – Female Wit

Birgit Peter: The actress Gisela Werbezirk – female/Jewish/Austrian wit? 
Based on the example of the Viennese actress, Gisela Werbezirk – a comic star of local Jewish farces and a protagonist in Austrian film productions – we will attempt to crystallize the specifics of female wit. Werbezirk promises to be quite interesting in this respect because she displays several essential aspects for the analysis of comedy/wit. In Austria, the portrayal of humor had previously been found in the realm of theater. Film, as a new entertainment media, picked up on this form of presentation, both in its persons, and also viewing conventions. The medium of film allowed images of women that seemed compromised when dealt with in the theater, variety shows, and cabarets, to appear as more authentic, and most importantly, made them available for a broader audience. 
When we are dealing with humor, wit, and laughter it is necessary to consider local and historical conditions in order to understand the laughter of the past. Werbezirk can be placed in the tradition of the female/Jewish/Austrian comedienne, a tradition that we hope to “reconstruct” in this contribution. 

Elisabeth Streit: “Naked Facts” – The presentation of the female body in early Austrian cinema. The 
Saturn Company.
Concurrent with the start of the film industry in Austria, Johann Schwarzer founded the production company “Saturn.” At this point in time it was not yet possible to speak of a person-centered stardom, however, through production firms such as Saturn, the “terrain” was prepared by the themes that their productions negotiate. One such theme was the “man’s night out film” – consisting of the projection of naked female bodies. 
Although the presentation possibilities for each nude model were limited, the models cleverly varied them in amusing and effective ways. It was perhaps these nameless, amateur comics who paved the way for professional comediennes.

19.00 Österreichisches Filmmuseum
Workshop I (in English if required)
Karola Gramann (Frankfurt): "First you take...". Aspects of programming: Practice and Theory
If you spread out the ingredients of a curry mixture, the art of film programming becomes apparent – like a curry, a program is also more than the sum of its parts, and like the mixture of spices, it depends just as much on the individual ingredients as their dosage. The culinary comparison likewise reveals that a program, far from being composed with the mind alone, relies mainly on the senses. 
Film exists at the moment it is perceived and this perception is an activity carried out not only by our eyes, but if possible, enlists our entire sensorial being. Similar to an individual film, a program must bear in mind disparateness and coherence, tension and flow. The work on a program, moreover, does not follow from a set calculation, but from the experience of many films, the memory and imagination of the intended film projection – an anticipated taste. Thus, although the workshop will introduce concepts, it will mainly communicate experiences and allow them to be made. I will work with short films from the early cinema to the present and will show examples from my current work, ...und wenn Du eine Rose siehst. 
 
21.00 Österreichisches Filmmuseum
IMAGE PLEASURE - Program 2
Kool Killer  Pola Reuth, D 1981, 16mm, 8 min., Farbe
Love Stinks – Bilder des täglichen Wahnsinns  Birgit & Wilhelm Heim, BRD 1982, 82 min., Farbe

Saturday, 17. Mai 2003

9.30 –11.00 project space
Discursive and imaginary Spaces:  TV's Elsewheres and Nowheres

INTRODUCTION
Television constitutes specific spatial/temporal arrangements, perceptions, and dispositions that carry intense gender connotations. Since the early 1980s, feminist TV Studies scholars have investigated the linkage of space, television, and gender at various levels and in diverse contexts. In doing so, television is primarily analyzed as a text or thematized in terms of its identity politics in the contended field between genre theory and audience research. The dominant form of watching TV, in private, inner rooms, is linked with the search for the “female spectator” and analyses of changing concepts of public and private. In the context of SCREENWISE, we would like to focus on lines of questioning that reflect the transformations of space and feminist TV Studies’ associated issues and fields of research.  
Margaret Morse, author of Virtualities. Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (1998), described television in the context of modern consumer culture as a transmitter of derealized spatial experiences. Joke Hermes, together with Len Ang, in the seminal essay  "Gender and/in media consumption" (1991) carried out a radical critique of the use of the category gender in feminist and ethnographic oriented audience research. The keynote talks by Morse and Hermes, as well as the 
lectures by the invited panelists, Susanne Lummerding, Jyioti Mistry, and Mari Pajala, will revolve around the following set of questions: 
What are the furnishings of the televisual interior of the postmodern? Are there sites, a room, for “prime-time-feminism”? What possibilities for identity politics are effective in television’s various dispositif arrangements in the context of globalized (media) economies? How does television contribute to the experiences of migration and diaspora? How do televisual representations of war and catastrophy react to structural dislocation and segmentation of the television experience, how are these structured in terms of gender politics? 
The lectures brought together under the theme of “Discursive and imaginery Spaces: TV's elsewheres and nowheres,” invite discussion of televisual reconfiguration of political, social, and imaginary spaces. 

