viva questions

Question 1

What are the most recent major developments in your area?

Answer 1

Alive field of research: Maggie Hennefeld

Question 2

What were the crucial research decisions you made?

Answer 2

1) Archive/ primary resources: open ended approach. to closely view and review a plethora of early films rather than departing from a film historic texts (view see afresh)/ Holden
2) letting practice lead even if crisis of written project question: adjustments in process e.g.. understanding that making objects and feminist debates are not mutually exclusive but entangled

Question 3

What are the most recent major developments in your area?

Answer 3

alive x3
1) in terms of new films being uncovered and shown for the first time to audiences in il cinema ritrovato or pordenone which need to be contextualised and understood

2) show the gaps in the research fabric sites like the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) at Columbia University by listing names and countries
3) Digitisation
4) audience, there is an interest as women are looking increasingly at taking up positions in power also in the film industry

Question 4

How did your research questions emerge?

Answer 4

journey through slapstick led by practice, short performances interventions in public, performing myself, increasing interest in objects which brought about a shift in writing also.
painful tension I thought I had to make a decision between either dealing with human body or with inanimate objects

Question 5

What are the strongest/weakest parts of your work?

Answer 5

strength are also its weaknesses:
comprehensiveness, could have focussed one or two female comediennes - greater film historical contribution

given the material rather than argument and theory more space/ added more examples over working a theoretical position into the text, ultimately the images that drive the practice.

Question 6

What are the strongest/weakest parts of your work?

Answer 6

strength are also its weaknesses:

comprehensiveness, could have focussed one or two female comediennes - (detective appeal) greater film historical contribution (future funding gaiety girls)

given the material rather than argument and theory more space/ added more examples over working a theoretical position into the text, ultimately the images that drive the practice.

Question 7

What would have improved your work?

Answer 7

more time and funding in archives (torn practice)

Question 8

And, finally… What have you done that merits a PhD?

Answer 8

new body work

contribution to knowledge

Question 9

You propose future research. How would you start this?

What would be the difficulties?

Answer 9

eye, moore, strand, depending on geolocation gaiety girls or european comediennes

Question 10

What advice would you give to a research student entering this area?

Answer 10

funding, time plan

Question 11

What have you learned from the process of doing your Ph

Answer 11

apart from the new knowledge in film history and theory the main takeaway perhaps is that not only the future is mobile but also history is moving construct in which the dominant or surviving discourses rarely the only ones worth remembering

I have generated a new processes of working and interlacing theory with practice:
inviting other voices, creating lists and taxonomies as a strategy

to not be afraid to stake a claim, to position myself and feel confident in that position (not dogmatic manner)

Question 12

What are the contributions to knowledge of your thesis?

Answer 12

1) demonstrated how human subjects are decentered in slapstick film and challenge anthropocentric viewpoint. Boundaries between human bodies and inanimate matter are under constant attack and objects are shown as powerful agents that have the capacity and will kick back. Slapstick shows our bodies to be porous to be in an ecosystem with many powerful agents is relevant to a reassessment of our place in the world today from ecological point of view.
2) Furthermore I have given space to previously narratives of women and europeans in silent comedy. shown them to be a part of a continuum that not just american as if often claimed but a wider phenomenon.
3) I have created a new body of art work that works through these findings / unruly or extracting movement, etc.

Question 13

How do your findings relate to literature in your field?

Answer 13

there are various discourses this thesis draws on and engages with.
Feminist Film Historiography:
Further the work of Heide Schüppmann, Preschl, Hennefeld
Film comedy:
Think beyond the sight gag
operational aesthetics as proposed by gunning
Early film:
slapstick directly engages cinema of attractions by using attractions, Donald crafton’s Pie and Chase idea of narrative by thinking about how directionality is used in film
Feminism:
posits against refusal of laughter Mary Ann Doane
Philosophy:
endorses (Bataille) discourses on laughter

Question 14

How have you evaluated your work?

Answer 14

practice /written?
practice: might sound banal but I haven’t just made a body of new work I have exhibited it. Through continuous output in exhibitions and conversations and writings about the work (blogs, newspaper articles) I have created feedback loops
written:

Question 15

How has your view of your research topic changed?

Answer 15

see above

Question 16

How did you deal with the ethical implications of your work?

Answer 16

consolidate

Question 17

Now, can you summarise it in one sentence?

Answer 17

silent slapstick decanter human agency

Question 18

What is the idea that binds your thesis together?

