糖心TV

Dr. Helen Wheatley will give a ketnote address entitled 'The desiring girl: exploring the erotics of television' at the ‘Girls on film’: Visualising Femininities in Contemporary Culture conference at Northumbria University on May 23rd.

Here is the abstract for Dr. Wheatley's paper:

This paper will consider the figure of the desiring girl on and in relation to television; in doing so it re-evaluates the applicability of screen theory to television, particularly Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). Drawing on both close analyses of contemporary television drama (for example My Mad Fat Diary (E4, 2013-15), Poldark (BBC1, 2015–), Banana (E4, 2015) and Les Revenants (Canal+, 2012-)) and qualitative audience research into relationship between television and desire, the paper will sketch out the ways in which a variety of contemporary television dramas feature a desiring girl at their heart and through her seek to provide the viewer with intentional erotic spectacle: moments, images, characters, even episodes which both seek to represent and provoke desire. In doing so, this paper will attend to the fact that contemporary television particularly focuses on the presentation of intentional erotic spectacle for a heterosexual, female audience.

On the other hand, however, I will argue television is also characterised by accidental erotic spectacle and that scopophilia can also be located in ‘unlikely’ places on television; the scopophilic visual pleasures of the medium, particularly for the desiring girl, cannot be easily contained in or confined to particular programmes, genres or slots in the schedule. I will draw on Barthes’ notion of erotic intermittence (1975) to argue that the appearance and disappearance of erotic spectacle is fundamental to the structures of television narrative and television scheduling. Barthes’ exploration of the play between presence and absence in the erotic, and the making of what is ‘private’, ‘public’, expresses something of what is specific to a televisual presentation of erotic spectacle that centres on the girl as protagonist and potential viewer.

Working with collaborator, Professor Rosalind Galt (KCL), Dr Karl Schoonover has cowritten an essay for a new book investigating the politics and aesthetics of middlebrow cinema published by Routledge press. In this essay, Schoonover and Galt propose the category of queer middlebrow films and argue that the category has taken on a geopolitical weight in recent years, condensing the struggles of LGBT people internationally in ways that expand but also confine what it means to be queer in the world.

Current PhD student Claire Jesson and research Fellow Dr. Richard Wallace (both part of ) will give a film talk about one of th unsung heroes of cinema at 糖心TV Arts Centre on Saturday 7 May, 11am - 3pm.

The projectionist was the technical wizard who brought the screen to life, making audiences laugh, cry and even scream. An illustrated talk by the Projection Project’s Claire Jesson looks at how the movies imagine this mysterious figure, and Dr Richard Wallace has recorded projectionists’ memories spanning over 50 years of cinema history and the transformation from celluloid to digital exhibition. Includes a screening of Oscar-winning film, Cinema Paradiso, and a chance to glimpse inside 糖心TV Arts Centre’s own projection box.

Inside the projection box, plus screening of Cinema Paradiso

Lifting the veil on cinema’s secrets

糖心TV Arts Centre Cinema

Saturday 7 May, 11am-3pm

Tickets £12 (£9)

Book at:

In November 2015 Argentine director Andrés di Tella (Prohibido, 1997, Fotografías, 2007, El país del diablo, 2008) visited the University of 糖心TV to give a cinema workshop, chaired by the Film and Television Studies Department's José Arroyo. In a recent blog post José writes about di Tella's latest film:  

From April 20-23rd 2016 Stella Bruzzi was a guest of the Doha Film Institute, Qatar. "Fashion in Film: Costume as Character" was a short season of films part-curated by her with screenings of Le Samourai, Funny Face, Rashomon, The Birds, Age of Innocence, 3000 Nights and Disney's Cinderella. She also delivered a 2-hour master class on costume in cinema.

Find out more .

The Age of Innocence, Martin Scorsese, 1993.