Lectures in English - Chair: Monika Bernold (Wien)

Margaret Morse (Santa Cruz): Imbedded and Immersed: Managing Bodies and Death on the 
 Front and on the Screen
After discussing virtual and interactive features of television,  I will review my conclusions about presentational techniques during Gulf War on American television in my book -Virtualities_ (Indiana UP 1998) in relation to the current American war in Iraq.  Precise contents and approach are contingent on events, but in any event I will discuss disengagement,disembodiment,women and cyborgification, MRE's, games and managing death. 

Joke Hermes (Amsterdam): The Self-Textualised Audience: Post-Feminist Television, its Fans, its 
         Critics and the Internet
Feminism has a long and respectable history of studying women as audiences of popular culture. In television studies the paradigmatic example is soap opera. Issues for feminist audience analysis have been: the inequality between researcher and researched; the researcher as fan and restricting the choice of informants to other fans and/or women. Since the inception of feminist audience studies from the early 1980s onwards, television's social place has changed. In this talk I will focus on the fairly recent strategic alliance of television and the internet, exploited by both television networks and producers, and by audiences. Fan audiences found an ideal medium in the internet to extend talk about favourite programmes to like-minded viewers across the globe (albeit, usually, within the Western world, if not exclusively). However, not only fans but those critical of television programmes have allied via the world wide web. By focusing on a particular web site (called jump-the-shark) I will show how the parameters for feminist television audience studies has changed dramatically with teh changing role of television from a broadcast monopolist, to a narrowcast link in the new multimedial environment developing around us. My case study are jumptheshark-discussions of two outstanding recent American television series from a broadcast and a cable network: Ally McBeal (Fox, 1996-2002 network television) and Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2003 cable television). Not only does the internet deliver instant material for analysis (no transcription of interviews needed), the self-selected groups of jumptheshark critics offers a new constituency of viewers. In my talk then I will offer discussion of feminist television ethnography and possible new directions for it to take; in relation to developments within television (post-feminist lead characters in television drama) and in relation to television's changing social place as a consequence of the popularisation of internet and multimedia links.

11.30 – 13.00 project space
Gender and Genre in Film and TV Studies
	
INTRODUCTION
Gender and genre share a tradition: Since the 1970s, feminist film studies have dealt with questions of genre specific gender constructions whereas genre theories constantly point to the central role of gender within genre. During the last few years, however, attempts to combine the categories of gender and genre in analyses have increasingly come under criticism for their essentialist tendencies. While the analysis of genre formulas produced gender constructs, which became so rigid that alternative textual practices could no longer be focused on, text-based genre definitions furthered an ahistorical, universal understanding of the cinematic sign system. Based on these theoretical observations, this section of the conference will, first, raise metatheoretical and methodological questions for collaborative analysis of gender and genre and, second, offer insight into the state-of-the-art in gender/genre studies.
Two scholars, equally involved in the advancement of the gender/genre discussion, Irmela Schneider and Christine Gledhill, have agreed to offer the keynote lectures. With her early work on the melodrama, Gledhill is one of the founding figures of feminist genre analysis; her more recent work on the soap within the framework of Cultural Studies, identifies her as an interdisciplinary, cross-media thinker. With her article “Gender und Genre” (2001), Irmela Schneider has published a text, which not only undertook a profound criticism of traditional gender and genre approaches, but also proposed an empirically oriented approach to the two categories.
Susanne Rieser approaches the question of the construction of identity as a “special effect” from the perspective of the iconography of the action film, Henrike Hoelzer focuses on action film sequels using the example of the Terminator films, and Katrin Oltmann studies the relationship between the musical and the action film in three adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Beyond the focus on the action film, Verena Kuni’s talk will deal critically with genres’ cinematic methods and will speak from the perspective of artistic interventions. 

