AGE-C presents its dataset on ageing and European cinema at NECS conference in Izmir
The 17th annual conference of NECS, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies, took place from the from the 25th to the 29th June 2024 in Izmir, organised by the Faculty of Communication within the Izmir University of Economics. The conference featured 91 panel presentations and workshops, featuring over 300 film and media researchers, on different scholarly interests around the main topic of Emergencies, and four keynote sessions. Melis Behlil, from Kadir Has University, presented on the topic of spectatorship and Cinematic Virtual Reality. Joanna Zylinska, from King’s College London, focused her keynote speech on the use of algorithms to study audiences. William Uricchio and Katerina Cizek discussed co-creation, collaborative research work and the use AI, and finally Deniz Göktürk closed the conference with a keynote session on ecocinema, installations and frame adjustments in times of extinction.
AGE-C sent a delegation which comprised most of its members, with Professor Vinzenz Hediger, Dr Belén Vidal and Dr Andrea Virginás in different chairing and presenting duties, and with Dr Asja Makarevic, Dr Alexandre Moussa, Boglárka Farkas and Dr Luis Freijo in charge of elaborating a workshop around the different methodological challenges that the project has faced since its beginning in February 2023. Specifically, the AGE-C delegation realised four interconnected presentations in the afternoon session on Saturday 29th which revolved around the elaboration of the database that has become the centre of the project in the last year. After a presentation of the project from Professor Hediger, Dr Makarevic started the workshop offering a theoretical framework within cultural gerontology and film studies that has provided the general guidelines of the work. Dr Moussa continued with a detailed overview of the different iterations that the dataset has experienced, to then explain how the organisation and collection of the data is being articulated in its current form. Ms Farkas offered then an explanation of the tagging system upon which the database rests, which will enable the project to reach a balance between quantitative and qualitative studies and methodologies. Dr Freijo concluded the workshop detailing how the approach to analysing film genre within the dataset has been built, and which kind of questions in relation to film studies methods can be answered by the dataset.
The workshop was widely attended by a full room of media scholars from different parts of Europe, who received the work on the dataset enthusiastically and offered questions, support and suggestions. Among the feedback that was given by the attendees, questions revolved around the potential use of the database to study audiences, especially ageing audiences, and to understand how ageing filmmakers might be making films about ageing; the different directions that the tagging system could take, and the arising trends in relation to ageing and cinema that the researchers of the project could envision; the role of production companies, distribution companies and exhibitors in illuminating some of the issues related to the business aspect of ageing and cinema; and the possibility for ageing cinema to become a genre in itself.
The conference was extremely useful and rewarding for AGE-C, because it enabled the team to reflect on their process and because the scholarly community was supportive and offered positive reactions to the project’s work so far. With this support in mind, AGE-C will continue to complete its dataset and move on to the data analysis that will be enabled by it.
Written by: Dr. Luis Freijo