Cardiff sciSCREEN

Dangerous Method - March 1st.

2012-01-30T06:59:00.000-08:00

The next Cardiff sciSCREEN will be on Thursday March 1st from 6pm at Chapter Arts Centre when we will be discussing themes brought up in the film Dangerous Method. This event will be sponsored by the Welsh Psychiatry Soicety (WPS). Information on speakers and themes will be posted shortly.

Risk and Take Shelter

2012-01-24T07:36:00.000-08:00

by Colin Young, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

This excellent film poses some important questions. For instance, is the young man experiencing paranoid delusions, or is he in tune with the premonitions of a forthcoming apocalyptic event? Those of us who appreciate science fiction films, will be aware how often that kind of question is posed.

To me, some fundamental questions are raised in the film:

What’s really going in the world?

What are the threats that we face?

How should we define these?

What should we do about them?

My focus – my perspective – is derived from being a qualified social worker, with over 30 years experience, and having researched risk-based practices in social work, specifically social workers working with vulnerable adults in health settings. Risk assessments are seen as an essential tool for social workers in this field, as in many other areas of social work, and also in many other organisations – the risk –based framework is an all pervasive mechanism of regulation and standard setting. In technical speak – threats are hazards, and the risk is the outcome of the hazard, - the impact should it occur - and the likelihood of it occurring. Risk –management is a cost effective way of managing uncertainty.

So what are the threats? Many writers on risk, e.g. Beck (1992) , talk about the risk society – that life is getting riskier, and that technologies that have been developed to solve life’s problems, for us to have a comfortable existence, carry with them many negative consequences (e.g. nuclear power, global warming due to carbon emissions, pesticides, obesity due to cheap processed food). Some of these threats one may seek to measure statistically – a calculation of risk, and respond accordingly. For example, - New Orleans by the Gulf of Mexico is in a main hurricane runway. The levees were built to withstand a category 3 hurricane – however, sooner or later it is likely that the strongest, a category 5 hurricane will hit – which is what happened with hurricane Katrina in 2005 (actually it passed by slightly, but it was near enough to overwhelm New Orleans’s defences). So statistical measures are useful, but have their limitations. We have recently heard a lot about exceptional weather events in this country – severe flooding, a very cold winter, and been told that these are something like “1 in 200 year” events, - that cannot be planned for – which I suppose is meant to imply that we will be safe for another 200 years from a repeat! But of course it does not work like that! It may come along next year! Providing defences against certain calamitous events costs a lot, and risk management is a way of managing those costs, by considering a statistical assessment of likelihood.

So we live in a very uncertain, unpredictable, and potentially hazardous world. So how should we respond? Statistical assessments are part of the picture, but there are also important social and psychological perspectives on the risks we face. There is a terrorist threat level in this country – which is considered to be severe? – certainly not low. Prime Minister Tony Blair, when the booklets informing us what to do in the event of a terrorist threat, were sent to all households, said words to the effect: “know where the booklet is, and forget about it”. Is that a rational and reasonable way to proceed? Carry on regardless? Should we modify our behaviour in some way. (One has recently become aware of the terrorist threat level here, with the news that during the Olympics more troops are going to be deployed than are currently in Afghanistan!) The link to my research and practice experience of social work here, is that in social work, we tend to encounter, or at least work through in our minds, worse case scenarios - both for planning to support people in very difficult circumstances, but also, it must be said, as back covering! There is a risk that one gets into a state of high alert. This may manifest itself in a number of ways – one of which is to be aware of the limitations of any formalised processes of assessing risk (i.e. the forms and protocols), and look beyond them – be intuitive, look for signs that others may miss. Many risk-based assessments are susceptible, to what Donald Rumsfeld, Defence Secretary in the US, in 2002, at the beginning of the IRAQ war, famously termed “unknown unknowns”. These are things that are happen outside the conceptual framework of the risk assessment. An intuitive sense is something that many professionals will describe, and indeed the late Donald Schon, a Harvard professor of some distinction, who researched many professions, noted similarities in the way that many professionals described trusting their “gut instincts” in problematic, complex situations (Schon 1983). Curtis, the husband in the film, conveys a sense of “high alert” – looking for, and reading intuitively “signs” that other people miss or discount. Interestingly, another dimension to the film, given brief reflection, is the young daughter in the film is Deaf (Deaf spelt with a capital D refers to Deaf Culture). Scenes are shown, where the parents are attending classes, learning sign language. Throughout the film, a strong connection is displayed between Curtis and his daughter, - an intuitive understanding.

So to return to the themes of the film, is someone experiencing apocalyptic visions, tuned in , having real premonitions, or are they experiencing mental illness? There is a fine line between the two I would suggest. I have talked about risk being a statistical thing – a measurement – another dimension is its social construction. Risk perception is also borne out of how people describe the world around them - A famous sociologist –Anthony Giddens (1991), Tony Blair’s guru – describes the importance of perception, when communicating ideas about risk. However, to rely on a consensus of views as a definitive description of what is going on, is problematic – what if most people are wrong? You could say about the banking crisis that there was a group delusion amongst the bankers, and those engaged in the financial system (note the very recent report by the Financial Services Authority into RBS) – few raised their voices, and fewer still did anything about trying to head off the impeding catastrophic collapse. (One can imagine a similar conversation to that in the film, amongst bankers before the crash – “is anyone else seeing this?” – “no stop being negative and depressing share prices! Everything's fine!”A number of people with 20/20 hindsight are now saying they knew – too late!) So the majority view may be a flawed one. In a house full of people, just because only one smells smoke, that does not mean that the house is not on fire! In such a situation, do you take the group view, or check out closely the minority one? Maybe that one person is just more tuned in.

So to conclude – lone voices need to be listened to, sympathetically and may be correct. The key player in the film – an everyman for our time, treads a fine line between alertness and mental illness. Mental illness can be socially constructed by others - e.g. Thomas Szasz (1974) - a writer in the 1970s in a famous book talked about mental illness being entirely socially constructed. We live in a very uncertain world, creating challenges to keep thinking outside the box (thinking reflexively, sociologists call it!). To summarise the risk perspectives, Donald Rumsfeld, when Secretary of State for Defence during the Iraq war came up with the schema:

“Known knowns – things we can agree we know

Known unknowns – things we can agree we don’t know

Unknown unknowns – things we don’t know we don’t know”, and it is these unknown unknowns that to me the film seeks to explore. In some societies – visionaries, prophets, mystics, witch doctors, are seen to have special qualities, gifts, as they tap the unknown unknowns, and we should be cautious about dismissing these perceptions.

This clever film raises many issues and does not fully resolve the question of whether Curtis was experiencing paranoid delusions, or witnessing the forthcoming apocalypse. We are left to make up own conclusions.

Watching the film was a very thought-provoking experience, and very relevant to many of life’s modern day dilemmas!

Dr. Colin Young, Lecturer in Social Work Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences. January 2012.

Take Shelter: Inheritance, Surveillance and Being Normal

2011-12-26T05:40:00.000-08:00

by Katie Featherstone, School of Nursing and Midwifery Studies, Cardiff University

Inheritance (of land, fortune, title) and inheritance of madness is a common plot device and this film gives a contemporary take on this story. The key themes I want to discuss are inheritance and surveillance, but also the competing versions of being ‘normal’ presented and challenged throughout the film.

Inheritance and Surveillance

The risk of inheritance of major mental illness and the silent surveillance of Curtis by the couples friends, their family and their wider community and importantly by Curtis himself, runs through the film. I am a sociologist of medicine, and I am particularly interested in how people make sense of genetic illness and risk. My detailed ethnographic study Risky Relations: Family and kinship in the era of new genetics (2006) examines the ways in which individuals and families respond to having a genetic risk, and the ways in which they disclose this risk of disease to other family members. Genetic conditions lead to alertness and monitoring in various ways and in this monograph we identify processes of ‘mutual surveillance’ among family members:

• Older family members observe the next generation in order to try to detect early signs of the condition ‘coming out’ in them.
• Similarly, if they are aware of the familial nature of the condition, members of the younger generation survey their older relatives, in order to try to assess their own possible fate.

Importantly, they all search for patterns to assess how the condition affects their own particular family, the onset and early signs of the condition and how it manifests and progresses within their family.

From the aftermath of his first dream Curtis surveys himself for the signs of the onset of the mental illness that affected his mother at a similar age (30’s). Every time his wife, closest friend and brother ask ‘Are you OK?’ he gives no indication of his underlying anxiety, but tries to cope and manage on his own, seeing his GP and counselor in secret. In response, his wife, their friends and community silently watch him. Even his GP when he discloses what to him is possibly his most embarrassing symptom (bed wetting), just asks ‘have you seen your mother recently?’ No one mentions the possible diagnosis that is clearly in all their minds (onset of mental illness) and they all watch and worry in silence.

It is also typical that family members worry about onset at a similar age- he has reached the same age as his mother developed her mental illness. Beliefs about who is ‘at risk’ within the family often follow social rather than biological patterns of transmission. The assessments of clinical professionals are often assimilated into the broader systems of belief and practice that form the context of ideas about kinship and inheritance. In one of the final scenes, the psychiatrist tells Curtis he needs to ‘commit to treatment’ and to enter a treatment facility, this mirrors both the onset of his mothers condition, but also her fate: following onset and diagnosis she was hospitalised and became institutionalised for the rest of her life. For me, this seems to tap into Curtis’s deepest fears.

We do not need genetic science to provide us with a general sense of biological relatedness or to tell us that risk of disease can be transmitted through families (for example, Haemophilia and the royal families of Europe) or that there are strong cultural beliefs that traits such as talents and aspects of personality are inherited. In the film, these more general beliefs about inheritance are played out during the play date, where the women discuss the fate of the tiny baby with them: he is destined to be just like his father- drinking beer and going to bars every night. My own work examines Mendelian genetic conditions, however, work has yet to be done to examine the ways in which individuals and families make sense of more complex multi-factoral conditions such as the major mental illness, that have more complex patterns of familial risk.

The wonderful ambiguity throughout this film means that we always question whether Curtis is experiencing the onset of mental illness or is it something else? Is he a prophet? or is he expressing a deep anxiety about being abandoned? We find out that his father (who brought him up) has recently died and his mother abandoned him in a car when he was a child. The shelter may be a way of shoring up his world, he repeatedly states throughout the film that he won’t leave his wife or daughter.

Being Normal

Reality is contested through the film. The first scene is a very Norman Rockwell scene of Curtis standing in his yard with the picket fence and pick-up truck. As his friend says, he has the ‘perfect life’ in the context of this blue collar Mid-Western world. It is ‘normal’ but only one version of it. But it is also an apple pie fantasy of a small town world. However, as he starts to get ill, he is seen as stepping out of line and the clear message from the community is that he does not fit in.

In return, he also imposes a world on them. This is the God fearing bible belt of America and we see this in his father-in-law’s damning statement that Curits does not attend church. But Curtis in turn, also imposes another world on them; he becomes a prophet warning them of Armageddon.

For me, the most powerful scene is the oyster bake, which encapsulates so many of the key themes. The family are trying to function as normal, as the wife puts it she wants them to have a normal family night out. But as they sit down to enjoy the meal, all the eyes of the community are on them - silent surveillance of him – and importantly they sit apart. His best friend confronts him and makes it clear he no longer belongs there. They fight and no one intervenes and as he is covered in food the community keeps silent whilst he accuses them of believing he is mentally ill. Then the tone changes dramatically - his speech turns into a sermon warning of Armageddon and of fire and brimstone, dispensed from the pulpit. The community who are still silently watching him from their seats become more akin to a scared flock- his language now holds a resonance for this God fearing community and they look scared. Curtis turns to his wife who looks at him not in fear, but in horror at what is happening to them. The three of them (Curtis, his wife and daughter) hold each other and leave this silent ever-watching audience and their isolation from the community becomes very clear.

I love the ambiguous ending. In the final scene they are having the holiday at the beach house that the wife has saved for and fantasized about throughout the film. Yet even here the family are alone and isolated: the house looks the same, the routines are the same: she cooks in a similar kitchen and he plays with their daughter on the beach instead of the backyard. No one else can be seen. For the first time others see the storm coming- the daughter (who sees it first) and his wife. Is he a prophet, a modern Noah who’s vision saves his family, is this another dream or has his psychosis spread to Folie a deux for this family now isolated, shunned and set adrift by their community.

References

Featherstone K, Atkinson P, Bharadwaj A, Clarke AJ. (2006) Risky Relations: Family and kinship in the era of new genetics. Oxford: Berg.

sciSCREEN thanks and Merry Xmas

2011-12-20T07:42:00.000-08:00

Dear All,
Just a quick message of thanks to all those who have supported sciSCREEN this year: funders, organisers, speakers and those who have attended. This year we have run 7 full sciSCREENS from the King's Speech back in January, Never Let Me Go in March, Black Swan in April, Poetry in July, Silent Running and We Need to Talk About Kevin in November and Take Shelter in December. In addition, we have also organsied 3 sciSCREEN lights: Into Eternity in May, Page One in September and Strigoi in October. I hope you have all enjoyed and we will be in touch in the new year with a new film and a new system.

Kind Regards and Merry Xmas
Jamie

Take Shelter - December 19th

2011-12-12T06:36:00.000-08:00

Dear All,

Merry Christmas from all at sciSCREEN. Our next event will be on December 19th from 6pm at Chapter Arts Centre when we will be screening the film Take Shelter. We have four speakers lined up for the event who will touch on themes such as the psychiatry of hallucinations, states of consciousness, risk and uncertainty, and disclosure and the family: This event is being sponsored by the MRC CNGG at Cardiff University.

Dr. Ian Jones, MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics

Dr. Katie Featherstone, School of Nursing and Midwifery Studies

Dr. Colin Young, School of Social Sciences

Dr. Louise Childs, School of History, Archaeology and Religion

Please note that previous events have been overcrowded and for this event we will have to limit the number in the seminar room to 50-55 people on a first come, first served basis. We are in the process of setting up a new system for the New Year. We apologise for any inconvenience that this might cause.

Terra Forming and Silent Running

2011-11-29T02:22:00.000-08:00

by Rhodri Evans, School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University

In the film Silent Running, the Earth has become uninhabitable to all but humans, and a fleet of space ships out in the vicinity of Saturn each have 6 large geodesic domes. Some plant and animal life is being sustained in these domes, in the hope that planet Earth will be able to support them once more in the future. In this article I will discuss the evolution of Earth's current human-friendly environment, and also the idea of terra-forming, creating an Earth-like environment elsewhere.

The Earth is very old by human timescales, 4,600 million (4.6 billion) years old to be precise. This age was accurately determined in the 1950s by Clair Patterson of the University of Chicago, using the radioactive decay of Uranium in the Earth's interior. The Earth, and the other planets in the Solar system, formed out of a cloud of gas and dust which surrounded our Sun as it formed to become a star, this is known as the Solar nebula. We see similar nebulae around other young stars in our neighbourhood of the Milky Way galaxy.

Most of the material in the Universe, and in our Solar system, is hydrogen and helium. These are not only the two lightest elements, but also the only two which were created in any quantity in the early Universe. All heavier elements (with the exception of a small amount of lithium, barium and boron) are created inside stars; either in their nuclear furnaces, or when massive stars explode as supernovae.

Thus, because we find elements heavier than the lightest ones in our Solar System, we know that our Sun is not a first generation star. Our Sun and the planets in our Solar System have all formed from material which had already been enriched with heavier elements by a previous generation of stars. The rocky material of our Earth is made primarily of compounds of iron, silicon and magnesium, but many other elements, all the way up to uranium, exist in the material which makes up our planet.

When these heavier elements came together to form a nascent Earth, there was enough hydrogen and helium left in the Solar nebula after the formation of the Sun to give our Earth its first atmosphere. This primary atmosphere of hydrogen and helium was quickly lost. The Earth is too close to the Sun and does not have a strong enough gravitational field to be able to hold on to light molecules and atoms like hydrogen and helium, so these were lost into space.

The early Earth had a great deal of intense volcanic activity, and this volcanism lead to the out-gassing and creation of a second atmosphere, composed mainly of water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. This is the atmosphere the Earth had when life first appeared.

The first signs of life on Earth go as far back as about 3.5 billion years, which is pretty early in Earth's history. In fact, it seems that as soon as Earth had survived a period of heavy bombardment by debris left over from the formation of the Solar System, life on Earth first appeared. The earliest life forms were not only simple single cell bacteria, but in fact were anaerobic respirators, meaning they didn't use oxygen to respire. Instead, they would have used carbon dioxide; and some, possibly, nitrates (compounds of nitrogen and oxygen).

From 3.8 billion years ago through to 1 billion years ago, all life on Earth was single celled. Green plant life first appeared about 3 billion years ago, and with the appearance of green plant life came the oxygenation of our atmosphere through photosynthesis. The amount of oxygen in our atmosphere started increasing from essentially 0% to the present value of 20% due to the photosynthesis of green plant life. Thus, our current atmosphere is actually the third one the Earth has had. The first appearance of life which respired aerobically (using oxygen) is believed to have happened about 2 billion years ago. This too would have been single celled life, the first multi-celled life appeared only about 1 billion years ago.

Thus, when we talk about our Earth being habitable to life, we need to bear in mind that for most of its history it would have been uninhabitable to humans, and most other multi-celled life.

We, as humans, have evolved to live in the conditions we find on Earth today. These conditions have been fairly constant for the last several thousands of years. The last ice-age peaked 20 thousand years ago, but humans survived this climatic swing, presumably by migrating to warmer climes. The causes of ice ages are not well understood, but clearly humans were able to adapt to them.

The Sun is about half-way through its lifetime, in another 4.5 billion years it will begin to undergo dramatic changes. This is because it will have used up the Hydrogen in its core, and so its source of current fuel will be gone. Without going into the details, the Sun will swell up into a red giant as it begins to burn Helium in its core. When the Sun does this, its size will increase many thousands of time, and it will probably engulf the Earth. Thus, eventually, the Earth will become uninhabitable due to natural processes over which we have no control.

However, the timescales involved are huge. They are so large that it is useful to compress the Earth's 4.6 billion year history down to 24 hours. On this timescale, human beings don't make an appearance until the last 20 seconds! 20 seconds out of 24 hours, that is all our presence on Earth amounts to. It is therefore very naive, in my opinion, to think that our species will be around in another 24 hours (4.5 billion years), when the Sun swells up to become a red giant star. I think we will be lucky to survive another few minutes on this timescale, let alone a whole 24 hours.

Of course, if climate change is as dramatic as some people fear, we may have to look to create a present-Earth like environment elsewhere in the not too distant future. How feasible is this? Certainly it is something NASA and the European Space Agency ESA have looked at. But where would we go?

The two obvious places are the Moon and Mars. The Moon is the only place beyond the Earth that humans have actually visited. Although it is our closest neighbour, it is very different from the Earth in many ways. The gravity is only about one sixth of the Earth's gravity, and as a consequence it has no atmosphere. No atmosphere means no atmospheric pressure. If a human were to step out of a space ship which had landed on the surface of the Moon without wearing a space suit, before he or she died from lack of oxygen the astronaut would explode due to the lack of atmospheric pressure.

Therefore, on the Moon, the only way we could create a habitable environment would be inside of giant domes or greenhouses. This would enable us to create an oxygenated atmosphere (using green plants to do the work for us), and also to create an atmospheric pressure so that we didn't explode! There isn't much we could do about the lower gravity, but one way to quickly adapt to this would be to wear weighted shoes to artificially increase our mass and thus our weight. There is increasing evidence that the Moon has frozen water in the pulverised rock on its surface, and there may also be frozen water in the depths of craters near the Moon's poles. Along with many other minerals in its surface, the presence of water on the Moon makes it feasible to, maybe one day, establish a colony there.

In many ways Mars would be a more attractive destination. Sadly, we appear to be many many years away from sending humans to Mars. In a book written in the same year as the first Moon landing, 1969, I recently read confident predictions that we would send humans to Mars by the year 2000. Apart from a simulated mission to the red planet conducted in a facility just outside of Moscow, we are probably further away from sending humans to Mars than we were in 1969. In my opinion, it is unlikely to happen before 2030.

When we eventually do get to Mars, what sort of environment awaits us? The short answer is one which, in many ways, is similar to Earth. Mars has about half the Earth's radius, and a similar density. Therefore its surface gravity is 0.4g, where 1g is the acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface. There is also increasing evidence that water exists on Mars. We believe it actually flowed on the surface in the past, but now it seems to be in the form of frozen water on the surface. But, there is some evidence that liquid water may presently exist below the surface.

Mars has an atmosphere, but it is much thinner than Earth's. It is 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, with the remainder being mainly Argon. At the surface the atmospheric pressure is only about 600 Pascals, compared to 100 kPascals here on Earth, so about 160 times less. This means that, even on Mars, we would initially have to create an artificial environment to enable humans to survive, again presumably in large geodesic domes where green plant life could create a pressurised, oxygenated atmosphere. It is possible that, over time, green plant life could create a thicker, oxygenated atmosphere allowing humans to survive outside of these geodesic domes, but this is very speculative.

It is my belief that terra-forming, although it presents large technological challenges, is not something which is beyond our current capabilities. The main hurdles are ones of resources, both financial and material. But, to think that terra-forming could provide us with a way to survive the destruction of the habitability of our planet is, I think, very naive. It could only ever serve to provide for a small fraction of humanity and other life on Earth.