Lectures in English - Chair: Andrea B. Braidt (Wien, Köln)

Christine Gledhill (Staffordshire): Rethinking Gender/Genre Relations in the Postmodern Era
Drawing on arguments begun in my ‘Women Reading Men’ and ‘Rethinking Genre’ this presentation will explore the implications for feminism of genre cinema’s use of gendered bodies and identities for the pleasures of aural-visual fiction. This will involve considering the relation between generic production and the inter-related modes of realism and melodrama and the place of entertainment, fiction and fantasy in the discursive circulation of social and political ideas. In attempting to construct a framework from which to develop feminist critique of generic production I will be drawing on Bakhtinian notions of cultural dialogism and Steve Neale’s concepts of cultural and generic verisimilitude. In the process I will consider the impact on feminist film theory of the shift from modernist to postmodern conceptions of aesthetic and cultural production.

Irmela Schneider (Köln): No Independent Pair: Genre and Gender Theories
The talk comprises three parts: following a number of etymological references to genre and gender, the first part will offer a historical sketch on genre theories, to the extent that they are relevant to the question of the relationship of genre and gender. This sketch will show the functions of gender concepts immanent to historical genre theories. The second part will focus on a discussion of those positions that have reflected on the relationship of genre and gender since the 1980s, and have remained influential until the present day. For example, John Fiske’s differentiation between masculine and feminine genres will be discussed. The third part will introduce the concept of deferred action (constitutive posteriority), which since Freud and Lacan has in no way been limited to psychoanalytical theories, but rather, for example, has become just as relevant in the relationship between social structures and semantics. The original consideration postulates that through a concept of deferred action, the relations between media, genre, and gender can be more precisely determined.

13.00 – 15.00 Pause

15.00 – 17.00 project space
Panel 3: Discursive and imaginary Spaces:  TV's Elsewheres and Nowheres

Papers in English - Chair: Sabine Prokop (Wien)

Susanne Lummerding (Wien): Wasteland TV?
In light of feminist media studies’ waning interest in the media, genre, and dispositif of “television” over the past ten years, the question arises of the foundations of these apparent doldrums, and also whether and to what extent it might be interesting to counteract the ambivalently phrased “wasteland” implied in the title.
Assuming that television, like any other media, cannot be considered in isolation, but instead, must be seen in the context of and interaction with other media, in “media constellations,” I would like to take up the issue of the construction of a “common virtual space” as the starting point for my considerations.
The claim of a television-based production of such a “virtual space,” a claim that essentially characterizes the history of television, has been confronted with a similar claim – since the mid-1990s at the latest – mainly from Internet, in terms of the idea of a “cyberspace.” What is now interesting is not only the relevance for the respective media (or genres or dispositifs) in the sense of major transformations, but mainly, which functions related to the creation of “reality” will be up for debate?
Feminist film and media theory approaches, which are supported by a psychoanalytical and hegemonic theoretical apparatus, among others, offer enormous potential in this area, to the extent that they, and the phantasmal wasteland of television, prove compatible.

Jyoti Mistry (Johannesburg): Feminism in new popular South African Television
In recent years the media has covered the alarming rates of rape and violence against women in South Africa. While the legal system offers an extremely progressive and forward thinking constitution which protects women’s rights, patriarchal hegemony infused with traditional African conceptions of women propose an urgent challenge for re-imaging the place and space of women in both the realm of the private and the public. 
In this paper and presentation, I offer an analysis with exemplification of the discursive relationship between the conventions of television genre, with particular emphasis on soap operas and drama series, and its polemic and radial reinterpretation in locally produced South African content. My critical reading offers a departure from western socio-political conventions of television to show how a new form of feminism is emerging in popular South African television which is a direct response to the violence against women in South African society. More importantly, these popular forms relocate the agency of women within a new political order which is not simply a response to Western and/or African patriarchy but derives from African notions of women’s agency coupled by a space of equity imagined in this new democracy. Some of the television shows that will be addressed are: Gazlam (South Africa), Bad Girls (British), Generations (South Africa). 

