Wednesday 3 December 2014 – Lunchtime Seminar with Dr Chi-Yun Shin (Stage & Screen, SHU)

Title: Pigeons, Rooftops and Heterotopia in ‘On the Waterfront’ and ‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’
Speaker: Dr Chi-Yun Shin (Stage & Screen, SHU)

Dr Chi-Yun Shin is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. Her articles on East Asian cinema and Black British Diaspora films have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and her recent contributions include Jump Cut, Horror to the Extreme, Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain, Transnational Cinemas, Korean Horror Cinema and Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. She is co-editor of New Korean Cinema, and her new anthology, co-edited with Mark Gallagher, East Asian Film Noir (I.B.Tauris) is due to be published early next year.

Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront and Jim Jarmusch’s 1999 film Ghost Dog share a curious little setting of rooftop pigeon coops. For the protagonists in both films – dockworker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) and a contract killer Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), caring for the pigeons on the rooftop space provides ‘another’ world far away from what they do for a living. Yet, what they do down below has a devastating impact upon the rooftop coops. In the sense that the rooftop space ‘reflects and contests simultaneously’ in these films, this paper argues that it constitutes the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia and explores the multifaceted features of the rooftop space in these films.

1.00PM – 2.00PM
WEDNESDAY 03 DECEMBER 2014
CANTOR 9020a

All SHU staff and students are welcome to attend the C3RI Lunchtime Research Seminars. If you are from outside of the University and would like to attend a seminar, please email CCRC Administrator, Rachel Finch (R [dot] Finch [at] shu [dot] ac [dot] uk) to arrange for entry.