We need to realise that we have evolved to live in quite a narrow range of conditions, and if the conditions on Earth change too much it may well become uninhabitable to us. Most natural changes which we know have happened in the past appear to have happened over many thousands, if not millions, of years. What is alarming about the current increases in e.g. carbon dioxide levels is how quickly they are happening.

However long our remaining time is in the 4.6 billion years our Earth has left to its lifetime, let us hope we take better care of our planet than we have done in the last few hundred years.

We Need to Talk About Kevin, Genetics of Postnatal Depression and Puerperal Psychosis

2011-11-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

by Elaine Green, MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics, Cardiff University.

Throughout the film We Need to Talk About Kevin there is the question of whether the mother, Eva, was in anyway 'at fault' for the atrocities performed by her son Kevin, or whether Kevin was just born evil. This, of course, can direct us to the sometimes over-used and possibly unhelpful Nature/Nurture divide. Leaving debates of this divide aside, though, there is a strong suggestion that Eva suffered from some sort of postnatal depression, and it is from this perspective that I will discuss my research. Within the department of ‘Psychological Medicine and Neurology’ at Cardiff University we are interested in identifying genes that cause susceptibility to a range of psychiatric disorders. My area of research interest is mood disorders, including bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and postpartum psychosis.

It is important to point out that these psychiatric disorders are known as ‘complex disorders’, by which I mean that there is not a single causal gene, rather it is interplay of many genes and environmental factors together: nature and nurture together if you like. By identifying susceptibility genes we hope to understand the biology of these disorders which would ultimately provide better treatment, (although this may take years from the identification of genes to treatment) and aid in risk assessment for individuals.

Mood symptoms frequently occur during pregnancy and postpartum periods (after birth), known as postnatal depression or the more severe psychotic form, puerperal psychosis or postpartum psychosis. These are serious mood disorders and do differ from the baby blues, which are often mild, transient and present within the first few days after delivery.

Why do we think that genes are involved in mood disorders? Twin and family studies suggest that there is a genetic contribution to mood disorders including postnatal depression and puerperal psychosis. It is known that women with a family history of such disorders are at a higher risk of experiencing such episodes themselves than women without a family history.

Postnatal depression occurs following around 10% of deliveries. It is known that women with a history of depression and those who experience depression or anxiety during pregnancy are at a greater risk of developing postnatal depression. Puerperal psychosis is more complex, with a wide range of symptoms that can rapidly change. It represents some of the most severe episodes of illness seen in psychiatry and in tragic cases can lead to suicide or, very rarely, harm of the baby. Approximately, 1 in 1000 women after giving birth develop puerperal psychosis, which rises considerably for those women with a history of bipolar disorder. For women with a history of bipolar disorder 50% go on to develop a mood disorder postpartum.

Further episodes of illness are common for women who have suffered a mood disorder after giving birth. It is important to point out that this in not just after having another child, but non-postpartum episodes can also occur. For example, research has suggested that 63% of women who experience puerperal psychosis suffer a subsequent affective mood episode outside of childbirth, whilst approximately 57% experience a relapse after a subsequent pregnancy. Informing women of such statistics allows them to make important decisions regarding having additional children.

Research on the psychobiological basis of antisocial behaviour in children

2011-11-10T07:33:00.000-08:00

by Stephanie van Goozen, School of Psychology, Cardiff University

My main interest has been the neurobiological basis of antisocial behaviour in children. It is from this perspective which I approach We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Children who display antisocial behaviour have a range of emotional and cognitive problems that help to explain the way they behave. They have a tendency to interpret and respond inappropriately to the social signals emitted by others and have problems with decision making and emotion regulation in emotionally arousing circumstances. Being able to regulate one’s emotions successfully is critical for rational decision-making and social adaptation, and a failure to do so is likely to lead to problems in forming or maintaining relationships.

In terms of emotional functioning we study the ability to recognise emotions in other people’s faces. Being able to recognize distress cues in others serves to inhibit antisocial behaviour. Fearful and sad expressions act as aversive stimuli, and as such play a key role in socialization processes. Antisocial individuals fail to process expressions of fear and sadness appropriately, resulting in ineffective socialization and a greater propensity to cause harm to others. At the moment we study whether we can improve emotion recognition ability in young offenders, and if so, whether this has a positive effect on their behaviour.

Another area of our research is the stress response systems. Having a deficit in experiencing stress is particularly crucial in the development of antisocial behaviour. Neurobiological responses to stress act as a form of ‘warning signal’ to restrain ongoing behaviour in situations of psychological or physical danger. Children who fail to activate these systems are likely to behave in a more dis-inhibited fashion. This could arise from genetic factors or from exposure to uncontrollable stress or maltreatment in early childhood.

Our research shows that antisocial children’s appraisal of situations is not accompanied by contextually-appropriate patterns of emotional arousal and does not lead to activation of autonomic or endocrine stress response systems. Moreover, antisocial children who, as a result of their risky or impulsive behaviour, place themselves in threatening or dangerous situations gradually become further desensitized to stress due to habituation. This leads to a negative cycle in which the child becomes increasingly resistant to stress and is therefore likely to place him- or herself in increasingly threatening situations.

We also study in our department the development of aggressive behaviour up to the age of 3. In very young children the origin of antisocial behaviour is likely to be a combination of difficult temperament and a non-optimal environment in which ineffective socialization plays a key role. Individual differences in aggressiveness are clearly present before the age of 3. In the early years, emotional factors associated with aggressive outcomes include fearlessness in the face of novelty and challenge, and problems in regulating negative emotionality. Our group has shown that maternal prenatal and postnatal emotional state is related to later aggressive behaviour. The affective quality of the parent-child relationship (harsh-rejecting vs. warm-responsive) can also influence the sort of adult a child becomes. The role of parenting as a mechanism through which variation in children’s normal and abnormal development may be explained is an important issue in developmental psychobiology. In my research the question of how such influences become long lasting is addressed by examining the neurobiological underpinnings of stress and coping in infants. The prediction is that women who experience greater stress transfer this to their child via disruptions in the affective quality of the mother-infant relationship, which in turn has implications for children’s long-term behavioural well-being.

Moral Responsibility and Morality in We Need to Talk About Kevin

2011-11-09T08:14:00.000-08:00

by Jules Holroyd, School of English Communication and Philosophy

One of the issues raised by the film, and in Lionel Shriver’s book, ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’, is that of moral responsibility. Is Kevin morally responsible for the massacre? Is Eva responsible for her child’s behaviour? Is she rational to feel responsible?

One of the ways that philosophers have approached the question of moral responsibility is in terms of the conditions for free actions, and the metaphysical conditions necessary for freedom. For example, some argue that a causally deterministic world would not be consistent with our being morally responsible. If all our actions are causally determined, such that at any point in time, we could not do otherwise, surely we would not be free in any of our actions, and if not free, then not morally responsible.

On this way of thinking about things, whether we are free and morally responsible, or not, depends upon the truth of some metaphysical thesis about the world. If causal determinism is true, then so much the worse for freedom and moral responsibility: our practices of treating each other as free and responsible cannot be theoretically supported (van Inwagen 1975). Were this view correct and causal determinism true, then the landscape of moral responsibility is flattened: neither myself, nor the fictional Kevin, nor anyone else, has the kind of freedom of choice and action necessary for moral responsibility.

Questions about whether one’s upbringing affect one’s responsibility are also debunked on this view: if all of us are causally determined, and if that is what accounts for our lack of freedom, then it matters not whether we were causally determined in one way (to become an Olympian archer) or another (a massacring one).

In our usual practices of holding and regarding each other as responsible, we tend to allow for more nuances than this. Our concern is not with the truth of some metaphysical thesis, but with more immediate issues: did she intend to harm me? Was her action accidental? Was she suffering undue stress, or other psychological distress, such that we can say ‘she didn’t really mean it’?

Philosophers who have emphasised these aspects of our practices have rejected the condition for moral responsibility identified above: we’re not interested in whether we are causally determined. Rather, we’re interested in each other’s quality of will: whether that person demonstrated malice or ill will towards us in her actions (Strawson, 1974). Part of the fabric of our practices are the reactive attitudes that, often, we cannot but feel, in response to the quality of will of others: attitudes such as resentment, or (in response to good will) gratitude.

On this view, some of us may be morally responsible, some of the time; others not. Much will depend upon whether there are conditions which – temporarily or permanently – prevent our actions from manifesting the quality of our will towards others. In the absence of such excusing conditions, we can treat each other (and cannot but treat each other) as morally responsible.

What would such views say about Kevin? If all that matters is quality of will, we might think that Kevin pretty unequivocally demonstrates ill will – outright malice – towards his fellow human beings. But much of the discussion surrounding this book (including that scheduled for the sciSCREEN event), focuses on the question of whether Kevin is properly diagnosed as psychopathic, and how this diagnosis itself should be understood. It may be that psychopathy is one of the conditions which we take to modulate the reactive attitudes of resentment we might otherwise have. If so, we might need to consider some revision to this understanding of moral responsibility; it is hard to deny that his actions display malice and hatred, or at best a gross indifference to the interests of others.

One might think that individuals who are psychopathic are not able to act otherwise – unable to act well and take others’ interests into account because of some pathology of the mind: but doesn’t this just take us back to the first kind of condition for moral responsibility, according to which we aren’t free if we cannot do otherwise (the condition which leaves all of our moral responsibility vulnerable)?

Some have argued that this kind of 'could have done otherwise' condition for moral responsibility is asymmetrical (Wolf 1980). What matters is not that individuals are not causally determined, but rather than they are not causally determined in a way that prevents them from acting well. If nature or nurture prevents an individual from being able to grasp moral reasons, from appreciating the interests of others, from cherishing the value of other human beings – as surely some brutalising childhoods or psychological impairments may do – then it is unfair to hold individuals responsible for failing to give regard to such values.

Proponents of this view argue that determination itself is not a problem. For what matters for moral responsibility is that individuals are determined in the right way; that is, in whatever way is psychologically necessary for the appreciation of moral reasons and interests and values. If psychopathy prevents individuals from grasping moral reasons or considering other persons’ interests, then it may well, on this view, exempt from moral responsibility.

Psychopaths may use moral terms, but unless they can fully grasp moral reasons and their force, they are using such terms in ‘the inverted commas sense’ – that is, as merely descriptive of what others might say, and without proper acknowledgement of the force of moral terms that other users typically have (Hare, 1952).

Debates about the conditions for moral responsibility, then, have implications for whether or not individuals such as Kevin are to be regarded as blameworthy. Accordingly, whether psychopathy undermines moral responsibility is in part dependent upon philosophical questions – what are the conditions for moral responsibility – and in part on empirical research: what kinds of capacities do individuals diagnosed as psychopathic have (whilst such diagnoses themselves remain a site of contention)?

But there are further philosophical questions concerning capacities are needed in order to be responsive to reasons, which turn on how we might understand moral judgement and morality itself. For example, where sits the distinction between conventional and moral reasons? In what way, if any, does grasping moral reasons and making moral decisions involve emotions?

Some have suggested, for example, that psychopaths are unable to distinguish between moral and conventional reasons, and that this is indicative of an inability to grasp the important and special kind of normative force that resides in moral claims (Levy 2007, Matravers 2007). Others have argued that psychopaths lack the kinds of emotional capacities that are important in moral decision making (Hare 1993, Nichols 2002). Others have suggested that psychopaths suffer other forms of practical rationality also, such as failing to monitor and react to information that is relevant to the achievement of their goals, for example (Hare 1993).

Whether any of these features of psychopaths renders them unable to grasp moral reasons or behave morally will depend in part on how we understand morality and moral decision making itself. On this latter question, some philosophers, such as Hume, have emphasised the importance of empathy (in his terminology ‘sympathy’) in our moral decision-making – in deciding whether we ought, or ought not, reveal an unkind truth, say. If this characterisation of moral judgement is right, then certain emotional impairments will indeed hinder an individual’s ability to make moral decisions.

Other philosophers – rationalists – see moral judgement as a matter of exercising our rational capacities (where this excludes emotional capacities): in particular, can I universalise my intention to do this action, for this reason, in this context? If this is the correct characterisation of morality, then emotional impairment may matter less to whether an individual is capable of moral decision. Other deficits in practical irrationality may matter much more (Maibom, 2005).

Kevin’s responsibility, then (and indeed, the moral responsibility of psychopathic individuals), may rest on a complex set of judgements about the conditions for moral responsibility and the nature of morality, as much as empirical facts about his capacities and competences.

That the emotions may have an important role in morality foregrounds another important dimension of We Need To Talk About Kevin. Whether or not Kevin’s parents are, in part, responsible for his actions, one important feature of Eva’s character, as she is presented to us in the book and film, is that she feels responsible, and she takes responsibility. Are such feelings and judgements misplaced?

Whilst some moral philosophers have given little place to the emotions in morality, others have thought it important to focus on emotions such as guilt or self-blame in response to acting wrongly. But others have emphasised the importance of a wider range of moral emotions. We often do things which, even if morally right, implicate us in such a way as to give us reason for regret: philosophers give us examples of saving some at the cost of others, although few of us encounter quite so dramatic scenarios, if we are fortunate. Or we might feel deep regret for events in which we are causally implicated whilst clearly not morally responsible: the careful driver who nonetheless could not avoid hitting the child unexpectedly in the road (Williams, 1981). Indeed, we would think someone callous who failed to do so. These kinds of emotions have great importance in the ethical domain.

Our ability to identify with this kind of regret is perhaps what makes Shriver’s characterisation of Eva so powerful, and emphasises the importance of moral philosophers’ focus on these emotions, even though they don’t correspond to moral failings (Eva may have been guilty of some bad parenting (the film brings this out more than the book, I thought) but she isn’t guilty of murder). Shriver’s rich characterisation and open-ended novel enables us to wonder whether Kevin might be able to feel – eventually – such emotions as guilt and regret; and what the implications of this might be for whether we can fairly hold him morally responsible for his actions.

Hare, R.M. 1952 The Language of morals. NewYork: Oxford University Press.

Hare, Robert 1993. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths among Us. New York: Pocket Books.

Hume, David 1777/1975. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Levy, Neil 2007. The responsibility of the psychopath revisited. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 14,no. 2:128–138

Maibom, Heidi, L. 2005. Moral Unreason: The Case of Psychopathy. Mind and Language, Vol. 20 No. 2: 237–257.

Matravers, Matt 2007. Holding Psychopaths Responsible. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Volume 14, Number 2:139-142.

Nichols, Shaun 2002. How psychopaths threaten moral rationalism, or is it irrational to be amoral? The Monist, Vol. 85, 285–303.

Strawson, P.F 1974. Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, London: Methuen.

van Inwagen, Peter 1975. The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism. Philosophical Studies 27 (March):185-99.

Williams, Bernard 1981. Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wolf, Susan 1980. Asymmetrical Freedom. Journal of Philosophy 77:151-66.

Let's Talk About Kevin

2011-11-09T08:05:00.000-08:00

by Bob Snowden, School of Psychology, Cardiff University

Work in my laboratory looks at a range of problem behaviours that include violence to others, sexual crime and self injury. In particular, we deal with how we can assess the risks, manage these risk public protection, and help with recovery and rehabilitation. Inevitably such work must also take into consideration mental disorders and their possible effects on these behaviours – these include brain injury, mental illness, and personality disorders. One of the most prominent (and misunderstood) constructs is that of the “psychopath” – inevitably whenever a terrible and violent crime occurs, as those of Kevin in this story, one is tempted to simply label him as “psychopathic” and hope that this “explains” what has happened.

Psychopathy is actually a constellation of personality traits that include grandiosity, callousness, lack of remorse, and shallow affect. These, in turn, may allow for the production of antisocial and violent behaviour. In particular it is thought that most (and nearly all) instrumental homicides (those killings done in cold-blood such as Kevin’s) are perpetrated by psychopaths. Crucially, the psychopath is aware that their behaviours are “bad”, but nevertheless they choose to do them.

Certainly the film suggests that Kevin has these psychopathic traits and would meet diagnostic criteria for psychopathy (such as a high score on the Psychopathy Checklist, PCL-R). However, there appears to be more to him than the unfeeling and uncaring prototype of the psychopath. There also appears to be something akin to “evil” in that from birth he appears to be deliberately going out of his way to inconvenience, upset and hurt people (with little gain to himself). These “sadistic” tendencies have been noted in some psychopaths (but far from all) and such people are known as a “lethal cocktail”.

The crucial question then is “where do they come from”. In the film we are certainly given the impression that Kevin is born this way. Recent research does appear to find a strong genetic influence on psychopathy, but this needs to be put in perspective. First, there is not a gene for psychopathy, but many of the traits (such as callousness) may well have some genetic inheritance. Second, just because something is genetic doesn’t mean it will be apparent at birth (my male pattern baldness, for example, failed to show until my 30s!). It is clear that the expression of many genes is dependent upon the environment. Hence, you may have a bad gene or you may have a bad parent, but what you really don’t want is both a bad gene and a bad parent. I will leave it up to you to think as to whether Kevin had a bad parent……

Space exploration: present and future

2011-11-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

by Chris North, School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University

Silent Running was released at a time when there were almost no limits on the imagination of science fiction writers and screenwriters. The advent of the space age led to the belief that we really would be travelling through the Solar System in a few decades. Sure, there were technical challenges, but these were thought to be easily surmountable. Other films of that era, such as Arthur C Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey", treat the difficulties of space travel with some respect for the science, while others exercise a little more poetic licence. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that - talking about magnetic boots, gravity plating (whatever that is!) might detract from the main story - but the apparent disregard for these things does stick in the throat a little.

By 1972, when this film was released, the furthest we'd reached in terms of unmanned exploration was Mars, and the outer Solar system remained a mystery. The planet Saturn, around which much of the action takes place, has long been a point of fascination, with its majestic ring system setting it apart from the other planets. Since 1972, we've accomplished an awful lot and know an immense amount more than we used to about Saturn. In 1979 Pioneer 11 passed Saturn, and in the 1980s the two Voyager probes flew by and sent back stunning images of the ring system. More recently, in 2004, the Cassini probe arrived at Saturn and is still exploring it today. Some of the most amazing discoveries have been regarding the structure of the rings.

Flying through the rings of Saturn would not be anything like what was seen in the film, though since there had been no observations other than those from Earth this is completely forgivable. The rings are composed of tiny particles of ice, most of which are a fraction of a millimetre in size, though some are huge boulders. The main part of the rings are around 300 thousand km across from side to side, though there are more tenuous rings several times that diameter. What is truly astonishing is their thickness, which was a huge surprise when it was measured. They are one 10 metres or so thick! Flying through them would be fairly damaging to a spacecraft, which would likely find boulders flying towards them at immense speeds, though not for very long. Even the tiny particles are damaging at these speeds which can reach tens of thousands of km per hour.

Of course, manned exploration of the Solar System has yet to begin, with the Moon being the furthest mankind has reached. While there are plans for future missions to Mars and some asteroids, these are still decades away. But we are beginning to understand what the most significant challenges might be, and how they might be addressed. There are some aspects of the film that I think are probably more accurate to manned exploration.

Firstly, everything tends to take place really slowly. That's not because the speeds are low, but because the distances are so immense. It's around a 1.5 billion km (1 billion miles) out to Saturn, and this journey took the Cassini probe 7 years to complete. It didn't go directly there, using gravitational sling-shots of Venus, Earth and Jupiter to give it enough speed to reach Saturn. Of course, in the film they talk about a 6 month journey, but it could be that they have much more powerful engines than we have today. Being so far away causes problems for communication. Radio transmissions, which travel at the speed of light, take around an hour to travel from Earth to Saturn, so meaningful conversation is all but impossible. The fact that they simply get transmissions from Earth is realistic. Of course, the ships would not be controlled from Earth. As indicated in the film, future exploration would rely heavily on computer control.

There would certainly be robots to fix things, as going outside would be a last resort for the people. That's not because of the hassle of donning space suits, but rather the problem of radiation from the Sun. The high energy particles that make up the solar wind from the Sun are the greatest challenge for manned exploration of the Solar System, and any future spacecraft would have to be very heavily shielded. The robots would most likely not look like Huey, Dewy an Louie, though, as there would be a huge range of maintenance robots to do specific jobs, from adjusting components on the outside of the ship to cleaning the waste pipes. I doubt that they will be at all humanoid in appearance, though it's possible that there'll be humanoid robots to help with the ironing and hoovering on board...

Of course, robots need power, as does the rest of the ship. Out at the orbit of Saturn, the Sun is 100 times weaker than it is at Earth, and so solar power really isn't feasible. They don't specify what propulsion method is used on board, though much of the literature of the time assumed we were a few decades off having nuclear fusion power - which is coincidentally how far off we probably are today! Unmanned probes such as Cassini and the Voyager probes use radioisotope thermal generators, which draw power from the radioactive decay of plutonium.

Obviously travelling to Saturn and back requires a significant amount of fuel. The ship seems to be carrying large tanks, so perhaps it was assembled in Earth orbit with large fuel tanks attached. This is possible, but probably not the most efficient way of travelling. Today's spacecraft predominantly rely on normal chemical rockets, though there are other forms of fuel available. The Dawn mission to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres uses an ion drive. Instead of sending the products of a chemical explosions out of the exhaust, Dawn sends a stream of very energetic particles. This produces a very low thrust, but it is very efficient and can burn for a long time. The efficiency is crucial, as a huge challenge for interplanetary travel would be carrying enough fuel to accelerate and decelerate such a large spaceship.