Mari Pajala (Turku): The Eurovision Song Contest and the map of Europe: boundaries, 
          hierarchies and unruly peripheries
Television, as the "private life of the nation state" (Ellis 1982), has been important in constructing the imagined community (Anderson 1983) of the nation. At the same time, it has been construed as a window to the world, a medium that opens up the horizons to areas outside the viewers own experience. In this paper, I look at one programme, The Eurovision Song Contest (1956-), that has on the one hand been based on a strong national identification, and on the other hand has attempted to promote an idea of a European community. What kinds of boundaries and exclusions are these identifications based on? I situate my analysis in the Finnish context and my material consists of TV programmes and press and Internet coverage of the contest.
In my analysis, I apply Judith Butler's (1990, 1993) ideas about the performative construction of gender to the study of nationality. The repetition or citing of norms is central in Bulter's theory of performativity. The unusual longevity of the ESC makes it possible to analyse the construction of nationality and Europe over a period of several decades, paying attention to the process of repetition over time. From the point of view of feminist media studies, it is especially important to pay attention to exclusions and boundaries in the construction of national identity and Europe. I analyse for example the somewhat problematic position of new Eastern European countries, immigrants and non-heteronormative people in the traditionally Western European, nation based and heteronormative map of Eurovision.

15.00 – 17.00 project space
Panel 4:  Gender and Genre in Film and TV Studies

Papers in German - Chair: Ines Steiner (Köln)

Henrike Hölzer (Berlin): The shadow of the mirror image. Action film sequels as uncanny doubles 
Genre films are characterized in that their plot structure, aesthetics, as well as the strategies with which they are marketed aim at a certain target group: the targeted audience is often defined according to gender. This is particularly true for the so-called body genres (Linda Williams) such as horror, melodrama, and porno films. Action films also belong in this category: they address primarily a male, heterosexual audience. 
In my talk, based on the examples of the films Terminator and Terminator II Judgment Day, I will show the extent to which these action films themselves are subjected to such essentializing categorization. I am particularly interested in the fact that they are sequels that play with the figure of repetition. This refers to both the plots of the films as well as their visual and auditory staging. “Repetition,” a concept from psychoanalytical theory, will serve as my methodological guideline. Although they seem to have fallen out of fashion in current film studies, psychoanalytical theories have the potential to confront essentialist elements. 
It seems useful to maintain the idea of subject constitution in the cinema (Christian Metz), although in doing so I would like to avoid both referring to the Lacanian mirror stage and invoking a comparison of film reception and dream. Instead, the concept of “repetition” will be at the center of my considerations. For the constitution of the viewing subject, “repetition” has a different significance in terms of the individual concepts of the triad: trauma, fantasy, and memory. “Gender” remains, as before, an identity-constituting category, however it becomes clear that, although influential, it is neither prescribed nor can it be freely chosen. My analysis will show that the supposedly one-dimensional hero or heroine stories are assigned a substructure. Although this substructure does not fundamentally question the dominant myths, it nonetheless adds a dark shadow to the viewers’ shining mirror image.

Verena Kuni (Frankfurt): Gender is a Genre is a Genre? Cut Up! An attempt using the method of cutting
 through a Gordian knot 
In the feature film, gender and genre are tightly woven. It thus appears quite obvious to attempt a sound critique of the reproduction of gender stereotypes in film by considering the genre-specific characteristics. This is also confirmed by a series of feminist investigations undertaken in the past several decades on the classical film genres such as the horror and sci-fi film, the western, road movie, thriller, comedy, and artist’s biography. Nonetheless, a critical analysis that succeeds in working out the continuity of stereotypical gender coding, including its genre specific and historical variations as a characteristic trait of the respective genres, carries the danger of once again inscribing these stereotypes in genre and film history and theory and thereby once again, like it or not, contributing to their essentialization. Nonetheless, mechanics and motorics of this vicious circle, as can once again be shown mainly by feminists, are most tightly linked with the institutions of theory, science, and historiography in traditions of which, gender and genre are, for their part, complexly woven together. How then, can a feminist critique, also striving to claim its position within these cultural institutions, succeed in avoiding the traps that this densely woven field notoriously contains and consistently resets “as the rules of the art dictate”?
Is it possible that precisely laid “tricks” – or, more exactly – artistic techniques, which have already proven effective as methods of critical strategies in film and art history, can contribute to cutting through this Gordian knot? I would like to pursue this question based on the examples of works in which artists confront the connection of gender and genre in feature and TV films.

