AGE-C at NECS 2024
The AGE-C project will be presented at NECS conference on Saturday, 29th of June, 2-3:45 pm, at the Izmir University of Economics
The workshop is entitled H1: Cinema’s Migrations Across a Greying Continent: Ageing and Gender in the face of Europe’s (and European Cinema’s) Demographic Emergency and will be chaired by professor of cinema studies and the project leader of AGE-C Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger. Dr. Tony Tracy, Lecturer in Film and Media Studies and Acting Director and co-founder of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media, NUI Galway will assume the role of respondent. PhD candidate Boglárka Farkas, Dr. Luis Freijo, Dr. Asja Makarević and Dr. Alexandre Moussa will be participants in the workshop.
The workshop will address the challenges of studying aging and gender in the face of Europe’s (and cinema’s) demographic emergency. How exactly do filmmakers and producers respond to demographic change? How do their films change the visibility of ageing Europeans and, as a consequence, shape perceptions of old age in society? And finally, how does the increasing visibility of ageing protagonists affect the well-being of ageing audiences?
The workshop will engage with these challenges by drawing on the research in progress arising from the VW Foundation project AGE-C: Ageing and Gender in European Cinema (www.age-c.eu). The participants will discuss data-gathering in a transnational, European context and address various points of intersection between cultural gerontology, gender and film studies, particularly through a focus on stardom and performance, genre and representation in relation to European film cultures.
Asja Makarević, representing the German unit of AGE-C, will situate the project by providing an overview of theoretical concepts utilized through the group`s reading sessions, paper presentations, blog posts and the build-up of the dataset. She will engage with the notion of ageing defined in biological terms and as a social construct. The concepts like “chronological”, “biological”, “functional age” as proposed by Kate de Medeiors will provide a necessary point of departure for this intervention. The theoretical framework will be expanded with the notion of “narrative of decline” as problematised by Margaret Gullette, its counter concept of “successful ageing” by John Rowe and Robert Louis Kahn, and by the possible alternatives to these dominant poles of thinking about the old age. Relatable concepts such as “feminist ageing” by Kathleen Woodward and “ageing masculinity” as thematized, among others, by our respondant Tony Tracy will prove useful not only as analytical tools for close reading of films but also as operational and navigational tools within the AGE-C dataset.
Alexandre Moussa, representing the French unit of AGE-C, will introduce the dataset: he will first explain how our preliminary work building the corpus for the project led us to look for a solution allowing us to blend qualitative and quantitative analysis, gathering tangible data about ageing stars and depictions of the elder onscreen while identifying clusters of films for closer analysis. He will later explain the design of the dataset and the questions it should allow us to answer, relying on a sample of two years of data.
In her intervention, Boglárka Angéla Farkas, representing the Romanian unit of AGE-C, will elaborate on the dataset’s tag system, how and why it was conceived through a twofold practice – based on film viewing and a literature review concerning gerontology – furthermore, what are the future purposes and current challenges of such a system. Toward the end of her presentation, she will also offer some provisional results of the tag system (derived from the findings between 2021 and 2022), exploring the possible transnational aspects of these European cinemas regarding the representation of age and gender.
In the final intervention on the workshop, Luis Freijo, representing the UK unit, will be explaining the approach to film genre that has been undertaken in the database. First, the construction of the dataset and the codebook, and the elaboration of the list of genres will be explained. Then, the theory that underpins how film genre is being articulated in the project will be developed, with especial attention to the works of Jacques Derrida and Celestino Deleyto on genre theory, and the specific methodology utilised by project members for the analysis will be reviewed. Finally, an example of the kind of questions that will be established through these generic analysis will be given, which will also reflect preliminary findings from the data gathered.
Written by: Dr. Asja Makarević
Image credit: official poster ©NECS, 2023
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