There are other methods of propulsion that are envisaged as well. Rather than chemical explosions, it might be possible to use nuclear explosions to push the ship forwards. Risky, and certainly not advisable in the Earth's atmosphere, but a method that was considered plausible for a long time. Another form of propulsion is a Solar Sail, which only works for very light craft, but requires no fuel. It simply uses the pressure from the Sun's light to push a very lightweight film. It has been demonstrated by both NASA and the Japanese space agency, and may well become the favoured method of propulsion for journeys that do not require high speeds.

In "Silent Running" the ships are meant to be commercial ships which have been used to transport forests, so perhaps they were mining vessels. Maybe they collected fuel in the asteroid belt on their way out to Saturn. Or perhaps they were gong to harvest Saturn's rings to generate fuel from the water ice. I think that the commercial exploitation of space travel is what is really required to make it commonplace. At the moment, Virgin Galactic are offering tickets for 5 minutes of weightlessness for around £100,000, which means it is limited to the very rich and famous. But look at normal air travel, and how quickly that industry has grown in just a century. Things like mining will likely be completely robotic, but I find it hard to believe that we won't eventually have colonies on the Moon and Mars. Perhaps they'll become holiday destinations for the rich and famous, and then eventually build up their own communities. How long will it be before we can get budget flights to Mars with "easyrocket"?

So now the money question: how far off are we? We've proved that we can send people to the Moon, and build laboratories in orbit around the Earth. But for 40 years we've not travelled further than a few hundred kilometres above the Earth's surface. To make matter worse, America's manned spaceflight programme is experiencing a short hiatus after the end of the Space Shuttle programme. They are relying on Russian launches to send astronauts to the International Space Station. In a few years, it is possible that we'll have the first commercial launches of manned spacecraft, from companies such as Space X and their Dragon capsule. NASA are developing a multipurpose crew transport vehicle, which has more in common with the Apollo rockets than the Space Shuttle.

So where to send the next wave of explorers? We've done the Moon, though we could have a practise at setting up a base, possibly near the lunar south pole. China, who are in the process of building a space station in orbit, also have designs on the Moon. Mars is also quoted as being a future destination, though that would involve a mission lasting at least two years and would require many of the current challenges to be overcome, such as the production of fuel on another planet and the shielding from radiation.

The next target for America is currently a near-Earth asteroid. Not necessarily to land on it, but just to "interact" with it. This sounds like an easy challenge, but in fact poses many difficulties that don't exist with missions to the Moon and Mars. It involved operating in deep space, far from the gravitational pull of a planet or Moon. We've shown that people can live and work in Earth orbit, and even on the Moon, but any interplanetary missions of the future will spend the vast majority of their time between the planets. If we can travel to a near-Earth asteroid and back, then perhaps we can send astronauts to the "L2" point, the gravitational sweet-spot where satellites such as Herschel, Planck and (in a few years) the James Web Space Telescope operate. This is a million miles away, and currently well beyond our reach. If we can get to the stage of sending astronauts to work and maybe even live there, then we have a hope of one day building the sort of infrastructure required to taken people to the other planets.

Silent Running: Why Biodiversity Matters

2011-11-07T05:03:00.000-08:00

by Lori Frater, BRASS, Cardiff University

Film actors and directors have for a number of years now had a high profile in speaking out about environmental issues. The Earth Communications Office in Los Angeles was a consortium of film directors, producers and actors using their position to raise environmental awareness within the industry and to make the industry more environmentally sustainable. Prior to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009, the Oscar winning actress Cate Blanchett spoke at the World Business Summit on Climate Change, to persuade world business leaders to go beyond mere rhetoric in pushing for action on climate change.

Hollywood isn’t renowned for making the environment a major storyline with perhaps the exception of the disaster blockbusters, like The Day after Tomorrow and 2012 when humanity is pitted against the environment. However, while The Day after Tomorrow was a box office hit, many questioned its scientific basis and so rather than raise awareness about climate change, provided sceptics with the opportunity to challenge climate change science. Small independent films have tackled environmental issues with more success, particularly films like An Inconvenient Truth and the Age of Stupid.

This is not to say that film has not addressed topical environmental issues in the past, just think of Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich challenging big business polluting the environment.

Silent Running was one of the first films with an environmental message. It was produced at a time when the international community were beginning to legislate some of the early international conservation conventions; for example for wetlands (RAMSAR) passed in 1971 and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species passed in 1973.

Like many other films, the future view of the earth is one where people either live in domes away from nature (Logan’s Run) or have left or need to leave the earth (Wall-E or Red Planet). So the question is how accurate is their future premonition of nature disappearing?

In 2002, governments pledged to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, but the pledge has not been met and some analysts suggest that nature loss is accelerating rather than decelerating. In 2004, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) created shock waves with its major assessment of the world's biodiversity, which calculated that the rate of extinction had reached 100-1,000 times that suggested by the fossil records before humans. Some biologists contend that we are in the middle of the Earth's sixth great extinction - the previous five stemming from natural events such as asteroid impacts. Scientists now predict that humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve.

Also in 2004, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the work of over 1,000 scientists, demonstrated the rapid decline in all major ecosystems around the world, highlighting that they no longer had the capacity to support human industry and food production indefinitely. This is significant because genetic diversity in terms of an ecosystem is an indicator of the health of that system and its potential to survive.

At least 40 per cent of the world’s economy and 80 per cent of the needs of the poor are derived from biological resources. Increased opportunities for medical discoveries (from genetic resources), economic development (from e.g. raw minerals, water) and adaptation to climate change (forests as sink hubs) all derive from our biodiversity being extensive and healthy. As natural systems such as forests and wetlands disappear, humanity loses the services they currently provide for free. These include purification of air and water, protection from extreme weather events, and the provision of materials for shelter and fire. A large on-going UN-sponsored study into the economics of biodiversity suggests that deforestation alone costs the global economy $2-5 trillion each year. The intention behind this study is the hope that by identifying the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity, governments will be encouraged to devote more funds to conservation.

However, at present every day our planet loses more and more species, meaning that the extent of its biodiversity is constantly in decline.

Silent Running: An Ecologist's Perspective

2011-11-07T04:47:00.001-08:00

by Rob Thomas, Cardiff School of Biosciences

The world is changing, and has already changed. Global temperatures are rising, weather patterns are altering and evidence for these changes being driven by human changes to the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere has (in the view of most mainstream scientists) become compelling.

It is now also becoming clear that the rapid changes to the climate over recent decades have been associated with major changes to the Earth’s ecosystems, species and individual organisms. For example, research at Cardiff School of Biosciences is mapping many of these changes, including case studies as diverse as the impacts of climate change on long-distance migratory birds, disease transmission, interspecific interactions and the structure of ecological communities in rivers, soil and tropical forests. Of course, climate change is not the only ecological issue; the combination of climate change with other human impacts on the environment, such as habitat destruction, pollution and unsustainable harvesting of wildlife (e.g. overfishing) has been described as a “deadly anthropogenic cocktail” which threatens the long-term viability of Earth’s ecosystems.

The film Silent Running is based on the premise that the Earth has already suffered an extreme environmental catastrophe, leading to Earth’s few remaining fragments of forest vegetation being evacuated to a spaceship for safekeeping. This apocalyptic scenario is of course deliberately extreme for cinematic effect, to get us thinking how we would behave in such an unprecedented situation. Yet there is a sense in which we can see Planet Earth itself as a relatively small and vulnerable “spaceship” travelling through the universe, whose fragile and precious ecosystems are the only ones we have left. Indeed, this is one of the great insights obtained by the first astronauts looking down on our home planet from space, seeing Earth for the first time as a tiny yet precious habitable outpost in the vastness of space. The question is; what on Earth can we do to protect it and ensure the survival of its biodiversity, including humanity?

Environmental protection is not straightforward -it is clear that human societies, governments and nation-states consistently fail to act for the good of the planet. Examples of ecologically harmful political and economic structures are innumerable; the Common Fisheries Policy, the Common Agricultural Policy, the abortive Copenhagan climate summit are just a few recent examples, but major human impacts on the environment can be traced back into deep pre-history. These much older examples include the extinctions of native megafauna that coincided with the arrival and spread of humans in Australia and the Americas; the complete deforestation of Polynesian Islands, and the unwitting or deliberate introduction of rats, pigs, goats and rabbits to fragile island ecosystems across the globe.

Case studies of this deadly anthropogenic cocktail of climate change and other human impacts should alarm us; not just because they show us that the biological word is indeed changing rapidly, but because they also highlight how little we currently know about the underlying mechanisms by which climate influences ecosystems, or what we could do to minimise -or even just predict- these ecological impacts. For example, we can describe how ecosystems have responded to climate variability within the historic range, but this does not necessarily let us predict how ecosystems would respond to more substantial climate change in the future. This is because responses of individual species may be non-linear, or community composition and ecosystem function may alter as individual species become extinct. Any or all of these are possibilities, or other, as yet unknown, effects may become apparent; so much is unknown that ecological prediction beyond the recent range of climate conditions remains largely guesswork.

Climate models indicate that even if emissions of greenhouse gases stabilised immediately, the increases in the insulating properties of the atmosphere that have already occurred have committed us to a substantial amount of future warming. Since it is clear that climate change leads to ecological change, substantial ecological changes appear inevitable too. It seems that rather than hoping to prevent climate change, we can only hope to minimise warming as far as reductions in emissions can allow. This means that we need to be pragmatic and focus on how to manage ecological change, for the inherent value of the ecosystems themselves, as well as for the long-term benefit of humanity.

Suggested solutions to the environmental crisis includes “technological fixes” for specific problems, such as “carbon-free” energy from technologies such as nuclear fusion, or by seeding the oceans with iron filings to induce phytoplankton blooms that would act as carbon “sinks”. However, our pragmatism needs to encompass the distinct possibility that humans will accidentally fail to develop workable technologies to achieve these “fixes”, or develop them too late to prevent ecosystem collapse.

This pragmatism also requires a frank appreciation of how human societies, as well as individual humans, behave; our motives as well as our constraints and limitations. For example, we humans are not good at evaluating long-term risk, and we tend to favour our own self-interest, especially over the interests of people we do not know. Similarly, our political structures influence the means by which change is –or is not- possible; governments take a short-term view because they need to be re-elected every 4-5 years, politicians are answerable to their local constituents, or at least to their own nation-state, rather than the global community. Ecologists and conservationists need to acknowledge these human realities (frailties?!) if we are to see meaningful protection of the environment. It is not enough to sigh and wish that humans would be more altruistic –we need to examine the circumstances in which humans have incentives to behave altruistically. The type of incentive may vary; money certainly motivates governments, so our arguments need to be economic as well as moral. Family ties certainly motivate individuals, so our arguments need to encompass our environmental legacy to our own children and grandchildren as well as to the human family as a whole.

The future for Spaceship Earth is uncertain. It does have a future of course, but whether that future includes a healthy environment for humans and for the current diversity of other species, is now largely up to our own generation –in other words, you and me. The responsibility is mind-boggling, and tempting to deny, but there seems no more important issue that the scientific community can address. And despite everything that I have written above, I believe there is room for optimism. Nature is, by very definition, adaptable. And in that sense, nature is resilient. So too is humanity, whose human frailties go hand in hand with traits such as intelligence, morality, and the ability to plan strategically for the future. Climate change may well precipitate the greatest ecological, societal and moral challenges that our species has faced, yet the scientific challenges that lie ahead are exciting, vital and I for one want to be involved!

Strigoi: The Undead, by Rebecca Williams

2011-11-01T04:50:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Williams (Communication, Culture, and Media Studies Research Unit, Glamorgan University) gave this talk to introduce our sciSCREAM Halloween film, Strigoi.

In her book Our Vampires, Ourselves theorist Nina Auerbach famously stated that ‘every age embraces the vampire it needs’[1]. Indeed, there is a long history of belief in, and representation of the vampire, from Ancient Greece and Rome to England, from Norse mythology and witch trials in the Middle Ages, through to the Gothic literature of England in the Victorian era. Whilst each version of the vampire may be different – some depict vampires as being unable to walk in sunlight whilst others have no such issues – one thing that does remain consistent is the use of the vampire as a figure who can represent contemporary social anxieties and fears. In her comprehensive study of vampires Milly Williamson makes clear that we must avoid ‘the tendency to make sweeping generalisations about the era in which a work was produced, and thus about the work itself’[2], and we must be cautious of the assumption that ‘psychic drives and historical periods [can be] ‘“summed up” in individual exemplary forms’’[3]. However, it seems that the tradition of the vampire has both influenced culture and been influenced by culture throughout history. As writer Christopher Frayling has suggested ‘the vampire is as old as the world’[4]. For example, early fears about being buried alive or returning in a state of ‘undeath’ were credited with originating the vampire myth in Ancient Greece whilst the 19th century this was linked to misunderstanding around the processes at work in the human body after death. As the vampire became mediated through literature and film, it also seemed to represent a range of fears, as in the suggestions that the appearance of Nosferatu in the 1922 film reflected negative European attitudes towards Jews in the early twentieth century.

Even today the vampire continues to be a present figure within culture, even if the majority of those who live within society do not believe that vampires are real. The popularity of television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, the book and film series of Twilight and other movies such as Blade, Let The Right One In and its remake Let Me In and the film we are about to see suggests that the modern vampire is as present as ever. Such examples rework and contribute to established generic tropes of the vampire – as Jonathan Hardy has noted, these recent successes have ‘added to the resonance and intertextual reworking of vampire myths and iconography, whose rich cultural history continues to provide malleable resources for contemporary storytelling’[5]. However, whilst some of these modern vampires are sympathetic or romantic figures (e.g. Twilight’s Edward Cullen or True Blood’s Bill Compton), Strigoi presents a blackly humorous look at the undead.

Its setting in a post-communist Romanian village reflects the vampire heritage of Eastern Europe; the most obvious marker of which is Transylvania and its association with one of literature’s seminal vampires – Dracula. The film draws on a specifically Romanian version of the vampire – the folklore of the figure of the Strigoi. As writer Matthew Beresford notes in his comprehensive history of the vampire, From Demons to Dracula, the Strigoi was considered in Romania to be the most feared of all spirits[6]. These figures are created if appropriate post-death traditions are not respected or if for example, a person dies before being married. In the folklore of the Strigoi we see many of the traditional means of dispatching the vampire including garlic, stakes through the heart, being set on fire or being buried at a crossroads to prevent the demon from returning to its home village.

Strigoi the film plays with many of these conventions to explore the conflict between the belief of the villagers and the central character Vlad’s initial confusion and reticence to believe that the Strigoi can be real. When the Strigoi Mrs Tirescu attempts to sate her hunger by consuming the contents of her neighbours’ kitchen she is warned “There’s garlic in that. You can’t eat that!”. Later, the villagers ponder that Constantin Tirescu cannot be a real Strigoi since he is able to enter the Church – as one asks, “Well, then, what is he?”. In contrast to the superstitious adherence by the elder villagers that the Strigoi is real, the more modern minded Vlad continues to maintain that Constantin is simply ill and that these traditional ideas are outdated and ludicrous. For instance, upon his first return to town he incredulously asks villagers watching over a dead body whether they expect him to become a vampire. Only when faced with the possibility that the Strigoi are real – and that his own grandfather may be a living or ‘born’ Strigoi who has been sucking his blood whilst he sleeps – does Vlad accept that some of the traditions must be adhered to. When he removes and burns the heart of his friend, his reluctant acceptance of the history of the village and his own family is clear.

Indeed, in reworking and drawing on many of the traditions associated with the folkloric Strigoi, the movie attempts to offer a new incarnation of the vampire film. Using the figure of the Strigoi to offer a commentary on land ownership, control and corruption in post-Communist Eastern Europe allows the movie to explore issues that could seem dull and overly political to many viewers in a way that is both original and engaging. Indeed, it works as an example of how

the vampire … is shaped by both the changing world into which it emerges as well as by the medium through which it is represented. … The vampire is timeless but, through the process of renewal, it is completely in tune with the present[7].

References

[1]Nina Auerbach (1997) Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[2]Milly Williamson (2005) The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy, London: Wallflower Press, p. 5.

[3]Ibid.

[4]Christopher Frayling (1991) Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, London: Faber and Faber.

[5]Jonathan Hardy (2011) ‘Mapping commercial intertextuality: HBO’s True Blood’, Convergence, 17: 7-17, p. 9.

[6]Matthew Beresford (2008) From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, London: Reaktion Books.

[7]Stacey Abbott (2007) Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, p. 10-11.

Strigoi, Silent Running and We Need to Talk About Kevin

2011-10-26T08:16:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that we have a sciSCREEN bonanza this weekend and next week. On Saturday October 29th Rebecca Williams will introduce the film Strigoi with a talk on Vampire Culture as part of a Halloween special commencing at 6pm.

This will be followed by two full sciSCREENs. On Tuesday November 1st, and as part of sustainability week, there will be a full sciSCREEN discussion with 5 speakers after the film Silent Running centering on issues of biodiversity, the interdependency of humans and nature, interplanetary travel both now and in the future and creating earth like environments elsewhere. The film will begin at 6.15pm and is our Eco-Halloween special.

Finally on Thursday November 3rd, there will be a full Cardiff sciSCREEN including 4 speakers from Cardiff University after the 6.10pm screening of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Sponsored by the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics and organised by 5 early-career researchers, the discussion will provide an opportunity to discuss issues such as postnatal depression, child development, foresnsic psyhcology and responsibility and blame.

All tickets can be bought from Chapter Arts Centre.

Hope to See You There.

sciSCREEN is Back and then some... Silent Running

2011-10-19T02:28:00.000-07:00

Like London Buses, you wait for one and then two come at once. Not only will there be a Cardiff sciSCREEN on November 3rd with a screening of We Need to Talk About Kevin but there will also be a Cardiff sciSCREEN on November 1st run by BRASS which will include a screening of the sci-fi classic Silent Running.

Run as part of Sustainability week talks will centre on issues such as biodiversity, outer-space and astronomy. Speakers include:

Lorraine Frater from the Centre for Business Relationships Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS)

Chris Barber from the International Space School Education Trust (ISSET)

Chris North from the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University

Rhodri Evans from the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University

Rob Thomas from the School of Biosciences, Cardiff University

The film will start at 6pm and, as usual, discussion and debate will commence after the film finishes and will include a free wine reception. For information on cinema tickets and ticket prices please contact Chapter Arts Centre http://www.chapter.org/.

sciSCREEN is Back: 'We Need to Talk About Kevin'

2011-10-13T03:52:00.000-07:00

We will be hosting another Cardiff sciSCREEN event on Thursday 3rd November from 6pm at Chapter Arts Centre.

'We Need to Talk About Kevin' is adapted from Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel of the same name by director Lynne Ramsey. Tilda Swinton stars as Eva, who recounts to the audience the events leading up to and following the massacre of students and teachers carried out by her son Kevin at his high school. The film premiered at Cannes Film Festival this year, receiving praise from critics and audiences alike and is due for cinematic release on October 21st. Touching on themes such as postnatal depression, childhood development, violence and the old nature-nurture debate, both the book and this adaptation should present interesting discussion points.

The screening of the film will be followed by a full Cardiff sciSCREEN event sponsored by the MRC centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics. A panel of speakers spanning a number of disciplinary perspectives and expertise from Cardiff University will take part in a discussion of the themes raised during the film accompanied by a free wine reception.

Confirmed speakers for the event include:

Dr. Jules Holroyd - School of English, Communication and Philosophy;
Prof. Stephanie van Goozen - School of Psychology;
Dr. Elaine Green - MRC Centre, School of Medicine;
Prof. Robert Snowden - School of Psychology

Tickets for the film will be available from the Chapter Website shortly.

The Crisis in Newspapers, and What to Do About It: From the New York Times to the Western Mail.

2011-09-29T15:51:00.000-07:00

by Dr Andy Williams, JOMEC, Cardiff University

The Crisis in US Newspapers

The US newspaper industry is in deep crisis, but the New York Times is ahead of the pack. As a large daily with a fairly affluent national readership it has only seen a 45% drop in advertising revenues since 2006 (McChesney 2010), its print circulation has only fallen by around a quarter since 1993 (Political Calculations 2011), and although there were 200 newsroom jobs cut announced in 2008 and 2009 (Perez Pena 2009), there haven’t been any in 2010 or 2011. I’m being facetious, of course. The Times is in deep trouble: advertisers and readers are leaving in droves and the increasing revenues from its online operations are only a fraction of those it used to make in print.

But at least it actually is still in print. 300 US newspapers went under in 2009, and 150 more disappeared in 2010. Many of these were large metropolitan dailies in big cities (McChesney and Nichols 2010). Those that remain have all scaled back their operations significantly: US newsrooms have shed more than a quarter of their journalists since 2000 (Pew 2011). There are a number of reasons for this. Newspapers have traditionally made their money in two ways: by selling news to us, and selling us to advertisers. Advertisers have left newspapers in droves – overall US ad revenues fell by a quarter between 2008 and 2009 (Houston Santhanam and Rosenthiel 2011). Quite rationally, companies no longer find subsidising the news we read to be a profitable activity, and are migrating to other more lucrative markets (online search engines, social networks, classified ad websites). At the same time, we as readers no longer feel inclined to pay upfront for the news we read. The papers all put it online for free, why would we? There’s also the problem that decades of these staff cuts have left journalism severely diminished in quality and independence. Perhaps the news just isn’t worth what it used to be.