Katrin Oltmann (Köln): (Genre-) strolls with Romeo: Musical goes Action
Beginning with Steve Neale’s pronouncement that genre conventions are “always in play rather than being simply re-played,” thus beginning with a transitory, or more precisely, a performative concept of genre that takes into account each film’s way of “doing genre,” the talk will explore a reading of the gender-genre implications in the Romeo and Juliet films, WEST SIDE STORY (USA 1961), ROMEO+JULIET (USA 1996), and ROMEO MUST DIE (USA 2000). My starting thesis states that all three films carry out a game with genre conventions – go on a “genre stroll” – which functions like a paper chase based on the principle of “leaving tracks.”
Baz Luhrmann’s ROMEO+JULIET, categorized as action/romantic drama and also ROMEO MUST DIE, advertised as a martial arts film, as I will show, function as musicals based on the genre of their predecessor, WEST SIDE STORY. They thus function according to the guidelines of a genre with an extremely hybrid structure, which is already evident in its origins: influenced by the European operetta, American wild west shows, vaudeville, and music hall, it derives from traditions that refused every attempt at one-dimensional integration and systematization. For good reason, the musical is considered “the only genre in which the male body has been unashamedly put on display in mainstream cinema in any consistent way” (Neale). These clues are also expressed in the action and spectacle elements of the two later productions. Not only can the ubiquitous showstoppers of the musical genre be found – the elaborately choreographed battle scene in ROMEO MUST DIE is staged as a “number” – but also film editing and camera techniques are oriented on the conventions of the genre: the rapid succession of close-ups of black shoe-clad moving feet in the opening sequence of ROMEO+JULIET for example, refers to the iconography of the musical. The films carry out transformations, become action-film musical dramas or musical-action films, just as the musical WEST SIDE STORY, which likewise bears elements of the battle and action films, is a “musical drama with action elements.” 
The talk will focus on the gender-genre dynamics of the films: what transpositions of gender-representation are provoked by the genre transformation: what gender shifts in the constellation of figures, the setting, the plot, etc., have affects on the constitution of each genre? 

Susanne Rieser (Wien): Gender & Genre: ConFusions 
 “Gender & Genre: ConFusions” deals with issues of identity construction as discursive effects of cinematographic technologies, in particular with the gender politics of the violent visuality in action film iconography. Gender as a “special effect” of the spectacular overdose comes into action when the dynamized object world of a breath-taking and ear-splitting cinema begins to live a life of its own: When hyperkinetic and supersonic wall-to-wall-violence starts forcing a bloody “confetti screenstorm deconstructing image/content into technonihilism” (Murphy) onto the cognitive and perceptive faculty of the audience. The violent visuals of the “all-night-blood-and-bullet-raves,” fusing one image into another with blinding speed and razor-sharp editing, are conFusing traditional notions of the distribution of authority between the seer and the seen. The conFusion of qualities associated with gender and genre may disclose new grounds for visual agency. 

19.00 Österreichisches Filmmuseum
IMAGE PLEASURE – Program 3
For You  Linda Christanell, A 1984, 16mm (s8-Blow up), 8 min., Farbe, stumm
Die blaue Distanz  Elfi Mikesch, BRD 1983, 16mm, 25 min., s/w
Mann & Frau & Animal  Valie Export, A 1970-73, 16mm, 10 min., Farbe
Johnny oder das rohe Fleisch  Eva Heldmann, BRD 1984, 16mm, 4 min., Farbe
Die Urszene  Christine Noll Brinckmann, BRD 1987, 16mm, 6 min., s/w & Farbe
Kugelkopf  Mara Mattuschka, A 1985, 16mm, 6 min., s/w
Gezacktes Rinnsal schleicht sich schamlos schenkelnässend an  
Hans A. Scheirl & Ursula Pürrer, A 1985, 16mm (S8-Blow up), 4 min., Farbe
First Comes Love  Su Friedrich, USA 1991, 16mm, 22 min., s/w

ab 21.30 Ra’Mien Bar
Club
SCREENWISE goes Homoriental
CJ Yasemin features Oriental Dancefloor
Gumpendorferstr. 9, 1060 Wien

