Hiking to/in Scotland
Corinne Oster and Dale
Hudson
This past January, we decided to submit a panel proposal,
with our friend and colleague from the French and Italian
Studies Department, Géraldine Vatan, for the 12th annual
Screen Studies conference in Glasgow, Scotland. While the
prospect of presenting our work to well-respected scholars at
this prestigious conference was appealing, we did not fathom—not
for one second—that we would have to hike gargantuan hills,
subsist on greasy chips, and endure a never-ending winter—all
in June! "What a waste of a beautiful month,"
some might say, but Glasgow is a beautiful city and the
conference was well worth the interruption to our
"summer holiday."
University of
Glasgow
The
University of Glasgow,
hosted the conference with the film journal Screen,
and is located on the outskirts of town, but it is easily
reachable from downtown, provided that it does not rain. The
conference was held in the Gilmorehill Centre, which is
actually an old chapel that has been renovated into a center
for the arts, complete with screening room and offices
located in the alcoves of the chapel. There, in that very
building, we presented our panel, "Remapping National
and Cinematic Identities: Ethnicity, Regionalism, and
Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary French Cinema," in which
we explored questions of ethnicity, regionalism, and
cosmopolitanism in the context of French cultural identity,
particularly as it is constructed in French
"national" cinema. We were pleased with the
positive responses to our panel, especially as we were among
the few graduate students who presented papers. After our
panel we hiked back to our modest (cheap?) lodgings in a
youth hostel that surmounted one of the higher hills of
Glasgow, stopping along the way for a quick pint at a local
pub, and to catch up with the results of the World Cup. Many
of the other presenters stayed at a swanky downtown hotel
(well, really a residence hall, but they had showers with
sufficient water pressures), thereby missing out on the fresh
air and vigorous exercise of a twice-daily mountain hike.
The
scope of the conference reflects Screen’s commitment
to various critical and methodological approaches to the
study of cinema, as evident in its publication of important
essays, such as Laura Mulvey’s "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema" (1975), Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s
"Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An
Introduction" (1983), Manthia Diawara’s "Black
Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and
Resistance" (1988), Richard Dyer’s "White"
(1988), and Andrew Higson’s "The Concept of National
Cinema" (1989), among others. We attended some excellent
panels and heard papers by Laura Mulvey, Phil Powrie, and
Elizabeth Cowie. Corinne was very impressed with Lynn Spigel’s
work on US television archives, and Dale was equally
impressed with the "Spectators of Colour" panel by
a group of recent Ph.D.s from California. We also got some
time to enjoy the city on our last day: Macintosh’s
architecture, the Tenement House museum, the botanical
gardens, and a few cheap bars and techno clubs. A word to the
wise… the concept of cocktails for a mere 70p is indeed
exciting, but the reality of enjoying these cocktails amidst
a bunch of drooling and sometimes groping drunks, who have
spent at least £7 on vodka-infused energy drinks, is less
enjoyable.