Most analysts leave the diagnosis of the problem at that, blaming inevitable and unavoidable changes in the market since the rise of the internet. But there’s another cause to this crisis, which can be located firmly in commercial management strategies, and the choices we’ve taken as societies about who owns newspapers, and how that ownership should be regulated. Even before the rise of the internet, free content, and new advertising markets, newspaper companies had been steadily cutting staff to maximise profits. Since the 1980s there’s been a trend in developed media markets towards consolidation: ever-fewer and larger companies buying up more and more papers. This was enabled by a string of governments in the US, the UK, and elsewhere caving in to pressure from industry to relax regulation on media ownership. Consolidation leads to problems with editorial independence and freedom of the press (as we’ve seen so clearly this summer with regard to Rupert Murdoch’s influence), but it also encourages these big companies to further cut staff in the name of creating efficiency savings across their media empires, and arguably to prioritise the generation of profits above the production of high quality news; to favour corporate interests over the public interest.

The Crisis in Cardiff Newspapers

I’d like to bring us across the Atlantic, now, from the heady heights of the Big Apple’s Gray Lady to the more modest charms of Cardiff’s very own Western Mail. The crisis in UK newspapers isn’t as intense as it is in the US, but the situation is getting worse, and the same underlying problems persist. We haven’t lost a newspaper in Cardiff, yet, but there are places not too far away that have. Port Talbot was one of at least 60 or so UK towns to lose its local paper between 2008 and 2009 (Greenslade 2009a).

We Cardiffians shouldn’t get complacent, either. The New York Times stats are worrying but those for our own newspapers are often worse. The advertising revenues at news conglomerate Trinity Mirror’s regional division, the parent company of the Western Mail, are down 43% since 2003 (Trinity Mirror Annual Accounts 2000-2010). The number of journalists at Media Wales, owners of the Western Mail and the Echo, WalesOnline, and a shrinking series of weekly local newspapers in South Wales has dropped from almost 700 to around 350 since 1999 – half of the journalists who produced out local and regional papers 10 years ago are now gone, and are very unlikely to be hired back (Media Wales Annual Report and Financial Statements 1999-2009).

People aren’t buying the newspaper either: since 2000 circulation has fallen by more than half, from 55,273 to 26,931 (Trinity Mirror Annual Reports and Accounts 2000-2010, and ABC Circulation Figures 2011). If sales fall in similar numbers over the next 10 years there may not be anyone left reading the Western Mail by 2021. But advertisers pay newspapers for access to readers’ eyeballs, and if we aren’t reading they have no reason to stick around. Commercial advertisers don’t subsidise coverage of Welsh politics, Welsh corruption, Welsh crime, Welsh Rugby, or even the minute details of Catherine Zeta’s summer holidays out of the goodness of their hearts. It seems reasonable to suggest that a crisis point at which it no longer seems profitable to prop up an ailing paper because of a lack of readers may mean the advertising subsidy is withdrawn before then.

And we can’t simply blame inevitable market forces, or the web, for the sorry state of our national newspaper: mismanagement by Trinity Mirror executives in London is also clearly to blame. Much of this period of declining circulation and staff cuts came at a time of extremely high profitability for Media Wales. Between 2002 and 2008 profits were incredibly high: the company consistently posted pre-tax profits of between £15m and £20m, with profit margins between 30% and 38% (Media Wales Annual Report and Financial Statements 1999-2009). Margins like this are, of course, unheard of in most healthy industries; in markets facing such steep decline they’re unheard of. At the same time as it was shedding readers at an unprecedented rate, instead of investing some of its massive profits back into journalism in the newsroom the company was cutting reporters in large numbers instead. This is a clear indication that the company is more concerned with the financial interests of shareholders and (over-paid) corporate executives than the public interest and the strength of the public sphere.

Why this is a Problem? Journalism, the Public Interest, and Democracy

All of this matters, of course, because journalism isn’t only a commercial product, it’s also essential to the health of our democracy. For most of the last century the democratic function of journalism was subsidised by commercial advertising. This subsidy has now been completely withdrawn in some places, and in others is in the process of disappearing. The public interest value of news can broadly be distilled into two main functions: information provision and critical scrutiny.

Ideally news provides us with the kind of accurate, independent, fact-checked, information we need in order to make good decisions. This has a direct practical use to us as well as less obvious, indirect, value. As well as telling us what’s going on, it defines who that “us” actually is. As well as keeping communities informed, the best news binds communities together by highlighting common concerns and facilitating discussion, disagreement, and consensus. At their best local newspapers have been agents of social cohesion as well as providers of information. At a time when levels of political and civic participation are in decline across the board, we desperately need the democratic debating chamber supplied by well-resourced local news.

Journalism also plays an incredibly important monitorial, scrutinising, role in ensuring that our elected politicians remain accountable. According to the critic and web evangelist Clay Shirky small and medium sized cities and towns across the US are sliding into “casual endemic civic corruption” because of the newspaper crisis (Greenslade 2009b). The same may be happening here in those towns and villages no longer served by the commercial local news sector. We don’t know, because in these places there are no journalists left to find out. There are also grave, and well-founded, concerns that many of those local and regional newspapers which are left may be missing such critical “watchdog” stories because so many of them are understaffed by overworked journalists.

The Proposed Solutions to the Crisis, and Why They’re Inadequate

There are a number of solutions to this crisis being suggested at the moment. Firstly, the big news conglomerates are all arguing for less strict regulation of media consolidation: this would no doubt allow the generation of some short-term profits for big media, but it would undoubtedly lead to further job cuts, less media plurality, and weaker journalism. Secondly, there are those that still hope that even though we might lose some newspapers advertisers will eventually migrate to online news. There is little evidence this will happen in sufficient volume. For example, in 2002 Trinity Mirror’s regional printed newspapers made £521.5m in profits; by 2010 they were making £298.8m (Trinity Mirror Annual Reports and Accounts 2000-2010). Steady decline in print revenues have been accompanied by some profit increases online; in 2002 the company’s local news websites were making £3.8m, and last year they made £32.4m. This is impressive growth, but it’s nowhere near enough to provide the resources needed to sustain public interest news on the scale newspapers used to provide. The US Project for Excellence in Journalism declared in 2009, “it is now all but settled that advertising revenue – the model that financed journalism for the last century – will be inadequate to do so in this one” (McChesney and Nichols 2010).

Alternatively, some news executives think that online pay walls will convince the public to stump up where advertisers won’t. This might be a viable model for suppliers of news to elite niche markets (e.g. the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal), but there is very little evidence this it can work elsewhere. A fourth solution is that unpaid citizen journalists will fill the void left by the redundant professionals, either in the form of independent blogs, or in collaboration with smaller commercial media. I am a great supporter and believer in the democratic and democratising potential of citizen journalism, but I’m also extremely sceptical about its ability to replace what we currently understand as journalism. Accurate, fact-checked, sceptical, “fourth estate” news costs in both money and time, and its reporters also need to be supported by strong, independent, journalistic institutions which can stand up to political and corporate pressure when needed. Individual citizens lack both resources and institutional support. It also seems that news organisations are currently hoping to exploit these unpaid digital serfs, hiding behind the rhetoric of community reporting or collaborative journalism, but in reality using them as an excuse to further cut into the professional workforce.

All of these solutions are distinguished by their inability to replace the scale of journalism previously underwritten by the advertising subsidy which sustained the old business model for news. The answer to this problem, I believe, has to lie in no longer seeing this as a crisis in news business models, but instead a crisis in journalism and democracy.

The Solution that Dare Not Speak its Name: Public Subsidy and Non-Profit News

So what to do about this problem? Last summer the editor of the Western Mail called me a “one-eyed hyperbolist” with a taste for “quaint 1970s rhetoric” after I outlined the kind of critique I just did here (Ponsford, 2010). I was also accused of making criticisms without understanding the challenges faced by the industry, and without offering solutions for solving this problem. There are no simple solutions to what is an incredibly complicated problem. But we should see the US crisis, along with the warning signs on our own doorstep, as a cautionary tale. Unless we debate and discuss effective action to save journalism now, our already ailing democracy, the accountability of our politicians and business elites, and the quality of public debate will suffer, perhaps irreparably.

Over the past few years a small trickle of influential figures have come out in favour of public subsidies for the news. Just a few weeks ago one of the most influential figures in world media, the advertising mogul Sir Martin Sorrell, claimed that state subsidies were needed to protect “quality journalism” (Fenton 2011). The former editor of the Daily Mirror Roy Greenslade thinks likewise (Greenslade 2011b), as do the former editor of the Washington Post Leonard Downie Jnr. And a growing list of influential academics (Downie Jnr and Schudson 2009, Usher 2011). There will no-doubt be massive opposition to this from newspaper owners, and some journalists (for different reasons): the former largely because they fear encroachment on their territory, and the latter mainly because they fear political interference with the content of news and a loss of editorial independence. The worries about meddling from policy makers are well-founded, but not insurmountable. We have effective mechanisms in place to protect the independence of public service broadcasters, and some European countries already subsidise the press alongside their broadcast news without much problem.

What forms this public subsidy might take is a fractious and tense debate for another day. My own view is that to bail out existing local news companies would be to throw good money after bad, and would probably end up subsidising the City of London and shareholders rather than quality journalism. I favour limiting intervention to a new generation of non-profit, perhaps co-operatively-owned, news organisations, beginning with the “news holes” in areas where local newspapers have closed down.

The US academic Robert McChesney sums up the need for public subsidy for local newspapers when he argues that the news is a public good, that is, “something the public needs, but that the market can’t produce in sufficient quality” (McChesney and Nichols 2010). Another example would be public education – it benefits everyone to live in a well-educated society, even if you don’t have children currently in school. The market is in retreat from news, in many towns it has already gone. Soon it may no longer find it profitable to subsidise our local news at all. If we want to live in a functioning democracy, in which citizens are reasonably informed, and politicians are accountable to the populace, we’ll have to pay for it ourselves, indirectly, with serious and smart public subsidies designed to replace the disappearing commercial advertising subsidy.

Works Cited:

ABC Circulation Figures (2011) Audit Bureau of Circulation Certificate for the Western Mail, January-July 2011, available at http://www.abc.org.uk/Products-Services/Product-Page/?tid=20940 (last accessed September 2011)

Downie Junior, Leonard, and Schudson, Michael (2009) The Reconstruction of American Journalism, Columbia Journalism Review, 19th October, available at: http://www.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_reconstruction_of_american.php (last accessed September 2011)

Edmonds, Rick, Huskin, Emily, and Rosenthiel, Tom (2011), “Newspapers: Missed the 2010 Media Rally”, Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2011, available at: http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/newspapers-essay/ (last accessed September 2011)

Fenton, Ben (2011) “Sorrell Urges Subsidies for Quality Journalism”, Financial Times, 16th September, available online at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fb852f32-e069-11e0-ba12-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1ZGDrAaTV (last accessed September 2011)

Greenslade, Roy (2009a) “Britain’s Vanishing Newspapers” Guardian, February 19th, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/feb/19/local-newspapers-newspapers (last accessed September 2011)

Greenslade, Roy (2009b) “British journalism is in crisis, but we are doing too little to save it”, Guardian, 24th September, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/sep/24/downturn-mediabusiness (last accessed September 2011)

McChesney, Robert (2011) “The Future of Journalism”, paper delivered to the Future of Journalism Conference, Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies

McChesney, Robert and Nichols, John (2010) The Life and Death of American Journalism, New York: Nation

Media Wales (previously Western Mail and Echo) Annual Report and Financial Statements (1999-2009), Companies House, Cardiff, available online at: http://www.levelbusiness.com/doc/company/uk/00046946

Perez Pena, Richard (2009) “Times says it will cut 100 newsroom jobs”, New York Times Media Decoder Website, October 19th, available online at: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/times-says-it-will-cut-100-newsroom-jobs/ (last accessed September 2011)

Political Calculations Blog (2011) “Slowly Escaping New York”, April 20th, available at: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/04/slowly-escaping-new-york-new-york-times.html (last accessed September 2011)

Ponsford, Dominic (2010) “Editor Accuses Academic of ‘One-Eyed Hyperbole’”, Press Gazette, 21st July, available at: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=45735&c=1 (last accessed September 2011)

Trinity Mirror Annual Reports and Accounts (2000-2010), available online at: http://www.trinitymirror.com/investors/financial-information/ (last accessed September 2011)

Usher, Nikki (2011) “News media are targeted but audiences are not: Herbert Gans on multiperspectival journalism” Nieman Journalism Lab, March 21, available at: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/news-media-are-targeted-but-audiences-are-not-herbert-gans-on-multiperspectival-journalism/ (last accessed September 2011)

sciSCREEN light - Page One

2011-08-01T04:49:00.000-07:00

The next event will be a sciSCREEN light on Thursday September 29th from 8.30pm at Chapter Arts Centre.

Drs. Andy Williams and Verica Rupar of the School of Journalism Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC), Cardiff University will introduce the film Page One with a talk on whether the United States and British Journalism is in crisis.

More information to follow...

A Monstrous World that Is Saved by a Mother who Writes a Poem - Choon Key Chekar

2011-07-29T06:56:00.000-07:00

If I use the analogy of poetry upfront, this film is a visual poem that is devoted to mothers, grandmothers and sisters from all of us, monstrous beings who owe our lives (and sanity) to them. This incredibly rich and complex film touches upon a number of issues but in this short essay I would like to see this film as a beautifully crafted work that plays with the socially constructed concept of sanity and insanity. Unsympathetic but observant — a local GP picked up the fact that Mija could not think of the word ‘electricity’ and suggested further examination — medical practitioners diagnose that Mija is the early stage of Alzheimer's disease. She is told that she is bound to become more forgetful, first nouns and then verbs so she will need to be looked after. But Mija’s situation means she is far from this possibility, she is not only looking after her teenage grandson on behalf of her daughter who lives away, but she is also a part-time carer for an affluent elderly stroke victim. Besides, Mija doesn’t seem to find the diagnosis affecting her life in the slightest. She can explain what electricity, soap, and bus terminal, are without remembering the exact term. In fact, she is perhaps the sanest and the most vigorous person among the entire characters in the film. However, as the film captures brilliantly, society sees it otherwise. Her love of flowers — in Korea a keen interest in flowers is somehow associated with insanity — and her keen interest in writing a poem — at her age and given her circumstances — attract unwanted attention from various people. As the situation around Mija gets worse, her bubbly personality and flowery outfit seem to become more and more absurd and mismatching. She asks questions abruptly in the middle of her poetry class and she burst into rather nervous laughs.

We have this satirical expression in Korea: family welfare, as opposed to public welfare. This means all sorts of welfare issues (including physical and mental welfare, disability, financial difficulties) are taken care of by the family, and female members of the family, more precisely. The sister of Mija looked after Mija when their mother fell ill and Mija herself is both a paid and unpaid caregiver. Most male characters depicted in this film are lazy, shameless, and lustful in this film. Fathers of the gang who repeatedly raped a young schoolgirl, who has now committed suicide, do not involve the kids’ mothers in the process of concealing this crime, and bribe the mother of the schoolgirl. What fathers want is peace without justice, business as usual, while Mija mourns the girl’s untimely and tragic death and suffers from the consequences of the actions of her beloved grandson Wook. What distinguishes this film from other Korean films with similar subject matters is that Mija’s deep love towards Wook — her favorite thing is to see him being well fed— did not justify her becoming a monster herself. And this is why we owe our sanity to her.

Facts that may help you understand this film better:

• Yun Jeong-hie who plays the protagonist Mija was born as Sohn Mija. Mija was a quite common name for girls who were born before 1980s in Korea but now this name is regarded as old-fashioned.

• The Mija’s poem that was read out first by Mija and then by the voice of the girl who committed suicide, was written by novelist-turned-filmmaker Lee Chang-dong in commemoration of the former Korean president Roh Moo-hyun who committed suicide on 23 May 2009 by jumping from a mountain cliff in the middle of a corruption investigation. Lee served as culture minister under Roh Moo-hyun’s government. Lee is known as one of the most progressive filmmakers in Korea and has on a number of occasions refused to accept his Blue Dragon awards for Best Film and Best Director because this award is sponsored by Chosun Ilbo, a far right-wing Korean newspaper.

• The seemingly unknown tutor of the poetry class Mija attended is played by Kim Yong-tack, one of the most recognisable poets in South Korea.

Dr. Choon Key Chekar, Research Professor, Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Peace, Chonnam National University, South Korea and Cesagen Associate, Cardiff University.

How poetry makes us remember but also allows us to experience as if for the first time - clare e. potter

2011-07-29T06:39:00.000-07:00

‘You do love words, don’t you?’
‘If one doesn’t have words how does one think?

In her book, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory, Patricia Hampl says:

'How uncanny to go back in memory to a house from which time has stolen all the furniture, and to find that one remembered chair, and write it so large, so deep, that it furnishes the entire vacant room. The past comes streaming back on words, and delivers the goods it had absconded with.'

I am fortunate in that I have not experienced first hand a loved-one afflicted with Alzheimer’s and it is a topic about which I know very little. I know the frightening experience of sleep-depravation having absconded with my thoughts and some external force, it felt, holding the brakes between my thinking and speaking; I’ve had two children in the last few years and on countless occasions entered a room, stood and muttered ‘Something and something and something and something,’ as if by the repetition I might synchronise the thought, the acknowledgement and the verbalisation. Of course, this was not serious, it was not illness and it has, mostly, passed. I now take for granted that I can say ‘Pass the remote’ rather than ‘Pass that square button thing to overlap the television.’ But I realise that that feeling of paralysis, that inability to articulate or even to know what it is one wants to speak of is exactly what it is to be a poet (or at least, my experience as one).

I don’t believe I write poems because I have an extraordinary vision or a gift to weave language, I write precisely because I am chasing words, trying to pin down, to find what it is I want to express. I live with a profound feeling of being unable to communicate and have always had dreams of opening my mouth to speak and mud spewing out or that I have to pull endless rags from deep beyond my throat from some place that understands to speak with words and rhythm and meaning is a responsibility. It is as if I am trying to navigate the spaces between the something and the something and the something, and much of my poetry focuses on this.

Many poets have documented the terror of being unable to speak (and of course the compulsion to tackle the limitations of language). ‘In poetry, one is wrestling with a god’ said Stephen Spender. Why is this? What does this mean, this feeling I understand which seems ridiculously grandiose. ‘Plath put her faith not in religion, but in language, in the struggle to say it.’ And that is the gift, being within that struggle, being within that ‘god space’ and bringing some part of it back in poetry. I know there are poems I am working on and poems that are working on me and it is intensely agitating but then when the poem is written, it is like the room is furnished and one can leave it for another to enjoy or add their own delights to.

In the same way I let go of a poem I have written, I do so with poems I have read and cherished and when I re-read them, it is like being immersed in the experience again as if for the first time. How is this? There are poems I have taught for 15 years and then out of the blue something new shifts into focus, slips out of focus, the poem opens up again. How does this happen? Reading poetry is not passive, we are not recipients of some writer’s great insight, we bring meaning depending on our own experience, intuition, psychic energy, intellect, and as we change so does our understanding, our questioning of the poem in the space of our life at that particular moment. Poetry ‘comes in contact with the indefinable’ and in a way that moves beyond language, is able to make that memorable while being experienced; and after, evaporates. Plath talked about

'A consuming love . . .of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. '

In poetry there is immediacy. A poem makes present that which has been realised and is imbued with energy of the poet’s encounter with and wrestling of some small truth. We know this to be true, we can read a centuries old verse and still feel the pulse of the poet’s desires, the depth of grief and delight in the work because it captures a spirit of a moment with more than words, affecting the reader (and writer) on a cellular level, and on levels we are not aware of when we are transported by a poem into some part of us we had forgotten or did not know we knew (Robert Frost has spoken to this, ‘People forget and poetry makes you remember what you didn’t know you knew ). You can say, ‘I love the song, O Mio Babbino Caro,’ but saying that, knowing that will not give you goose pimples, nor make you weep, nor reconnect you with your grandmother who sang this one Sunday wearing odd slippers. But when you hear the song sung, when you sing the song, something in the exchange between you and the energy of it will evoke emotion. And of course there is the song in poetry, in the music of the words, in the breath of it and you in one moment as you read it. And as you read you are not confined to the moment the poem describes, but also are cast back into memories you have not before remembered. I have seen, in writing workshops, older people who struggle with memory, read something, begin to write and as they write they open up a floodgate and more comes.

But we do not read a poem in the hopes that it will unlock something in our own memory, nor do we write in order to uplift or enlighten. We write to capture feeling, we read to feel and to be connected beyond time’s passing, despite the theft of memory to the part of ourselves which is always totally within the present.

Last week I met a man whose wife has Alzheimer’s. I tried to sympathise, said the usual blundering things, ‘It must be difficult’ ‘Do you have any support?’ ‘It must be as if you lost her years ago.’ ‘Mostly,’ he said. ‘she’s vacant but there are those moments when I get her up dancing or I’m tickling her and she laughs and I see the shine in her and I have her back for a bit.’

clare e. potter, poet

Further Reading:

A conversation between John Bayley and Iris Murdoch in the film, Iris, Directed by, Richard Eyre, 2001.