Sunday, 18. Mai 2003

12.00 –15.00  project space
Workshop II (in English if required)
Johanna Schaffer & Marcella Stecher (Wien): Strong Upper Arms? Shiftable Promises? Radical sexual politics: Alternative concepts of the body and desire in lesbian, queer film/Video images of S/M
Within feminist debate, lesbian S/M fantasies have outlined – for over twenty-five years – a controversial terrain between political incorrectness and a politics of visibility begging for respect. In any case, they have opened a necessary forum for the discussion of sexuality, power, representation, and fantasy. 
Genealogically, this workshop arose from our shared confrontation with representations of lesbian and queer sexuality. Our interest in film and video images has meanwhile turned to works whose themes, practices, and codes refer to the subcultures of experimental sexualities. 
We move beyond the girl-meets-girl pattern to seek out queer, lesbian representations of sex that pursue ways of situating a self (also in relation to others) as a sexual subject, beyond the myth of love and couple compulsion, beyond emotional and psycho dramas, and beyond a feminist norm that prohibits using others and allowing oneself to be used. Thus, we are seeking representations of sex where people take positions that make themselves objects, or objectify others with their consent. Our main focus is on S/M as a communal practice for producing sexual fantasies based on explicit and consensual construction and negotiation of rules, which by doing so, provide the initial enabling framework for this practice. That which fascinates us about S/M is the possibility, often negotiated, of a libidinal zoning of the body beyond genitality and the heterosexual matrix.
With this workshop, we want to promote a common dialogue on how certain images evoke and support possible alternatives for self-empowerment with reference to sexual behavior. What are the codes, rhythms, drives, representations of practices and bodies that these film and video images employ when inviting viewers to share their fantasies? When do we, the individuals, take up these offers? What role does the depiction of pain play in these images? What is the role of references to rules and codes of sexually experimental subcultures and communities? 
For the context of the workshop, we assume a readiness to reconstruct the effects of a historical feminist debate along one of its most productive points: the differentiation between representation, action, and fantasy – while acknowledging the interwovenness of these realms of reality. We understand fantasy as a unique realm of reality that does not denote an object of desire, but rather, functions as its setting. 
We ask that you bring a basic interest in these cinematically produced fantasies, as well as the willingness to be challenged by images that touch upon one’s own borders of reasonability. We hope for an inquisitive desire to watch and attentive/respectful desire to discuss, which, however, does not imply that everyone will share the fantasies screened or that they will be accessible for all. 

12.00 –15.00  project space
Workshop III (in English if required)
Eva Heldmann (Frankfurt) & Katja Wiederspahn (Wien): Nomads of Pleasure. Feminist film work in the 21. century – Avant-garde without a public?
Taking Eva Heldmann’s documentary film fremd gehen. Gespräche mit meiner Freundin as a starting point, we will toss out several provocative questions pertaining to the relationship of feminist film theory and practice: Should we consider the project of a feminist “counter cinema,” which has been followed with a feminist verve since the 1970s, a failure? How do today’s feminist filmmakers position themselves in relation to an increasingly institutionalized feminist film theory? Has the development of a feminist theory discussion contributed to the “formation” of a self-confident feminist audience? Where does today’s feminist avant-garde locate itself? 
In the context of these questions, the term “nomadizing” describes a movement of thought: it refers to fantasies of breaking out, liberation from chains, searching, promiscuity, wandering, crossing borders – thus, utopian, lustful moments of our own feminist projects. At the same time it also refers to a situation in feminist film and cinema in general, which, in contrast to feminist theory construction of the last decades, seems to refrain from an academic institutionalization/canonization and instead, wanders in the most varied public spaces. 

15.00 – 15.30 break

15.30 – 17.00 project space
Final Discussion (in German): ScreenVISIONS: Results and Perspectives
Chair: Ruth Noack (Wien)

19.00 Österreichisches Filmmuseum
IMAGE PLEASURE – Program 4
Les mains negatives  Marguerite Duras, F 1979, 35mm, 16 min., Farbe, OF
Je, tu, il, elles  Chantal Akerman, B 1974, 35 mm, 90 min., s/w, OmdU

21.00 Österreichisches Filmmuseum
IMAGE PLEASURE – Program 5
Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan [Ai Nu]
Chu Yuan, HK 1972, 35mm, 90 min., Farbe, OmeU