Answer 18

the fluidity between objects and subjects / Enlightenment concept

Question 19

What are the main issues and debates in Posthumanism

Answer 19

xxxx

Question 20

What are the main issues and debates in OOO

Answer 20

In metaphysics, object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.[1] This is in contrast to what it calls the “anthropocentrism” of Kant’s Copernican Revolution, as accepted by most other current metaphysics, in which phenomenal objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition.[2] Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently (as Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects.[3] Thus, for object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another.[4]

Object-oriented ontology is often viewed as a subset of speculative realism, a contemporary school of thought that criticizes the post-Kantian reduction of philosophical enquiry to a correlation between thought and being, such that the reality of anything outside of this correlation is unknowable.[5] Object-oriented ontology predates speculative realism, however, and makes distinct claims about the nature and equality of object relations to which not all speculative realists agree. The term “object-oriented philosophy” was coined by Graham Harman, the movement’s founder, in his 1999 doctoral dissertation “Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects”.[6][7] In 2009, Levi Bryant rephrased Harman’s original designation as “object-oriented ontology”, giving the movement its current name.

Question 21

Why did you use this research methodology? What did you gain from it?
What were the alternatives to this methodology?

Answer 21

xxxx

Question 22

What were the alternatives to this methodology?

Answer 22

attempting a quantitative study is out of question because of the amount of material missing.
Narrow field in depth study of only 5 films or comediennes

Question 23

commonwealth

Answer 23

• a political community founded for common good
  -independent state or community; especially a democratic republic.
  a state in which supreme power is vested in the people - (here in all things

Question 24

republic

Answer 24

is a form of government in which the country is considered a “public matter”, not the private concern or property of the rulers.
The primary positions of power within a republic are not inherited. ( very much case in slapstick where power relations shift)
- separation of powers into branches ( a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary, which is the trias politica model

Question 25

how did you deal with ethical implications of project?

Answer 25

at first thought it was an anarchic type of comedy in which no-one comes out on top / increasingly challenged, justice based on ethical principles (Lea e il gmitolo the parents hit each other instead of lea or elsewhere her pervy boss gets soaked)

Question 26

allegory / allegorical practice

Answer 26

allegory is a metaphor in which a character, place or event is used to deliver a broader message about real-world issues and occurrences.

I want to ask how very complex ideas and concepts are illustrated in ways that are comprehensible or striking

What inherent (hidden) moral or political meaning do some of the elements used in the films have?

Question 27

metonymy

Answer 27

is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept.

Both metonymy and metaphor involve the substitution of one term for another.

based on contiguity / an understood association with

Question 28

diffraction

Answer 28

Karen barad contrasts with reflection
practices of ‘reflexivity’, which are seen to be grounded in a representational paradigm and the epistemological aspects of research

Diffractively reading the insights of feminist and queer theory and science studies approaches through one another entails thinking the “social” and the “scientific” together in an illuminating way. What often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all. Like the diffraction patterns illuminating the indefinite nature of boundaries—displaying shadows in “light” regions and bright spots in “dark” regions—the relation of the social and the scientific is a relation of “exteriority within.”
This is not a static relationality but a doing—the en- actment of boundaries—that always entails constitutive exclusions and there- fore requisite questions of accountability.3

Question 29

intra-action

Answer 29

For Barad, phenomena or objects do not precede their interaction, rather, ‘objects’ emerge through particular intra-actions. (Thus, apparatuses, which produce phenomena, are not assemblages of humans and nonhumans (as in actor-network theory). Rather, they are the condition of possibility of ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, not merely as ideational concepts, but in their materiality. Apparatuses are ‘material-discursive’ in that they produce determinate meanings and material beings while simultaneously excluding the production of others.

Question 30

empirical

Answer 30

It is a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or experience.

based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.
“they provided considerable empirical evidence to support their argument”
synonyms: observed, seen, factual, actual, real, verifiable, first-hand; More

Question 31

ANT

Answer 31

Actor–network theory (ANT) is a theoretical and methodological approach to social theory where everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationship.[1] It posits that nothing exists outside those relationships. All the factors involved in a social situation are on the same level, and thus there are no external social forces beyond what and how the network participants interact at present. Thus, objects, ideas, processes, and any other relevant factors are seen as just as important in creating social situations as humans. ANT holds that social forces do not exist in themselves, and therefore cannot be used to explain social phenomena. Instead, strictly empirical analysis should be undertaken to “describe” rather than “explain” social activity.