Hampl, Patricia, I Could Tell you Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory. London: Norton, 2000

‘The Making of a Poem’ Stephen Spender in The Creative Process: Reflections on Invention in the Arts and Sciences UP California, 1985.

Paul Valery, ‘The Course in poetics: First Lesson’ The Creative Process.

Alzheimer's Disease: Current Care and Future Prospects - John Anderson

2011-07-28T04:23:00.000-07:00

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a terminal neurodegenerative condition that causes cognitive decline and dementia in sufferers. In the UK, around 820,000 people have dementia, with AD being responsible for around 60 % of all cases. Like other forms of dementia, AD is an extremely debilitating condition. Sufferers find it increasingly difficult to perform the every-day tasks necessary for independent living, and eventually require help with the simplest of tasks. As a result, most dementia sufferers become substantial users of health and social care services. There are two major types of AD, late-onset, and early-onset. Late-onset AD can affect people after age 65, and is the most common form of the disorder being responsible for around 90% of all cases. Early-onset AD can affect people before their 65th decade of life, and is rare, accounting for less than 10% of cases overall. Whilst in most of these cases AD is not caused by mutations (i.e. mistakes) in particular genes (i.e. the instructions for building proteins), certain forms (or variants) of some genes, have been linked to an increased risk of developing the disorder. However, in about 1% of cases AD is classed as “Familial”, being inherited due to genetic mutations associated with the overproduction of the amyloid precursor protein, or its biochemical processing into amyloid-beta peptides. Familial AD can affect people in their 40th decade of life.

As a neuroscientist my interest in brain research stems from my childhood experience of watching my grandfather succumb to AD. My grandfather was a much loved person who had a friendly vitality for life. I remember standing at his graveside, and thinking as the coffin was lowered into its final resting place, that one day I would like to understand enough about the brain to maybe help others avoid this devastating illness. To this end I have conducted research at Cardiff University, which has examined the possible therapeutic effects of anti-inflammatory compounds in AD.

The pathology of AD has been studied intensely in the last 20 years or so in both humans and with the aid of animal models related to the condition. Whilst these studies have provided valuable information with respect to our understanding of AD, many important questions remain unanswered. AD is an extremely complex condition, where genes, the environment and various life-style choices, all interact with each other to produce the dementia syndrome. Population-based neuropathology studies have revealed that AD-type brain pathology forms a continuum in the ageing population, with considerable overlap in the burdens of pathology seen in demented verses non-demented individuals. Establishing common pathological thresholds for cognitive impairment and dementia based on these components is a work in progress. Like most forms of dementia, AD is a progressive condition, with symptoms worsening over time. This is largely thought to reflect pathological changes taking place in the brain, which affect its chemistry, structure, and function. These changes are evident in the parts of the brain dealing with memory, especially structures in the medial temporal lobe system (MTLs). This part of the brain is vital for declarative memory - the conscious recall of facts (i.e. semantic memory) and information relating to autobiographical life events (i.e. episodic memory), as well as spatial navigation, which we use to find our way around a familiar environment. The MTLs is also necessary for recognising objects and their spatial locations (i.e. visuospatial memory). Pathological changes in this and nearby parts of the brain likely explain why it is that people in the early-stages of AD often experience memory problems such as forgetting recent conversations or appointments, getting lost, and misplacing personal objects of interest. However, AD is not just about being forgetful, it is about staring at your car keys wondering what they are for, or perhaps opening your fridge and finding your car keys or slippers inside.

The MTLs and nearby brain regions are also involved in communication, particularly language. People with early-stage AD will therefore often experience difficulties communicating. This aspect of AD is poignantly conveyed in the film “Poetry”, where the lead character is suffering from early stage AD whilst learning to be a poet. Whilst the character is able to understand what other people are saying, and can respond, they are sometimes slow in verbal expression due to trouble finding words. It is also common for people with AD to repeat comments or phrases, or have difficulty with verbal expression because they cannot maintain a train of thought. What is interesting about the poetry written by people with AD is that it often appears Zen-like, focused on the experience of the here and now, with a simpler sentence construction that is often minimalist in nature. These poems are powerful because of these features. Individuals with severe AD can still recall lines of poetry they may have learnt as children, and encouraging the recital of these can help improve the quality of patient’s lives by encouraging interaction. Over time various cognitive and behavioural circuits in the brain continue to degrade. Eventually sufferers are robbed of the very thoughts and memories which make all of us unique human beings. To paraphrase Rutger Hauer at the end of the film Blade Runner, [eventually], “All those moments, will be lost in time, like tears in the rain”. And yet, many individuals can be encouraged to learn new things, as implicit memory for skills (which does not require conscious recall), is still largely intact even in severe AD. Thus, encouraging the individual to paint or draw, can improve their social interaction and thus quality of life. It is also the case that skills learnt when a person was younger, such as playing the piano, can still be elicited well into the time course of the illness. Such activities can bring back (even if fleetingly) fragments of memory, and improve the persons quality of life. Unfortunately however, in many nursing homes, staff members, who are often under-resourced, and under-paid, do not have the time or motivation to encourage such activities, often reverting to a chemical cosh to keep patients with AD quiet. This is inhumane, and needs to change.

It is extremely likely that what we currently understand as early-onset and late-onset AD may turn out to be a generalisation for perhaps several overlapping sub-types of the illness (each like variations on a theme). Most pharmaceutical companies aim to produce blockbuster drugs, which are effective across a range of disease conditions (or disease sub-types). This is likely not an optimal strategy for AD. Providing we can accurately identify sub-types of AD, what may prove more effective is to conduct clinical trials for drug therapies on specific sub-types of the illness. It’s time we adopted a more holistic approach to treating AD, as without embracing its true complexity we are unlikely to succeed in treating the condition.

John Anderson - School of Biosciences, Cardiff University

What is the Word - Andrew Edgar

2011-07-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

In the early 1990s, the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag wrote ‘Samuel Beckett: What is the Word?’ This is a setting of Beckett’s last poem (initially with piano accompaniment, and later expanded for reciter, soprano, choir and small orchestra). The circumstances of the production of this piece are remarkable, and perhaps doubly so. They expose much about the nature and purpose of art and poetry in the face of suffering and the loss of articulacy.

The poem is composed of 53 short lines mediating on the nature of language, and the struggle to go beyond mere gestures (‘here’, ‘this’, ‘where’, ‘what’) to ‘glimpse’ something. The poem was written when Beckett was himself seriously ill and recovering from having fallen into a coma. It confronts his own inevitable silence, not merely through death, but through the loss of language. Kurtag was inspired to set this poem for the actress lldikó Monyók. A car accident had left her unable to speak for seven years. As much through the force of her own will as anything else, she recovered sufficiently to perform on stage again. Kurtag initially asked her to perform two of his existing songs. He was, he records, ‘fascinated most of all by her silences, which were full of tension’. He then set the Beckett text. In effect, Monyók performs herself on stage, while the music struggles to find coherent questions and answers in Beckett’s fragmentary lines.

Chang-dong Lee’s Poetry seems to be confronting similar issues. Art and poetry are something to which we might turn in moments of crisis. The Gideon Bibles that we find in hotel rooms contain useful advice on which passage one might read if feeling certain emotions; loneliness, despair, grief and so on (with presumably more cheerful emotions also being covered, although I don’t seem to recall them). This quiet advocacy says something very important about the role of art and poetry in our lives. Poems have long served to externalise our emotions, allowing us to see them afresh and bring them under control. We can share our experiences with others, overcoming our isolation and hopelessness. Poetry gives meaning to the apparent chaos of our lives. But some experiences seem to be too extreme for poetry. There are crises that seem to be beyond it, for there is no meaning to be had. The mortal illness of a poet, the muteness of an actress, and for any of us the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and the confrontation with family crises, all seem to strike at the very ground of our being. For Beckett to ask (if indeed he is asking) ‘what is the word?’, is in effect to ask how one can go on when the very conditions that make you the person you thought you were have been swept away. Nothing any longer makes sense.

Beckett, lldikó Monyók, and Mi-ja continue to write and perform, or indeed to begin to write for the first time, in the face of such crises. They go on, but perhaps not seeking meaning. Rather they explore the very loss of meaning. Here is the difficulty and complexity of much modern art, but also the disturbing gesture of a lyric poem, celebrating the beauty of a tree or the falling rain, while poignantly and deliberately remaining silent about all that sufferings. One can no longer assume that the world has meaning and beauty. There is a hint of this already in Michelangelo’s Pietas. Michelangelo’s first great work is the Pieta of 1499, that stands in the Vatican.

The work is beautiful, and yet there is something wrong. The mother mourns her son with a grace and dignity that is quite inappropriate to what has happened. Mothers should not mourn their sons. There is an injustice here that the very beauty of the sculpture seems to by-pass, or to reconcile all to easily. Michelangelo’s later Pietas respond to this problem.

They become more angular and awkward. The body of Christ no longer lies graceful across Mary’s lap. It hangs or is held, a dead weight. The supporting figures become increasingly twisted, agonised. Ultimately, the final work is left unfinished, as if the artist is defeated by the very weight of grief and suffering. Just as Beckett struggles to find a word and Monyók to utter a phrase, so Michelangelo struggles to find the next appropriate blow of his chisel. The mute stone, like Beckett and Kurtag’s hesitations, refuses to pretend that there is always meaning in the face of suffering.

Dr. Andrew Edgar, School of English Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University

Precious Memories - Martin O'Neill

2011-07-22T04:33:00.000-07:00

“Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.”

Often there is a very negative image associated with Alzheimer’s disease. People believe that once a diagnosis has been made there is no possibility of any future quality of life and it marks the final decline into dementia and death. The changing age make up of the UK and high profile cases such as that of Terry Pratchett have raised awareness of the diseases of memory and made people realise that it is often an integral part of the ageing process with which many of us will become increasingly familiar. As more and more of us have experience of the “treatment” and care of family and loved ones with diseases such as Alzheimer’s it will force us to confront some challenging philosophical, ethical and moral issues.

Memory is central to who we are, to our whole identity. Through memory we know who we are, where we have come from and why we are who we are. Memory is the repository of the knowledge of our friends, our families, our achievements and our failures. To experience lapses of memory can cause frustration and embarrassment: whether it be that name or fact on the tip of one’s tongue but still eludes the brain; or the deep embarrassment that sometimes can be the aftermath of a night of revelry where we don’t remember what we said or did, but we know that a number of people are no longer talking to us!

It is through memory that we construct our whole narrative as to who we are - what Raymond Firth called autobiognosis where we try to impose an order on sometimes random developments, to help us understand who we are in the world around us. Memory loss, particularly of the type portrayed in this film, is a disease of old age. As so many more of us are living longer, there is much more chance that we are going to have direct experience of such diseases either as sufferers ourselves or as carers.

The care and “treatment” of those experiencing particularly advanced forms of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and others associated with memory loss, pose some interesting philosophical and ethical considerations. Although it is to be expected that most of us should want to “retain our faculties” for as long as possible, what is the duty of care when an individual reaches a point where they can no longer retain the grasp on “reality”, whatever that might mean?

Many people with advanced stages of Alzheimer’s psychologically return to an earlier period of their own life where often they can lead quite contented lives. They might not recognise their own sons or daughters (which of course can be very upsetting for these offspring) but they are convinced that they are visited every day by their long dead mother. Another behaviour, often associated with Alzheimer’s, is that people want to be on their feet and wandering. Sometimes individuals can be doing this for 20+ hours a day. What are the duties and what are the difficulties of care in situations like this? Should the individual be allowed or even be encouraged to live in this separate reality or should efforts be made to bring them back to the reality as experienced by most of society? Should they be allowed to wander? They could fall or become lost, but surely to restrict them can be seen as a restriction on their personal liberty.

More contemporary approaches to the treatment of Alzheimer’s are aimed at helping individuals and families live with the condition and advocate that it is unnecessary to cause distress by well meaning attempts to remind the sufferer of what they have forgotten. Trying to bring people back to “reality”, known as reality orientation, usually results in the sufferer becoming more distressed. The more contemporary approaches aimed at managing Alzheimer’s advocates exploring the emotional places where sufferers liked to be, stored in the long-term memory and then using this as a context, which enables them to live almost all the time in a happy place, making a present of the past.

To understand the nature of Alzheimer’s and other diseases of memory it is useful to use the analogy of a photograph album. If you think of the individual photographs as memories, then in a healthy individual the album is full. But in Alzheimer’s sufferers, many new experiences fail to get stored as photos in the album at all. In learning to manage the condition, memory prompts are used to help the individual reach this happy place so if somebody used to work on the railway, for instance, a clock and photographs of trains could be used in this process. Living this happy way can alleviate distress and create a sense of well-being and contentment rather than the rage, confusion and helplessness triggered by more conventional responses to dementia. Such an approach can help to avoid the hellish image of existence often associated with Alzheimer’s; it is possible to create a contented dementia which promotes a sense of well-being for the rest of the patient’s life. Does it really matter if they believe that a dead relative is alive or if they think that they are at the airport when they are actually shopping in the supermarket? What is more important is the wellbeing of the individual and also that that individual and their family are able to manage their condition and surely such an approach is preferable to smothering the patients with excessive medication.

Dr Martin O’Neill, Cesagen. Twitter.com @DrNostromo

Poetry - 29th July - Speakers Announced

2011-07-05T01:07:00.000-07:00

The speakers for the next Cardiff sciSCREEN – Poetry, Friday July 29th at 5.45pm, sponsored by Cesagen – have been confirmed. Speaking at the post-film discussion will be:

Professor Julie Williams (MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics, Cardiff University) will talk about what the scientific community is doing to try to prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease in future generations.

Dr Andrew Edgar (Centre for Applied Ethics, Cardiff University) will explore the role that art has in allowing us to acknowledge and engage with the potential meaninglessness and tragedy of life, and to articulate our sense of loss when meaning and and beauty are absent.

Dr John Anderson (School of Biosciences, Cardiff University) will discuss the way in which people with Alzheimer’s can learn to do new things despite memory problems, and how this contrasts with the current government strategy for caring and treating individuals with dementia.

Clare Potter (Poet) will discuss the way in which poetry makes us remember, but also lets us experience as if for the first time.

In addition, Dr Martin O’Neill (Cesagen, Cardiff University) will distribute a short article on the subject of dignity and the care of older people.

Tickets for the film can be purchased from Chapter. The post-film discussion is free to attend.

Cesagen to Sponsor the Next Cardiff sciSCREEN

2011-06-27T00:10:00.000-07:00

Cesagen (ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics) will be the sponsors of the next Cardiff sciSCREEN; a screening and discussion of Poetry (dir: Chang Dong-Lee). Cesagen is an interdisciplinary research centre based at the universities of Cardiff and Lancaster.

At the sciSCREEN we will have four speaker who will address topics such as:

The genetics behind Alzheimer’s Disease and recent developments in the field.
How poetry makes us remember, but also lets us experience as if for the first time.
The role that art plays in allowing us to acknowledge and engage with the potential meaninglessness and tragedy of life.
The ways in which people with Alzheimer’s can learn to do new things despite memory problems, and how this contrasts with the current government strategy for caring and treating individuals with dementia.

Further detail of the speakers will be put up shortly.

Into Eternity: Remembering to Forget our Nuclear Legacy By Chris Groves

2011-05-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

The following is a piece written by Chris Groves formerly of BRASS and now at Cesagen and was delivered before the film Into Eternity as part of Chapter Arts Centre's Green Festival.

When asked whether he would leap in a river to save his drowning brother, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane is reputed to have said that he would risk his life for two brothers or eight cousins. Haldane’s response reflected what he felt to be the difference, from a biologist’s perspective, between what he shared in common with his own siblings on the one hand, and children of a parent’s siblings on the other. Aware that you’d typically share half your genes with a brother or sister, and one-eighth with a cousin, he was able to give a precise estimate as to the weight of his sense of obligation in either case.

We might feel inclined to similar conclusions, should we be asked what we might do for future people. Our children command great, unconditional sacrifices, our grandchildren maybe somewhat less, and so goes a pattern of weakening bonds that goes to encompass our great-grandchildren, great-great -grandchildren and then further generations we will have little or no chance of meeting. What makes the difference here? Even if we don’t share Haldane’s genetic frame of reference, then there will be other considerations: the increasing temporal distance which makes the identities of future descendants increasingly mysterious, for example, along with the uncertainty about how what you do during your lifetime might impact upon those more distant, unimaginable generations. And each generation ahead of us will stand in the same relationship to its children as we do to ours, further weakening the sense of a unique morel connection between us and temporally-distant others.

Into Eternity focuses on a by-product of our everyday lives which undermines these kinds of assumptions, and places us in an inescapable, uncannily intimate, yet thoroughly fragile relationship with people who will belong to, not the third, fourth, sixth or tenth generation to follow us, but to generations tens of thousands of years distant. There is somewhere between 2 and 300,000 tons of high –level nuclear waste (HLW) extant worldwide, produced mainly within fission processes in reactor cores. Such waste will threaten dangerous radioactive contamination of the environment – air, soil and groundwater, for up to 100,000 years. The film thus concerns our non-negotiable duty of care to deal responsibly with this waste for the duration of this period.

This responsibility has no historical precedent – it means taking care of not just one generation, nor two or even three – but hundreds of generations. Framed as a kind of letter to these future generations, Into Eternity presents us with the starkest form of a basic contradiction that arises from our dependence upon advanced technologies. This contradiction concerns how these technologies enhance our capacity to act in a way which races far ahead of our ability to understand the consequences of our actions.

Scientific knowledge of the natural world over the last couple of centuries has enabled humans to penetrate deep into and remodel the structure of matter – leading to the development of synthetic chemistry, to molecular biology and biotechnology and most recently to nanotechnology. But despite granting this power, scientific knowledge is not necessarily equally successful in predicting the future outcomes of how these technologies are used. At the same time, its obvious efficacy here in the present tends to make its beneficiaries overconfident that these limitations will be overcome in the future.

As the 20th century wore on, industrialised nations were repeatedly confronted by evidence of the existence of this gap between action and foresight. The assurance that scientific knowledge could transform the future from a terrain that had once been imagined as belonging exclusively to supernatural agencies or to fate into an infinitely malleable terrain of endless progress, was shaken by discovery of the unintended consequences of the use of DDT, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), benzene, heavy metals, endocrine disrupting chemicals, thalidomide, asbestos, and so on.

Instead of being the rightful domain of human progress, the future began to be imagined as a terrain of risk, of new uncertainties derived, not from our dependence on nature, but from what the philosopher Alfred Nordmann (2005) has called “naturalised technology”, technology whose latent effects across space and time are essentially incomprehensible to the present. Instead of a belief in progress, industrialised societies often manifest an attachment to security and safety. The irony here is that, the authorities tasked with governing the risky future generated by their societies’ dependence on advanced technologies respond by seeking to develop better scientific means to predict when and how potential hazards might eventuate, even as the temporal scope – the “timescape” (Adam and Groves 2007) – of their responsibilities extend ever further into the future, as evidenced by anthropogenic climate change, the release of genetically modified organisms - and nuclear waste. The desire for safety brings a greater desire to trust the promise of scientific prediction, even as it becomes more and more fragile in the face of the tasks we set it.

In Into Eternity we are introduced to a variety of people – scientists, engineers, tunnellers, politicians, administrators, even a theologian – involved with the construction in Finland of Onkalo, a 500 metre deep waste storage facility which will be completed sometime next century, and within which will be buried the HLW from Finland’s nuclear programme. A facility, as one interviewee within the film points out, only for the waste from one small nation (how many others will be needed…?).

[Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant]

Addressing itself to future people who have opened the facility and discovered it contents, the film maps the various moral positions adopted by different actors in response to the inescapable yet indeterminate future-oriented responsibility incarnated in Onkalo. Is the safest thing really to place the waste deep below the surface (imagined by various participants as unstable, unsafe, constantly changing) within the bedrock, where the clock, as one interviewee puts it, moves more slowly than up above? If so, should future people be warned about what lies beneath the surface? And how can this be done? How can we expect to communicate with people who will live up to twenty times further into the future than the history of human literacy stretches back into the past?

For a number of those intimately involved with the planning and construction of the facility, the best thing would appear to be to protect the facility from all human interference – and so to move it entirely out of sight, out of reach, and out of mind; to erase, to actively forget its existence. Yet how will we impose this forgetting on future generations: how will we, and they, remember to forget? Perhaps the most arresting sequences from the film are those concerned with the blasters and tunnellers, who descend into the tunnels in the darkness of the early morning and return from work at night, engaged in the repetitive labour of setting charges, blasting, excavating and clearing. Like the masons of medieval cathedrals, they will likely not live to see their work completed. Yet, if the moral perspective of those who believe in the need to forget carries the day, then the efforts of the workers creating Onkalo will have been devoted not to erecting a monument to the values of the present, but to eradicating all their traces.

References
Adam, B. and Groves, C. 2007. Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics. Leiden: Brill.
Nordmann, A. 2005. Noumenal technology: reflections on the incredible tininess of Nano. Techne 8(3), pp. 3-23.

