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Reframing history: film, television and the historians

Reframing History: film, television and the historians
 

Reframing history: film, television and the historians

Day Conference
Queen’s Film Theatre

Queen’s University Belfast, 22 June 2012

  

Conference organisers: Professor Des Bell and
Dr Fearghal McGarry

We aim to provide an engaging forum to explore the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration between historians, film-makers and broadcasters concerned with the public communication of historical understanding in Ireland as we approach a ‘decade of  anniversaries’. In a divided society like Northern Ireland which has experienced long-term political conflict this ‘memorialization of history’ represents a distinctive challenge for historians, programme-makers and educationalists.


Film-makers regularly employ historians to advise on the accuracy of their work, while historians acknowledge the pedagogic value and communicational power of film and television. Indeed the evidence is that the general public increasingly get their historical information from broadcast and film sources. But is the historical film a populist form which necessarily involves the ‘dumbing down’ of academic history? On the other hand, can the inclusion of historical film – whether factual or fictive – within the television schedule and on cinema screens extend access to historical understanding to a broader range of people than the specialist texts of academic history? In what ways does the approach of film-makers to the narration of history differ from the orthodox writing of historians? This conference proceeds from the assumption that to maximise the potential of film to facilitate historical understanding we need to forge more effective partnerships between historians, media scholars, film-makers and broadcasters. The conference programme addresses the following:


- the public commemoration of history in Ireland and the role of filmed history in post-conflict reconciliation
- notions of authority, objectivity and balance in television history in Ireland
- the engagement of the documentary film with personal testimony, collective memory and communal myth
- the use of archive and found footage in historical documentaries and the differing ways historians and film makers approach this 'data' as both evidential and expressive source


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PROGRAMME

10.00-10.15    Registration and coffee
10.15-11.15    Plenary Address:


PAT LOUGHREY (Warden, Goldsmith College and former Head of Nations and Regions, BBC): Reframing history? Television and the historians

11.30 - 13.00    Session 1: A decade of anniversaries? Film-makers, historians and broadcasters commemorate the past

Chair: Professor Keith Jeffery, Queen’s University Belfast

* Susan Lovell, Commissioning Editor, BBC Northern Ireland
* Mícheál Ó Meallaigh MÍCHEAL Ó MEALLAIGH, Commissioning Editor, TG4
* Steve Carson, Head of Programming, RTÉ Television
* Angela Graham, Development Producer, ‘The Story of Wales’, BBC Cymru

13.00 – 14.00    Lunch, Bar QFT

14.00 – 15.30    SESSION 2: Documentary film as witness
Chair: Professor Farrell Corcoran, Dublin City University and former chair of RTÉ
* Rod Stoneman, Huston Film School, NUI Galway, author of ‘Chavez: the revolution will not be televised’: History and the documentary moment:   the politics of the record
* Cahal McLaughlin, University of Ulster, Director of Prisons Memory Archive: Memory, truth and reconciliation via documentary witness
* Joram ten Brink, Westminster University: Cine provocation and the filmic elicitation of unwanted memories in South East Asia

15.30 – 16.00    Tea/coffee

16.00 – 17.15    Session 3:  Historians, the visual archive and popular memory
Chair:   Dr Daniel Kowalsky, Queen’s University Belfast
* Michael Chanan, University of Roehampton: The archival image, between family memory, and public history: the case of The man who electrified Russia
* Ciara Chambers, University of Ulster: ‘Navigating the moving image archive in Ireland: paths and pitfalls’
* Des Bell and Fearghal McGarry, Director and historical consultant of ‘The Enigma of Frank Ryan’ (2012), Queen’s University Belfast: Saving Major Ryan: Frank Ryan, the historian’s verdict and the filmic challenge

17.45    Reception:  Bar QFT