For more on the ethical aspects of our relationship with technology and future generations, see the website for the In Pursuit of the Future project.

Into Eternity - Sunday 22nd May

2011-05-18T05:02:00.000-07:00

On Sunday at 7:30pm, as part of Chapter Art Centre's Green Festival, Dr Chris Groves of Cesagen will be giving an introductory talk before a screening of Into Eternity.

Every day the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste are generated by nuclear power plants. This must be placed in interim storage, vulnerable to disasters, wars and societal upheaval. No long term solution to this problem exists at present, yet in Finland, efforts are being made to develop one. This is Onkalo, intended to be the world’s first permanent repository for high level waste. Hewn out of solid rock, the depository consists of a huge system of underground tunnels that must protect the waste stored there safely for 100,000 years.

Into Eternity explores, through a series of interviews with those involved in its construction, the ethical and practical complexities which surround Onkalo. At its heart lies the intransigent problem of how to communicate warnings about lethal dangers that will still be understandable hundreds of centuries in the future.

Runt: taking part in the making of a short pilot By Katie Featherstone

2011-05-04T02:34:00.000-07:00

The following is a special blog piece written by Katie Featherstone outlining her experience of being on set of a short pilot: Runt.

As I write, wailing and howling comes from deep in the woods, crashing through the peace of the countryside. We are in remote Camarthenshire and the 30 strong film crew swarm round a beaten up 4x4 carrying a camera and a generator. Drunkle (the main character) is driving the car down the narrow country lane. ‘Runt’ is a short pilot based on the Niall Griffiths novel examining the aftermath of the foot and mouth outbreak on rural communities in South Wales, funded by the Film Agency for Wales, The University of Glamorgan and the MEDIA Programme Of the European Union.

This is my first collaboration with Fizzy Oppe of Fragrant Films, a film producer and sciSCREEN regular – we (plus Jamie) are working on a Broadcast Development Award application for the Wellcome Trust (who are very encouraging) to co-produce a short film examining issues of mental health. To kick-start this project, I had planned to visit Fizzy on the set of her current project ‘Runt’. Fizzy has already managed to rope my partner (Nick) into the project - his facility and production company is supplying the RED camera and lighting – when she calls the day before the shoot asking if I would play one of the characters- the only requirement is that the actress must be a redhead. She is clearly desperate, so although a little taken aback, I say yes, happy to help, but….. I have a busy week…... Fizzy instantly replies ‘Katie darling, perfect, thank-you, this is the first scene, see you in the morning’ and puts the phone down.

When I turn up for the technical rehearsal the following morning, I am introduced to the crew as ‘Bethan’ the character. During the day the crew ask how long I have been an actress- erm, 5 minutes? I discuss my character with the director (Ieuan Morris), what do I need to do in my scene, and how ‘smiling, she gives an apologetic wave’ should look. Once I get home, I read the script again and notice it says ‘waving, she gives an apologetic smile’, this changes everything and I practice in the bathroom mirror.

We arrive on location: a small hamlet in the middle of nowhere, with the pub our location base. After lunch the first assistant director (Sarah, there are three AD’s on the shoot) calls ‘Bethan, time for make-up’ and the two make-up artists (Nell Bat and Catrin Williams) give me a wonderful florid pink bruise and a dressing, then hand me over to the costume designer (Alison Saunders) who shows me an array of dowdy costumes. We dissolve into giggles as we pick perhaps the most extreme costume, a pale blue cotton nightdress, a faded dressing gown and a pair of her mum’s very old and worn fluffy slippers. Everyone laughs when they see me, I embody dowdy and vulnerable. It is 1.30 and as I walk out of the pub into the daylight a group of locals drinking pints of larger outside all stop and stare and one stands up and looks very concerned asking ‘Are you ok?’ make-up and wardrobe have obviously excelled themselves. I head over to the crew and Nick looks shocked but also highly amused and proceeds to take pictures, emailing them to a number of our friends.

My status seemed to change once in full make-up and costume and classified as an ‘actor’; the care I received was fabulous- I had my own water bottle, endless offers of tea, not allowed to carry anything and a chair provided while we waited for the crew to get the scene ready. I have never had such attention. It was clear that the actors hang out together on set - so I spent the morning with Richard Harrington – by now transformed into Drunkle (a dark and brooding makeover), who was very kind and welcoming.

We go through three rehearsals of ‘Boy leaves the house and Bethan waves from the doorway giving an apologetic smile’. For the first take I come out onto the front step, wave and go back inside closing the door, for take two I come out to the step and stay there, for the third and final take I stand in the doorway and stay there to the end of the shot. The director is pleased with this and it felt right to me- I don’t think a battered and bruised woman would leave the threshold - one of my guilty pleasures is watching ‘The Actors Studio’. I spend the rest of the day watching the crew and the actors (Richard Harrington and Jams Powys) at work; they both give powerful performances to camera, take after take and I enjoy watching their characters unfold. Another key character is Arrn, an outstanding performance by Geoff the greyhound, who during one particularly emotional scene steals the show by putting a comforting paw on Boy’s leg while looking at him with his large sad eyes. As the director says ‘cut’, the entire crew spontaneously gave Geoff a round of applause.

At the end of the day the crew re-convene at the local pub, and as the locals order rounds of WKD and port (yes, really), I laugh with the Director of Photography (Timo Salminen) asking him for reassurance that my scene will look haunting and he teasingly apologises for not having time for my close-up, the Director thanks me for a wonderful performance and gives me a hug and Richard thanks me with a kiss goodbye. They are all extremely kind given my obvious lack of any talent….but watch this space, there is a long tradition of women who have played ‘dowdy’ going on to win Oscars- Nicole Kidman (The Hours), Charlize Theron (Monsters), Halle Berry (Monsters Ball), Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side) …

I hope we can premier Runt at sciSCREEN, this film touches on issues of grief, suicide, social deprivation and regeneration, emphasizing the importance for farming communities of maintaining a strong connection with the land and the devastating effects of the foot and mouth crisis in 2002. It would also be a chance for us all to meet and support local film-makers, the crew were mainly young filmmakers based in Cardiff, some had heard of sciSCREEN and were keen to hear more about what we do. This short film is also only the first step of a bigger project; the team is working towards obtaining funding for a feature length version and perhaps sciSCREEN can support them on that journey.

Black Swan: From the sublime to the... by Michelle Ryan

2011-05-04T02:20:00.000-07:00

The following is a piece written by Michele Ryan and relates to our sciSCREENing of The Black Swan last Thursday.

This was a film I was hoping to enjoy – a female protagonist, ballet, wonderful music, madness and melodrama! Unfortunately, I was on the whole disappointed - it is far more conventional and (for want of a better word) ‘patriarchal’ than this. Within postmodern discourse there is much about the ‘return to the body’, subjectivity, intersubjectivity and agency as well as looking at ideas of abjection, subjection and monstrosity. And there are elements of all of these in this film as well as an impressive performance from Portman etc. but the film lacks narrative cohesion and is sloppy in its representation of madness and disintegration.

Some of these points can be highlighted by the comparison between Black Swan and Red Shoes: the British film made by Powell and Pressburger in 1948. In Red Shoes, Moira Shearer (a real dancer) chooses dancing over life and submits to Lehmentov’s ambitions for her and his power and control over her. She then falls in love with the composer and at the end, torn between the competing demands and control of the two men and her own desire to dance, flings herself off the balcony into the path of an oncoming train (shades of Anna Karenina). A melodramatic end to an insoluble crisis born out of a desire that cannot be realised both in society (in the post war period a woman had few rights in marriage, was rarely able to work and all important decisions and powers resided with the husband), and in the construction of film and the potential horror of a woman fully realising her desires. In order to attain her desire she must enter into the world of male power and control and she finds herself powerless to resist that dominance and control so her death is melodramatic because it is inevitable and symbolizes that world where men’s power is often represented on and over women’s bodies.

Black Swan could be viewed as a contemporary re-working of Red Shoes fitting into a ‘postmodern’ 21st century representation. Problematic as that term might be for people, there are many women/feminists writing about film and representation who are attempting to look at the woman/female body – what it embodies, what gets represented (through it, and on it) particularly in relation to ‘the other’, who and what ‘the other’ is and so here it is interesting that in Black Swan a significant ‘other’ is the mother. Some French feminist critics (Kristeva, Iragaray) have focused on the pre-oedipal phase and the relationship to the mother, particularly the rejection of the mother as a prerequisite for the child’s acquisition of language. They argue that this is the space where the female abject body comes into being because there is no way of remaining within that ‘maternal’, connected space without being subjected to hysteria (Freud indicated that the hysteric converts mind to body and translates her fears and repressions into a language of body images), self destruction and annihilation.

However, most of these feminists who are writing within film and cultural theory view this ‘abjection’ as a space for breaking free from the confines of patriarchy or male dominance, a space where liberation can happen, where obsessions, perversions, phobias and the grotesque threaten to destabilise the symbolic order. What’s interesting about Black Swan is that these ideas are present in the film and are referenced in terms of the horror but only shallowly and confusedly. I get the impression that at least one of the writers (all male) had encountered some of these feminist critiques around representation and embodiment possibly through their film theory courses and thrown them in without understanding or exploring them!

Aronofsky chooses to ‘subject’ Portman by only allowing her limited access to his ideas and intentions thereby making her produce a performance which appears to be about abjection and desire but which collapses into a confused set of ideas rarely followed through. This is a film made by a man whose basic resolution of the fear/threat/dilemma of this embodied, abject woman (who can be seen as the dangerous other) is to annihilate her instead of allowing the two (black and white) to merge into a truly powerful woman. As Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in Second Sex woman’s body is the repository both of men's fears and his desires, of his repulsions and his dreams. The psychological ambivalence de Beauvoir describes, informs the cultural identification of the female body with the beautiful and the grotesque, and as an obstacle to the sublime. And it is interesting as well in that what she destroys is her womb or at least the space near that. The female body can and in this film does carry these projections on to it and is both a site of fear, danger, eroticism and liberation depending on who is looking, who is controlling, who has power, who is subordinated and who is subordinating and this is where I think the film fails because it doesn’t realise the potential it has to create a more liberating rhetoric than the one provided trapped as it is by Aronofsky’s desire to subordinate and subdue as well.

As a film within the horror genre Aronofsky wants to ‘creep out’ his audience (his own words) but its representation of the fragmentation and breakdown of ‘self’ is clichéd (e.g. the split between black and white, passion and control, desire and repression), the over reliance on mirrors, the lack of a consistent representation of the internal experience of losing ones mind. Black Swan doesn’t go far enough in entering into the psyche of someone who genuinely feels they might be turning into something/someone else, losing a sense of body boundaries and their sense of self in relation to the other. Two films that do are Polanski’s Repulsion and Carine Adler’s Under the Skin. Black Swan, except in a couple of scenes fails to get inside anyone’s head (except perhaps Aronofsky’s) leaving us with vague ideas as to why this breakdown is happening - she’s a dancer, used to pushing her body to the limits so we have to infer she is pushed beyond her limits because a man has told her she is not able to be herself, reach the sublime until she lets her Black Swan in!

Finally as a number of people pointed out its representation of madness, self destructiveness and psychosis do very little to help us understand such states or attempt to represent them in a meaningful way.

This is a movie that touches on fears of penetration, of our body, fears of being supplanted in the affections of a powerful man, love of perfection, love of dance, and perhaps most importantly of all, passionate and overwhelming desire/hatred of the mother but ultimately this film was too scared to delve deeper into those dangerous waters.

How do you make a Black Swan by Michael Arribas-Ayllon

2011-05-04T02:13:00.000-07:00

The following is a piece written by Michael Arribas-Ayllon and relates to our sciSCREENing of The Black Swan last Thursday.

The Black Swan is a classic narrative of self-destruction and part of a long historical tradition of exploring the boundary between transformation and annihilation. Freudians call this fundamental opposition of life forces Eros (the will to life) and Thanatos (the will to death). The Black Swan is a derivative of a much older story about the struggle of these forces. In fact, it is not the first time the ballet has been used as the setting to dramatise this struggle. The tension of life and death principles and the impossibility of perfection are embodied in the persona of Nina, played by Natalie Portman.

My task is not to diagnose Nina or to offer a moral commentary on the representation of mental illness in this film. Instead, I want to focus on the question I ask in the title of this essay: How do you make a Black Swan? For me, this is a more interesting question than asking: What’s wrong with Nina? We could debate whether Nina suffers from psychosis, we could speculate the causes of her pathology, but the film is not a genre of factual representation. If anything, it is an exaggerated simulation of madness at the ballet. Aronofsky’s Black Swan is essentially a horror movie that uses the setting of the ballet to portray the fragility of female autonomy and the tragedy of perfectionism. In this short essay, I use the film as a thought-device for exploring themes of pathologies of will and transformation of self.

To answer the question How do make a Black Swan? I need two concepts. The concept of ‘power’ maps the web of relations that produce the persona of Nina; the relations in which she is both an object of control and the subject of her own control. The concept of ‘desire’ is also essential to understanding the productivity of the persona who desires perfection, but destroys herself in order to transcend it.

Power and desire is linked to two prominent themes in the film. The first theme is the ‘obsessive’ model of desire, which describes the production of Nina as the eligible White Swan. Here, the film draws on the archetype of the child whose fragility and sexual innocence embodies the qualities of rigid perfection, but not the qualities of the Black Swan. The child cannot embody the permissive desire of the temptress. We have to turn to the figure of the mother, played by Barbara Hershey, to understand the making of this child. Hershey is compelling in bringing to life the controlling, obsessive mother who lives out her own unfulfilled desires through her daughter. She controls her daughter’s body, regularly monitoring for signs of self-destruction, and creates an environment in which Nina never grows up. Surrounded by her fluffy toys and a music box playing Swan Lake, Nina lives in a Peter Pan world of her mother’s fashioning. On occasion, the film gives us reason to think that Hershey’s character is unhinged – depressed, over-protective and fixated on the daughter.

Outside the psychodrama of the mother-daughter relation, the character of Beth, played by Winona Ryder, is also an important projection of Nina’s desires. She represents the brittle object of perfection that descends into annihilation. Beth is the ballerina who has reached the end of the cycle. Once, the princess of the stage, she is discarded by an industry in search of the next princess. For Nina, Beth is the ideal she covets so much that stealing her possessions is the means of embodying her perfection; coveting the image of perfection is the child’s technique of identification. In the obsessive model of desire, we understand the making of the White Swan as the product of an obsessive mother unable to fulfil her own desires on the stage and the productivity of the obsessive child who covets the same image of perfection.

The second theme is the ‘dissociative’ model of desire, which describes the mechanism for becoming the Black Swan, the possibility of which resides in the sexually mature and sophisticated double we see in the early sequences of the film. The figure of the double is what Jung calls the alter ego (the shadow), the autonomous phantasm of the spilt self, which Nina cannot consciously reconcile as part of herself. The double is part of a different map of relations that facilitate Nina’s transformation from White to Black Swan. The figure of Tomas, the Director, plays the dominant sexual male who sees only the White Swan in Nina, but gives her the lead role after she bites him (‘I can’t believe you bit me’). Like the figure of the mother, Tomas also controls Nina’s body, but does so to subvert the frigid autonomy created by the mother. The figure of Lilly is also central as the adversary, the persona who threatens to usurp her role. She is the perfect embodiment of the Black Swan – sexual freedom and maturity – but lacks the discipline of the White Swan. Both Lilly and Tomas are devices that actively seek to stimulate and augment Nina’s sexual desire.

The theme of dissociation becomes more prominent in the second half of the film as Nina struggles to embody the role of the Black Swan. What seems to drive this process of dissociation is the emerging sexuality of the alter ego, the violent struggle between the child and the temptress. The transformation from White to Black Swan is facilitated by a series of negations: the negation of the mother, Beth, Lilly, and finally, herself. In the ensuing struggle between mother and daughter, Nina resorts to various strategies to resist the mother’s control and to hide the signs of her impending transformation. As her delusions become more prominent, Nina is also confronted by the destruction of perfection, the horribly disfigured body of Beth that transforms into her monstrous double. The Black Swan destroys Nina’s image of perfection. In the final moments of the film, the negation of Lilly represents the final obstacle in her passage to becoming the Black Swan. The real tragedy of this film is the awful realisation that she has destroyed not Lilly, but herself.

Aside from all the clichés that deliberately intensify the horror and confusion between reality and delusion, the most compelling moment of the film is when Nina literally transforms into the Black Swan. Becoming the Black Swan is itself an archetype of transformation; the monstrosity of the child that becomes a swan, the performer that transcends perfection to achieve excellence, is both a tragedy and a triumph. It is here that we are confronted by a fundamental ambivalence about what value we should give this monstrous transformation of the self. It lends itself to two different orientations, one being moral and the other being amoral. The moral reading sees only a tragedy in which the pathologies of will, the sins of the mother and the pressures of the stage are lamentable factors in the production of Nina’s madness. The amoral reading attends to the productivity of this tension between life and death, between transformation and annihilation. The Black Swan, like the birth of tragedy in the Greek tradition, invites us to look into the abyss of human suffering in order to affirm our existence, and to explore the ecstasy and terrifying possibilities of what we can become.

Ballet Fiction by Amy Doughty

2011-05-04T02:01:00.000-07:00

The following is a piece written by Amy Doughty and relates to our sciSCREENing of The Black Swan on April 14th.

I was a dancer with Ballet Cymru for 13 years. I am now assistant artistic director of the company and am responsible for the training and maintenance of all the professional dancers employed by the company. During my dancing career I danced many leading roles with the company, sustained and recovered from injuries, had an operation to remove a bone spur from my foot, forgot steps on stage, been dropped from lifts, tore and split costumes, put on weight, lost weight, worked with interesting and dynamic choreographers, and overall had a very full and exciting professional ballet dancing career.

As a film to watch for pleasure, I enjoyed Black Swan. As a film to watch for accuracy of the ballet world, it missed the mark. I will always be interested in films which highlight ballet and bring it into the focus of main stream society; however, Black Swan does not accurately depict the profession and, instead, encourages every cliché suspected of the ballet world. The premise of Black Swan could have been placed into any context, be it music, sport, academia etc., In this instance it was placed into the world of ballet but it is not really a film about ballet as such, more about Nina’s state-of-mind, obsession/commitment to her work and her subsequent loss of reality.

In my role as assistant artistic director with Ballet Cymru I endeavour to break down the myths and stereotypes which surround the ballet world and its dancers. In contrast to this, Darren Aronofsky pumps up themes of the ballet industry for dramatic effect and so consequently it becomes more a fantasy film involving an interpretation of ballet. For me, this is particularly highlighted in the casting of Natalie Portman in the role of Nina, a Hollywood actress, rather than casting an actual trained ballet dancer. I cannot help comparing Black Swan to The Red Shoes in which Moyra Sheera, a trained ballet dancer, plays the lead role. Though the plot line of The Red Shoes, as in most ballet films I have seen to date, is far reaching and bear little relation to the ballet profession, I do applaud a film which casts an actual dancer over a Hollywood starlet in a so-called ballet film. I consider Mao’s Last Dancer, an autobiographical novel and recently released film based on the life of dancer Li Cunxin, as an accurate dance film, not only because it is the story of Li’s life and his career in the world of ballet, but because it is cast using dancers of The Australian Ballet Company and Birmingham Royal Ballet Company. For this reason Mao’s Last Dancer has authenticity.

So, Black Swan is not a realistic take on the ballet world, however, there are elements of truth contained within it. The ballet world is a very hard industry. It relies heavily on image and the body, on physical prowess, technique, training and a very strong sense of will and determination. It is a short career with far too few jobs available and for this reason it is extremely competitive. Because of this, dancers tend to be very driven, focused and the outside world can, at times, become something a dancer does not always engage with (to a certain extent). In this respect the film does portray the anxieties and insecurities felt as a dancer is striving to earn her place in a company and be promoted to dance bigger roles. This is, however, exaggerated for dramatic effect by things such as the broken toe nails. In this instance we see the toe nail break and Nina gasp in pain; however, she continues to work en pointe with no further side affect or consequence. In reality this would affect her working en pointe for at least a week due to the injury needing to heal in order to bear the body’s entire weight. The teddy bears on her bed are another example, suggesting a Peter Pan type immaturity and sexual repression. To symbolise the developing fractures in her personality she stuffs her teddies in the rubbish and snaps the spinning ballerina in her jewellery box which had previously lulled her to sleep with tunes from Swan Lake, the ballet which ultimately destroys her. Her commitment with her training and the role of the Black Swan comes at the detriment of making friendships in the company and her idolisation of Beth, who unravels to the point of suicide, becomes another obsession Nina cannot control.

Indeed, Nina’s conflicts, reliance and unhealthy relationship with her pushy ballet mother is demonstrated in her mother’s obsession with Nina’s working and private life, her paintings of Nina, and Nina’s inability to sever herself from her controlling mother. Only through physical pain such as trapping her mother’s fingers in the door and Nina taking her own life can Nina finally sever ties with her mother. Nina’s eating is the one thing she can control and she does this through bulimia. This is done almost in defiance of her mother and Thomas who control every other aspect of her life.

There is some accuracy in the way Thomas pushes his dancers in different ways to produce different results from them but to show him as a sexual predator was highly dramatised. In reality, dancers are protected from this kind of treatment just as individuals are in any other type of work environment with policies, procedures, and good management. There are elements of truth in the way Nina attempts to find the resources to help in her interpretation and connection to the role of Black Swan. Her innocence and purity makes her a natural White Swan yet she knows to dance a convincing Black Swan she needs to find a way to access a darker, or more adventurous side to her personality - a side which has been suppressed. She does this through the exploration of her sexuality, of experimenting with drugs, and through defying her mother. In the end Nina discovers power, both in relation to her mother and with Thomas, and emerges as someone who is finally able to take control of her own life. Unfortunately this comes at the detriment of her existence - once this is realised it is too late to save her.

In truth, Black Swan is a Hollywood version based on observations of the ballet world from an outsider’s point-of-view and taken to the extreme. I doubt Aronofsky’s main concern was to produce a completely realistic film depicting the ballet world, or about psychosis for that matter. His intention was to create a film which would be entertaining and thrilling and perhaps give insight into these areas but ultimately with an Oscar in sight, not realism. While Black Swan did not dispel any myths about the ballet world I cannot deny there are fragments of truth displayed throughout the film. It was a convincing portrayal for the outside world but in reality it was all fantasy and cliché.

The Destruction of Divas by Paul Atkinson

2011-04-18T03:48:00.000-07:00

The following is a piece written by Paul Atkinson and relates to our sciSCREENing of The Black Swan last Thursday.

I do not intend to talk a great deal about the film itself – we are not here to be amateur film critics, but to sketch a few points of cultural comparison, in order to put the film in a particular kind of context. My remarks are derived from opera and ballet, two performance genres that share many mythological characteristics. I do so because it seems to me that Black Swan works – insofar as it does work – by weaving together some well-worn narrative themes.

Opera and ballet share a common characteristic in that they are often portrayed as excessive. They transcend the bounds of normality, and can become not merely unusual forms of expression, but abnormal and unnatural as well. Their characters and their performers alike can be portrayed as monstrous – albeit as ‘sacred monsters’. So too can their presiding geniuses (such as Diaghilev).

The leading lady, the prima donna or the prima donna assoluta, is especially susceptible to monstrosity. One needs to think, for instance, only of the mythologised life of someone like Maria Callas. Exceeding the bounds of normal performance and normal behaviour, they are transformed into something ‘other’. At the same time, they are readily portrayed as victims, usually victims of a manipulative and potentially malevolent male figure. Think of Trilby and Svengali, or Christine and the Phantom of the Opera. These fictional narrative depend on the image of the (female) performer achieving perfection as a kind of hypnotically-induced hysteria.

These divas can, therefore, be consumed in the perfection of their art, and are destroyed in the very act of performing. Let us return to film. The film antecedent of Black Swan is Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger). In many ways this was the better film. By casting Moira Shearer, a dancer, in the lead, the directors were able to make dance itself a more vivid part of the narrative. They had fragments of a ballet, based on the Andersen story of the Red Shows, created for the film. (By contrast Black Swan has some pretty jejune shots of what actually seems to be a very traditional version of Swan Lake). The ballet and the film’s characters’ lives are intertwined. The ballerina is driven (by the red shoes themselves, by the impasse of her emotional life) to throw herself to a death.

This is a sort of Liebestod – a consummation of oblivion. The self-immolation of the dancer or the singer thus parallels the mythical, sacrificial destruction of the heroine in opera and ballet’s tragedies. Interestingly, there is an interesting parallel her in another of the Powell and Pressburger films – their version of Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann (which had performers in common with Red Shoes, including Moira Shearer and Robert Helpman). In a series of episodes, a series of failed loves are recounted. In the first, the hero encounters Olympia, who turns out to be a mechanical doll, created and then destroyed as she dances, by Dr Coppelius. In the second, he finds Antonina, who (the reasons need not detain us) must not sing, but under the influence of Dr Miracle, she sings herself to death.

To return to Black Swan, then, it draws on all of these, and other recurrent themes. It is thus part of a mythology of the performing arts, in which obsession, hysteria and excess drive the (female) performer, in which the (male) manipulator leads towards a destructive impulse, and in which there can be a sort of resolution in art-death.

Black Swan sciSCREEN - Thursday 14th April

2011-04-06T06:12:00.000-07:00

The next Cardiff sciSCREEN is Black Swan on Thursday the 14th April at 6.15pm at Chapter.

Black Swan is a psychological thriller from Darren Aronofsky, director of Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Wrestler. The film was nominated for several Academy Awards, with Natalie Portman winning the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Nina. The film takes viewers on a journey through Nina’s mental disintegration as she competes with a rival dancer during a production of Swan Lake. This screening will be followed by a sciSCREEN event, sponsored by the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics. After the film there will be a wine reception and panel discussion in which academics and other experts - including a member of Ballet Cymru - will use this film to explore ideas such as the causes of psychosis and the nature of experience, the subjection of women’s bodies, the portrayal of the world of ballet, and the mythology of the 'diva'.

Apologies: as this is the official trailer, it is, in turn, preceeded by a mini-trailer.

As this film is being screened in the smaller of the Chapter cinemas, advance booking is advised. Tickets can be booked over the phone (029 2030 4400) or via the Chapter website. Entry to the post-film sciSCREEN event is free, though space is limited.

The speakers for the event are:

Professor Paul Atkinson, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
Dr James Walters, MRC CNGG and Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute, Cardiff University
Dr Michael Arribas-Ayllon, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
Michele Ryan, Ex TV director, film/media lecturer, and counsellor
Amy Doughty, Ballet Cymru

Recognising the relationships between donors and their recipients: The missing ‘others’ in Never Let Me Go.

2011-04-05T03:51:00.000-07:00

The following is a personal piece written by BD, a member of Cesagen, which relates to our sciSCREENing of Never Let Me Go.

Never Let Me Go followed the lives of a group of ‘donors’ as they carried out their everyday, routine and mundane existence. Whether one thought the film dull or harrowing, it certainly prompted reflection of one’s own mortality and for me this meant thinking about my personal experience of being a recipient of a transplanted organ. From this position, my main criticism of the film was that it ignored any relationship between donor and recipient, and the value that this relationship might have for both parties.

One issue raised during the sciSCREEN discussion was why the children/young adults did not question their fate or attempt to run away (this is explored by Dr Mellor in his commentary on voluntary servitude). The discussion considered the possibilities of social conditioning, drugs that made the donors compliant, isolation and reduced possibilities for collective rebellion. Yet their lack of rebellion might also be explained by their implicit relationships, based on promise and expectation, with the potential recipients.

I was born with Cystic Fibrosis and during my teenage years my health had deteriorated to such an extent that I was on oxygen 24 hours a day and had to be fed through a tube in my stomach. My heart and lung transplant in 1996 (at the age of 23) brought with it a new life and I continued my studies, moved out of my family home and began living independently. Relationships between the recipient and the donor or donor family were not encouraged within my clinic but I was able to make contact, and therefore my experience might be very different to most. I have met and kept in touch with the family of the young boy who lost his life and from whom I received my new heart and lungs, as well as the man who received my own heart.

Although my heart was healthy, the heart and lungs were easier to transplant as a package rather than negotiate the complex web of nerves that links the two. I was therefore involved in a ‘domino transplant’ which meant that as I received my new heart and lungs, my own heart was given to someone else. While I was in theatre, my family began talking to another family in the waiting room whose relative was having a heart transplant. It soon became apparent that this was the wife and two sons of the recipient of my heart. During recuperation, my family brought me news of this stranger’s progress, and when I was well enough to leave my room I went to meet him and we stayed in touch until he passed away 10 years later.

In contrast to the opportunistic meeting with my ‘heart man’, it was my mother who had purposefully sought contact with my donor family in the desire to thank them and to provide them with news of my good health. She was told that she could write an anonymous letter that would be sent to the donor’s family if and when they requested contact. Despite these rules, my mother included her own address and within days had received a response. Through this letter I found out that my donor was a 15 year old boy who had been knocked down while crossing the road on his way to school. His mother sent me a photograph of a handsome and strong boy who was good at sport and had many friends. His mother and father visited some months later, and we even appeared on Richard and Judy together (Judy was ill on the day so Caron Keating took her place).

For a recipient, the relationship between donor or donor family can be extremely difficult. I have known people refuse to have a transplant because they cannot cope with the fact that they might benefit from another person’s death. In fact, very few people I know who have had a transplant have met their donor families or even know anything about their donor. Every milestone, such as surviving the first month and celebrating the first, fifth and tenth years, were a reminder of the different fortunes of our two families, yet the contact with my donor family has been really important in making sense of my new life. If a transplant is considered a ‘gift’ (Richard Titmus, 1970) then for my family and I it was important to say thank you.

Developments in medical technology might lead to an increasingly significant relationship between donor and recipient. Saviour siblings (where embryos are selected to be a genetically identical match for an ill child) and living donors (where relatives or even strangers might agree to donate an organ such as a kidney or part of their lung) have the potential to transform existing relationships. Yet the invisibility of the donor recipients in this film is not surprising. Never Let Me Go could be characterised by a distinct lack of ‘others’. Hospital wards were empty, the bleak countryside was unpopulated and even a normally bustling sea front appeared deserted. While this served to emphasise the isolation felt by this group, an opportunity to explore this unique relationship has, in my opinion, been missed.

How can we account for voluntary servitude? Some sociological thoughts on Never Let Me Go By David Mellor

2011-03-25T04:36:00.000-07:00

The following is a piece written by Dr. David Mellor from the Graduate School of Education at Bristol University and relates to our sciSCREENing of Never Let Me Go on Wednesday evening.

When we watch Never Let Me Go, we might be left with a question hanging uncomfortably in the air. It might go something like this: Why didn’t the donors just run away instead of accepting their fate? A central theme within the film might well be that at some point we all have to turn from life and face the inevitability of our own death. And in some senses the search for a love to be shared with someone else can very comfortably be read as an example of an illusion that we all share in maintaining; namely, that love can be some kind of transcendent passage for each of us to escape the inevitability of our organic demise.

Yet, this does not explain why the central characters are all willing to accept the fate that has been presented to them. It is true that they are told from the earliest age that they are something special, something precious that is in many ways a gift – a gift they carry in (as) their bodies and that they will eventually be able to share with someone else (or a number of people) through the donation of their body parts. We could chose to stop with this interpretation and see the film (and novel on which it is based) as a kind of allegory on the nature of human love and sacrifice.

For a sociologist, however, the uncomfortable question of the donors’ acceptance of their fate remains, albeit in a different form, and in the shape of a different allegory. This relates to the following question: how, in this dystopia, do they remain tied to the power of the state? As it is indeed the state that is the unspoken presence in the film: what, after all, sanctions and governs the process of donations? We only get a hint of it visually through the bleeping box on the wall that all the clones must scan their wristbands on as they leave and enter their homes. Such a form of power needs to be explored and explained, because the donors find it impossible to run away from the system that condemns them to an early death. More than this though, from a sociological perspective, we may be interested in what this might say about our own relations to state power and our willing acceptance of subjugation and inequality.

So why do people act in ways that are objectively against their own interests? One explanation might be ideology. A classical Marxist perspective would suggest that people suffer from ‘false consciousness’ that is the result of powerful ideas fed to them through the structures and practices of society, including for instance education. We see this early on in the film, when the children are at the boarding school; both overtly through the song they sing in morning assembly and more subtly through the image of the small pill cups that accompany their bottles of milk (a pharmacological metaphor for state control). But false consciousness does not account in any clear way for the actual actions of people in the real world – they are rather simply positioned as ‘cultural dupes’ who have been conned into behavior determined by the puppet masters of the dominant, ruling classes. In this view, the state rules with iron certainty, and people are ‘drugged’ into a state of obedience through ideas. Individuals can only escape if they have their false consciousness removed and replaced with a vision of ‘how the world really is.’ This is fine, as far as it goes, but people are not really able to do this for themselves, and must be instructed in some way, ultimately through political revolution. Thus, ideology is the only true power that is recognized; individual people are rendered effectively powerless under its spell.

The theory that was meant to supersede and improve on ideology was ‘hegemony’, as argued, for example, by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. With the theory of hegemony we see the dual aspect of coercion and consent. So now in addition to the power of the state, we have a sense that people act in some way to continue their own domination; they are not simply coerced but productively consent to this state of affairs. So the donors, instead of trying to escape the system of donations altogether, try to change it and find exceptions – like the mythical ‘deferrals’ – thereby giving the system legitimacy and working to keep themselves the subjects of its domination. This means that there is now a newly found symmetry to power – power is held by both the state and the individual and exists as a relation between them.

However, while this gives people some level of agency and shows that domination can be maintained through subtle paths as well as through full-blown oppression, it does not adequately explain how the status quo of subjugation is maintained or how (more importantly) it can be escaped. Because for hegemony to make sense, escape must still necessarily come in the form of a political revolution – individuals themselves ultimately remain under the control of some kind of state-centered authoritarianism. Even though the processes of power are spread through and between individuals, they themselves remain incapable of effective action against oppression, as it is the state that still supplies all available forms of citizenship. So, for example, the donors may be re-categorized as something like ‘clone people’ and allowed to hang on to their vital organs, but this need not necessarily mean they would be accepted as ‘normal people’ by others – we can imagine that they are likely to remain dehumanized.

This might well leave us quite depressed! But there is an alternative idea: it comes through a form of anarchism that has been explored by the political theorist Saul Newman. If we accept, as hegemony suggests, that our acquiescence to power also constitutes that power, then we might start by looking at desire as opposed to politics as such. This isn’t a rejection of politics but a new way of constituting what the political actually is. It means understanding how – in the case of the clones for example – people become bound to state-definitions of types of citizenship, like ‘donor’. This is the bond of voluntary servitude that sustains state dominance, and it means realizing that people actually desire and wish for their own subjugation. People willing give up their real freedom because the state provides tantalizing, tempting ways of thinking that give the apparent freedom of individualization – such as the way capitalism constantly produces new ways of looking, acting, consuming and so on that make us believe we must constantly up-date ourselves (even though we might know, at some level, this is all just a con). In Never Let Me Go, for instance, becoming a ‘carer’ represents a minor compensation for the humiliation of domination: this is an excellent example of how obedience is assured through a tiny shred of power derived from the state.

How could we use this notion to think otherwise about the fate of the donors? On face value it might seem very close to the idea of hegemony. However, where it makes a crucial departure from Gramsci’s ideas is in seeing servitude as something of our own creation and, consequently, we become the site for radical change and not the state. So instead of revolution, which aims at the Political, we (and the clones) could build on the notion of voluntary servitude to look towards an alternative: namely, insurrection. Insurrection is a form of micro-politics that rejects tyrannical power and aims to liberate the individual through a dis-identification with the state. Its fundamental difference is that it imagines political action beginning from the individual, through new techniques and practices of doing selfhood (in the case of the donors’, a refusal of their state defined fate and a claiming of a new form of post-state citizenship). This involves a very different perspective of human nature to that which has informed mainstream modern Western political theory, as it questions the very legitimacy of the state, rather then trying to assert its inevitability.

This isn’t to say that people can simply wish themselves out of their circumstances. It is, though, a means for imagining how radical spaces could be found for what the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault called ‘indocility’ and ‘inservitude’ – the refusal of power’s domination over our selves. The fact that state forms of power rely inherently on the complicity of individuals demonstrates their inherent weakness; something neither ideology nor hegemony truly account for. In sum then, yes, it is productive to read Never Let Me Go as an allegory for love and the desire for corporeal escape through some truly romantic and spiritual experience; but it is also highly productive to consider this narrative as an expression of how people experience – and ultimately succumb to – a short life of voluntary servitude.

The Relationship Between Art and the Soul by Andrew Edgar

2011-03-23T02:46:00.000-07:00

The following is a piece written by Dr. Andrew Edgar from the Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy and relates to our sciSCREENing of Never Let Me Go tonight.

Art offers an insight into the soul; indeed, art is proof that we have souls.

The children at Hailsham are encouraged to produce art, or more precisely, poetry, paintings and sculptures, to be included in Madame’s somewhat mysterious gallery. Tommy speculates that the art works will offer proof that a couple can be in love. Tommy is wrong, but not entirely off the mark. The children’s art turns out to be part of an ineffectual ethical assessment of the donation programme. The capacity to produce art might prove that the cloned children have souls, and thus moral status. This conceit makes a number of interesting claims about the relationship between art and human nature.

Firstly, in order to produce art, the artist seemingly requires a creative imagination and for there to be some inner state that can be manifested in the art work. The soul is both a capacity (creative imagination) and an expressible content, some form of subjective self-awareness and a psychological life. What we glimpse of the children’s art suggests that this soul-content manifests itself only in attractive use of colour and design, and given the ridicule that Tommy’s elephant painting receives, good mimetic skills. The implication may be that the soul is little more than the ability to recognise and create that which gives aesthetic pleasure.

Towards the end of Bladerunner, the dying replicant Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) releases a dove. If this is not a rather embarrassing example of the director just being pretentious, then it is the replicant’s inept attempt to express himself (and thus to create art). The dove is not merely beautiful. Rather its conjuring and release strives to articulate something of Batty’s emotional life; it is the manifestation of his aspirations and frustrations. Bladerunner of course grounds this question of self-expression, and thus the question of the possession of a soul or humanity, in the issue of verifiable memory. Bladerunner is thus, philosophically, rooted in John Locke’s account of personal identity in terms of memory and anticipation; Never Let me Go is more Cartesian, presupposing that art might give the clue to something akin to Descartes’ soul substance.

Secondly, only a few art genres are privileged. The children are not encouraged to perform, so there is no music, or dance or theatre. Perhaps this is simply a matter of practicality, as paintings and poems can be more readily stored and documented. But there is something more subtle here. The human soul is manifest, seemingly, in introspection, not in performance or action. It may be noted that the children play sport, and yet the creativity and free activity of sport is not considered possible evidence of the soul. There is again something worryingly Cartesian here, with its implicit dualism of the soul and body. The clones are bodies, evidently. Indeed, the problem is that they are considered little more than bodies. It is not clear that a body that is made rather than begotten (to use the vocabulary of the Nicene Creed) has a soul. The ability to use that body creatively and expressively is not considered evidence of genuine humanity.

Thirdly, the only art that seems to matter is the spontaneous, untrained, art of the child. Tommy’s art, even if created when he is a young adult, shares this lack of tuition (although it does have an expressive angularity that goes beyond the children’s art we have seen). Here, the story evokes the interest in the art of children (and ironically, in Tommy’s art, those suffering mental health problems) that was fashionable in the late 1960s. The story champions an innocence, that is uncorrupted by the artificiality and calculation of education or civilisation (and thus perhaps, the influence of television, against which Kathy protests later in the story). This art is evidence, not simply of the soul, but of the sort of soul that is possessed by Rousseau’s noble savage, or perhaps Levi-Strauss’ savage mind.

These comments hopefully suggested that the link that Never Let me Go presupposes between art and the soul is highly problematic. Neither art nor human nature are well understood. Humanity (and thus the claim to moral consideration) is reduced to the possession of a soul. Proper humans are souls that have bodies; clones simply are their bodies. The soul is a capacity for creative imagination, and this allows for the production of art. But the understanding of art is highly individualistic and intuitive. It is merely the production of beauty. Art is not allowed any communal significance, and it is stripped from its history and cultural development. It is seemingly little more than a diverting but ultimately idle play, rather than a source of self-understanding, or the expression of aspirations, hopes and fears. The irony of Tommy’s art is that is does struggle towards self-expression, and away from the merely beautiful (although it may still merely betray his tormented psychological state, rather than genuinely encourage reflection and self-understanding).

Whether these misunderstandings are those of Mark Romanek and Kazuo Ishiguro or Miss Emily and Madame is unclear. There are better indicators of humanity’s moral status (and the pursuit of art, especially in this superficial form, may blind the authors or their characters to those indicators, not least that the clones are capable of playing a full part in a human linguistic and cultural community). Perhaps, ultimately, it is the passivity of the clones before their eventual fate is evidence of their lack of a soul. Certainly, their characters are otherwise profoundly unconvincing as fictional constructions. Although even this may also be the failure of their art. Caught up in the mere production of beauty, this pseudo-art may inhibit the very self-understanding that might allow the clones to rebel.

A final thought: in 2003 a flint object was found on the Loire. It was carved, around 35000 years ago, seemingly to resemble a face, with bone fragments as eyes. It is thus an early example of art. It is thought to have been made by Neanderthals.

The Future Is Behind Us: Tissue Engineering, the State of the Art by Ilyas Khan

2011-03-23T02:39:00.000-07:00

The following is a piece written by Dr. Ilyas Khan - a research scientist at the Cardiff School of Biosciences - and relates to our sciSCREENing of Never Let Me Go tonight.

Human ingenuity knows no bounds, if we consider even just casually the achievements of mankind and the depth of understanding we have acquired of the nature of being in this universe, it beggars the mind to comprehend. The last man who could rightfully claim ‘all knowledge as his domain’ was the polymath Athanasius Kircher who died in 1680. To cope with the avalanche of new knowledge generated since, science and technology has fragmented to such an extent that separate fields of specialised study have emerged in order to facilitate advancement. Occasionally, these separate fields collide and fuse to generate new amalgamated sources of knowledge, one such example is Tissue Engineering (more commonly referred today, if as a scientist you want to be funded that is, by the funkier name of Regenerative Medicine).

Tissue engineering is the science of using human cells, engineering know-how and materials to maintain, repair, improve or even replace organs or tissues in the human body. Viewed from the perspective of the arts, particularly cinema and in near-science fiction novels, the technology of tissue engineering is merely in the process of catching up with the imaginations of their respective creators.

It is my contention that the reverse is true, that in fact, many of the imagined technologies for tissue engineering are already here and we are on the frontier of unforeseeable changes that will require reimagination of the future capabilities of man.

Both artistic mediums (cinema and sci-fi) conceive of near-futures where injured or diseased organs or appendages could be replaced by superior metallic or composite implants or limbs. An example of the depiction in the arts of the superiority of artificial limbs and organs was the 1970s television hit ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’, where Steve Austin the ‘Bionic Man’ had robotic legs, and one arm and one eye. An interesting aspect, possibly psychological in part, was the symbiotic nature of these implants with the human body, such that they integrated perfectly with surrounding biological tissue; a clinical aspect of implant bioengineering that is difficult to achieve in reality. Was this a tacit acceptance that man was inherently weak? By the latter half of the twentieth century practically every bone in our bodies had an artificial counterpart from metallic plates for the skull, spinal plates and prosthetic implants for the ribs, hips, knees, fingers and toes. In addition, fixation of bones using plates and wires is also in effect an indirect attempt at tissue engineering.

Professor John Charnley (1911-82) was probably the prototype first generation tissue engineer. Born in Bury, England, he was an orthopaedic surgeon, who in 1962 designed the replacement hip, conceived the surgical methods to place it in the body free of infection and fix it to the femur using thermoplastic cement. The success of this procedure is highlighted by the fact that hip replacement is the most successful orthopaedic procedure, with 97% of patients reporting improved outcomes.

Tissue engineering was borne primarily from the absence of any evidence of symbiosis between the robotic and biological circuitry, by this we mean that synthetic biocompatible materials were incompatible with the normal functioning of the human body. Therefore, although technology had advanced to such a degree that it was possible to keep a person alive using an artificial heart, kidneys or lungs it was becoming clearer, through an increased volume of research, that the cells of the body had an inherent capacity to heal or regenerate organs and tissues. Combined with technological advances in the production of biomaterials and bioreactors, even if patients were incapable of making replacement tissue, fabrication of organs and tissues could be performed in a lab prior to implantation.

Organisms are made of cells, and it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the technologies were developed to grow them reliably in the lab. The impetus for this particular research was to try and grow the poliovirus that needed cells to replicate, in order to produce enough vaccine to rid the world of this scourge of humanity. The workers who developed these methods received the Nobel Prize as an indication of the enormity of their enterprise. Further research in the following decades identified immortalised (cancer) cells and through analysis of these cells we learned more about human embryonic stem cells, which at their most potent, are also immortal and can generate any tissue of the body. Stem cells can be derived from embryos, but given ethical considerations it is now possible using scientific trickery to reprogram an adult's skin cell to behave as embryonic stem cells. These cells can then be pushed, by sequentially adding different chemicals, to become practically any cell in the body, such as cardiac cells. Cardiac cells can be added to a biomaterial in the shape of a heart valve or even heart, then grown and matured in a bioreactor (a glorified tumbler) under highly controlled conditions, until a functional valve or beating heart is produced.

Tissue engineered implants have many advantages over their synthetic non-biological counterparts. First and foremost, these implants can restore the function of damaged or diseased tissues and organs, and secondly, because stem cells (even from an unrelated donor) are not rejected, or can be engineered to be this way, a daily Smartie tube full of tablets to lower the power of the immune system to stop rejection is unnecessary. Also, the implanted tissue or organs integrate with the patients’ own blood supply thus providing the energy and feedback for optimal function.

So far we have touched on aspects of Regenerative Medicine, but this field emerged hand-in- hand with reconstructive surgery that is practised in many cases simply for aesthetic appeal. Walking down along the Santa Monica beach in Los Angeles it is hard as a bearer of a y-chromosome to not marvel as the semi-lunar protuberances disturbingly oblivious to the gravitational forces projecting from the chests of otherwise beautiful women. Similarly, one is entranced by the age defying, wrinkle-free, lip busting, facial features of celebrity septa- and octogenarians. These enhancements which owe more to first generation tissue engineering are merely the first wave of what will be a tidal wave of second generation body engineering. An example; doping is common in some sports, however even sportsmen and women are not oblivious to the detrimental side effects of drug taking, such as embarrassment, loss of earnings or the possibility of becoming a social pariah. But what is there to stop an athlete from harvesting muscle stem cells, expanding their numbers in the lab and then re-injecting them back into the limbs. In short, nothing. These technologies are available, are being used today and since this type of muscle modification is undetectable as yet, there is no downside for the athlete. I am in no doubt that athletes and coaches are unscrupulously using these types of techniques to gain unfair advantages on their rivals. It is likely that body modification through tissue engineering, rather than the cure of medically relevant diseases will be the big commercial thrust for large pharmaceutical companies in the coming decades.

As with most scientific studies, the detailed methods to replicate the latest advances in tissue engineering are all freely available online. The ubiquity of companies that generate materials for bioengineering could allow an enthusiastic amateur to accomplish almost anything, as the basic building blocks for any tissue are literally at hand. Website and blogs, especially those dedicated to muscle building, go into extraordinary scientific detail of the basic biology of growth and development of tissues. It is only hubris on the part of scientists to believe that they are the only ones engaged in tissue engineering.

As a teenager my personal epiphany of the extent to which the human body could be remodelled or indeed be repaired came through a decidedly grainy video of Ridley Scott’s magnum opus ‘Bladerunner’. In this very loose depiction of Phillip K Dick’s novel: ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’ androids called ‘replicants’ escape an off-world colony and try to find their designer on earth, a genius bioengineer, Dr Eldon Tyrell. Their hope is that he can override their in-built safety feature of a three year lifespan. Whilst my friends digested the philosophical implications of the films basic premise, I was personally entranced by the ubiquity of biological engineering throughout the film, such as artificial animals and human organs such as eyes that could be bought ‘off the shelf’. Bladerunner’s debt to the cyberpunk movement that depicted near-future dystopian societies in the midst of technological ferment led me to the novels of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson. It was in these novels that the nexus between cell biology as I knew it then and the future of tissue engineering was most obvious. In these novels the hubs of tissue engineering were based in South East Asia, principally from what I could deduce, to the absence of any Health and Safety regulations (an entirely plausible scenario). These books were also littered with examples of body modification based primarily on tissue engineering such as, fangs, claws (think Wolverine from ‘X-Men’) and also chimeras. Making fangs and claws is old hat in terms of what science has achieved, just google ‘hen’s teeth’ if you don’t believe me.

Chimeras are animals with cells from two genetically distinct organisms. In our age of greater sensitivity to green issues and fuel economy how useful would it be to have the legs of a kangaroo? Impossible? Just consider these two facts, firstly; the kangaroo genome is known and from it we know that our last common ancestor was ‘hopping around’ 150 million years ago and that large chunks of both kangaroo and human genomes are essentially no different from each other. Secondly, you may be surprised or indeed shocked to learn that chimeras have already been created, such as the goat/sheep chimera known as the ‘geep’ and the quail/duck chimera known as the ‘quck’. In 2007, scientists from the University of Nevada created an embryo that was composed of 85% sheep and 15% human cells. Would the embryo have survived if implanted, and what would the creature have looked like. We will never know, or will we?

I titled this essay, ‘the future is behind us’, because I had the sense that as a tissue engineer we had forged ahead and met the expectations of this and previous generations and in some cases wildly exceeded them. If occasionally, I have the time to slip into an introspective mood, I am truly in awe of the possibilities that lie ahead of us.

Never Let Me Go - speakers confirmed.

2011-02-21T06:38:00.000-08:00

We have five speakers confirmed for the next Cardiff sciSCREEN event to be held on Wednesday March 23rd after a screening of Never Let Me Go directed by Mark Romanek. This month's event is being sponsored by Globalising European Bioethics Education (GLEUBE) who study the ethical controversies brought about by advances in biology and medicine and is part of Cardiff University's Big Ideas in Science month.

Speakers include Dr. Mark Cutter who is based at the School of Public Health and Clinical Studies at the University of Central Lancashire; Dr. Joan Haran who is based at the ESRC centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen); Dr. Ilyas Khan who is based in the School of Biosciences, Cardiff University; Dr. David Mellor who is based at the Graduate School of Education, Bristol University and Dr. Andrew Edgar from the Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University.

The discussion will cover a number of themes brought up by the film including the realities of tissue engineering, cloning and the media, the ethics of organ donation, the philosophy of art and domination and political consciousness.

Next sciSCREEN - Never Let Me Go - March 23rd

2011-02-04T06:12:00.000-08:00

The next Cardiff sciSCREEN will be on Wednesday March 23rd at Chapter Arts Centre in Cinema One from 6pm when we will discuss a screening of Never Let Me Go as part of Cardiff University's Big Ideas: science show month. Directed by Mark Romanek, the film is based on the book of the same name written by Kazuo Ishiguro, and stars Keira Knightly, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield. Topics, times, sponsor and speakers to be confirmed soon - so watch this space.

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Hearing Our Voice: The Stigma of Stammering By John Evans

2011-01-26T09:10:00.000-08:00

The following is a piece written by John Evans - a trustee of the British Stammering Association - and relates to our sciSCREENing of The King's Speech last night.

My contribution to this debate comes from two directions:

First I want to give my reactions to the film based on my own experiences of stammering, and receiving speech therapy. Second, I want to talk about how this film might help to change public attitudes towards stammering. This is perhaps the first major film that has treated stammering as the frustrating and painful disability it is, rather than as a source of amusement.

I commend Colin Firth for his fine performance. He made me feel most uncomfortable, and I understand he felt very uncomfortable himself as he acted out the part. In one interview about the film he has said, “It had an effect on my body, this film, particularly headaches.” Stammering has then been called an “iceberg”. The part of the stammer that can be seen is represented by the part of the iceberg that is out of the water. However, by far, the bigger part is the shame and guilt induced by the stammering, lying below the water. A good actor, like Colin Firth, is able to portray that shame and guilt so that everyone can feel it. His performance was good and it was truthful.

As we know, stammering is seen as a bit of joke in so many films. But the oldest joke about stammering is a rather sad one. The joke is that there is a cure for stammering that works 100% of the time – guaranteed. What is it? The answer is that all you need to do is to stop talking! That is exactly what many people who stammer find themselves doing - they become retiring people whose voices are not heard. For me then the high point of the film was to hear Albert Windsor, cry out, “I have a voice” - and to know that he did make that voice heard: a voice not of perfection, or grand oratory, but of dignity and courage. Oscar nominee, David Seidler, who wrote the screenplay of the film, has stammered all his life, and I feel sure that scene draws on his own life’s journey.

But what helped the future King find his voice, and become a symbol of a Britain struggling against adversity? From my experience I would like to mention three things, which the film brings out well:

First, his own sense of who he was - that he mattered, that his values mattered and that it was important for him to live his life according to those values. He felt he had a destiny that was bigger than his feelings, bigger than his fears. He accepted that he needed to fulfil that destiny as best he could, with his handicap. He was, of course, never able to remove his stammer completely, and after some time, he probably never expected he would. One of the hardest things about going for speech therapy for the first time as an adult is when you say, “Please tell me how to make this go away – I will do anything – I just want to be normal” only to be told, “At your age, it is probably not going to go away. All we can do is to help you to manage it.” That is not what you want to hear – yet it is often possible to manage a stammer very well, to reach an accommodation with it, and to live a happy and fulfilled life.

Second, I would point to Albert’s determination and his willingness to work hard, to call himself into question, and to accept a great deal of distress. He initially gave up on the therapy because it was so difficult for him to deal with that pain - and I am not referring to the scene about the marbles!

Third, there was something I would call, “enabling love”. There was the unconditional love of his wife, known for so many years as the Queen Mother. There was the expert friendship and care of Lionel Logue. We are not privy to the exact range of methods he used with Albert Windsor, but on the web-site of the British Stammering Association, you can find an article by a man whom he treated, Richard Oerton. Richard was a child when he received treatment from an elderly Lionel Logue. He vividly recalls Logue’s kindness and acceptance.

Stammering is a condition that does not respond very well to will-power on its own. However, when effort is applied in the right direction, and when we are liberated by that mysterious thing called love – or grace – then we can learn to find our true voice and make it heard. What traps us all in unhelpful behaviour patterns is the opposite – ridicule, humiliation and shame, leading to secrecy and withdrawal. Laughing at people who stammer tends to lock them into their stammering. So many people who stammer bear the scars of ridicule in school from teachers acting, often with the best of intentions, like Albert’s father, King George V, and from other schoolchildren acting … like schoolchildren.

The effect of the film on attitudes to stammering has been palpable. Stammering is becoming something that can now be talked about openly. At least one stammerer has been portrayed as a hero. However, the message of the film will need to be sustained once the Oscars are over. That is why the British Stammering Association has launched a continuing “Appeal for change”. Part of this is to make some basic facts about stammering known, for example:

Stammering affects 5% of all children and 1% of all adults across all cultures in the world, and as far as we know across all of the ages of mankind
Stammering affects many more males than females
Stammering is not due to being weak-minded or congenitally shy
Those who do stammer generally just need a bit more time to express themselves. Some would like you to help them with a word they can’t say – most would not (especially if you get it wrong!) One thing to consider doing is to ask if they would like help
When identified in very early childhood, it is often possible to correct stammering completely - provided the necessary services are there.

I trust and believe that people will look back on The King’s Speech not just as an inspiring and successful film, but as an example of how the media has been able to influence our culture, and as an event that changed public perceptions about stammering for the better.

If you would like to find out more about the appeal John is referring to, please visit the British Stammering Association's website here.

Stammering and The King's Speech By Calum Delaney

2011-01-26T09:05:00.000-08:00

The following is an essay written by Calum Delaney from the Speech and Language Therapy at UWIC and relates to our sciSCREENing of The King's Speech last night.

The film illustrates that there’s just so far you can go with silence, before people start to feel awkward. This seems to be one of the dominant features of stammering, certainly as presented in the film. It is unlike many other disorders of communication where there is typically something going on that the listener is able to work with. In trying to understand the communication disruption of stuttering, it is probably useful to consider the experience of the listener as well as that of the person who stammers.

The listener’s response in an initial encounter with a dysfluent person is often one of surprise – “what’s going on?” “what should I do?” The listener’s expectations have been violated. The normal pacing of the listener’s non-verbal responses (eye-gaze, facial expression, gesture) is disrupted, often leaving both floundering in the silence. Once aware of the likelihood of disruption, other responses emerge – irritation, impatience, embarrassment. Both speaker and listener are conscious of being trapped into an encounter in which both parties have a diminished ability to control its course. Both are dominated by the stammer. It is this communication dynamic that is repeatedly portrayed in the film. In this case it is further complicated by the social roles of the speaker and listeners. The Duke of York has fewer of the options open to most stammerers for avoiding or otherwise managing difficult communication encounters. Most of his listeners are equally constrained in the options available to them for managing their own sense of awkwardness.

How should we understand the dysfluent speech behaviour produced by people who stutter? Most speech and language therapists would make a distinction between core and secondary behaviours. Core behaviours are the very rapid and often momentary interruptions in the flow of speech that most people identify as stammering. They are generally thought of as involuntary and to arise from some sort of physiological or organic cause. They are usually differentiated into repetitions, prolongations and blocks, and these may be located at one or more of the levels of respiration, phonation and articulation. Repetitions, prolongations and blocks are also thought to be representative of increasing degrees of stammering severity. In the film the speech of the Duke of York tended towards the severe end of this continuum.

Secondary behaviours are those behaviours that become layered over the core behaviours and are often understood as learned reactions to those core behaviours. In trying to cope with the core behaviours, the dysfluent speaker discovers other behaviours that seem to help him (it is more often him than her) to move his speech along. These are things like facial tics or pitch changes that enable him to escape from the stuttering moment, or “starters”, postponement or timing behaviours that enable him to prevent the core behaviour occurring. These behaviours are typically slower, involve larger movements and are usually seen as being the result of classical and operant conditioning – they are learned. For these reasons they are also seen as easier to work with and to eliminate from the stuttering behaviour. This is helpful, as they are also often the more distracting aspect of dysfluent speech. In the film the Duke of York showed fewer of these secondary behaviours.

There is a third aspect of stuttering that contributes to the difficulties that a dysfluent person experiences. This is the feelings and attitudes that accompany the stammer and are bound up with it. This dimension of the stutterer’s experience was consistently portrayed throughout the film. Dysfluent speech can give rise to feelings such as frustration, embarrassment and hostility and negative attitudes towards individuals, situations and personal aspirations. Anticipatory feelings of anxiety and fear, and expectations of difficulty and negative reactions, can also precipitate or exacerbate dysfluent speech moments. It is often difficult to disentangle the causal relationships between these, and it is often this aspect of the stammerer’s experience of her difficulty that is the most salient. Even when she is being fluent, the person who stutters will often still see her communication as being dominated by the fact that she is dysfluent, or a “stammerer”.

Modern speech and language therapy is often directed towards each of these three components of stammering in a fairly systematic way. The focus of the intervention would reflect the weighting of the components in the overall presentation of behaviours and responses. The interventions would also be more directly related to the nature of the presenting behaviours and theoretical understandings of how these are constituted. Core behaviours, which are probably the least responsive to intervention, would be addressed through attempts to modify the ways in which the dysfluent speaker breathes, initiates and maintains vocalisation and executes articulatory movements. It was this aspect of management that was mostly portrayed in the earlier stages of the film. However, these techniques were implemented fairly randomly with little consideration being given to the presenting behaviours. The influence of these techniques in the film may be explained by what is referred to as the “distraction effect” – stuttering behaviour can often be reduced by anything which alters the way in which the dysfluent individual speaks. The effect can be variable though, and it is seldom long-lasting. Secondary behaviours are typically managed using classical and operant conditioning techniques to reduce or eliminate them. The focus of attitude modification is to explore alternative and possibly more helpful ways of viewing and responding to the stutter and also more broadly to communication, interaction and self-perception. In the later stages of the film it was this aspect of the king’s difficulty that began to be explored in the relationship between him and Lionel Logue.

The film showed that, in the case of the king (and often with many people who stammer) dysfluency is not always something that can be made to go away. It is a part of the individual, it is variable, and it is (sometimes unpredictably) influenced by multiple interacting factors. Fluency requires maintenance. It is hard work. It demands resilience and persistence. But that may be to give stuttering more attention than it is due. George VI was more than his stutter and most of the characters saw this, especially his therapist. People who stutter are similar to everyone else, beset with fears and anxieties and possessing varying capabilities with which to manage them. They also possess the same degree of insight and wit in recognising and responding to these in themselves and others. They just speak a little differently.

A Churchillian view of the 1930s? Cinematic representations of politics and monarchy in 'The King's Speech' By Gary Love

2011-01-26T06:26:00.000-08:00

The following is an essay written by Dr. Gary Love from the Cardiff School of History, Archaeology and Religion and relates to our sciSCREENing of The King's Speech yesterday.

‘The King’s Speech’ focuses mainly on the relationship between King George VI and his speech therapist Lionel Logue, but the film also introduces audiences to other important historical characters, namely Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and Winston Churchill, and the influential role of the new mass media (radio, film, and the popular press) in Britain. I plan to say a few words about the historical accuracy of the film before moving on to comment on the role of the new mass media in relation to other established modes of communication, which had dominated the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

The film portrays Edward VIII and George VI in ways that most historians would now recognise, but its brief depiction of Stanley Baldwin and the broader political scene is wide of the mark. In short, the filmmakers are woefully inaccurate with regard to Baldwin and the National government’s policy of appeasement, which is disappointing because it would have made little difference to the overall cinematic experience if they had paid more attention to historical detail.

Stanley Baldwin did not retire in shame in 1937 as the film suggests. It is simply wrong to argue that Baldwin misjudged the Nazi menace and that this was the main reason for his resignation as Prime Minister after the Coronation of George VI. As a historian, the moment in the film when Baldwin states ‘Churchill was right all along’ made me cringe because this is a classic example of accepting a Churchillian narrative of the 1930s at face value. In fact, Baldwin’s reputation remained high until 1940. It was only the publication of the book Guilty Men by ‘Cato’ and Churchill’s war memoirs that destroyed Baldwin’s and the National government’s reputation. In the end, they took much of the blame for ‘failing’ to rearm during the 1930s and this view was sustained by historians until the 1960s. As we can see, it still gains currency today and we should question why this is the case. Perhaps the filmmakers had an American audience in mind when choosing to elevate Churchill from the political fringe to the centre of British political and monarchical life.

As recent scholarship has shown, Baldwin was the chief architect of a Christian, anti-totalitarian message, which he delivered in his speeches, radio broadcasts, and on film from the early 1930s. In the political world, Baldwin was the first to use and adapt successfully to radio and film. Baldwin was the unrivalled political media star of his age, but after the Second World War his political reputation lay in ruins. Undoubtedly, Baldwin laid the rhetorical groundwork for Churchill’s unifying messages during the Second World War. Nor is it the case that he purposefully neglected rearmament. After all, he was the first to warn in Parliament that ‘the bomber will always get through’ and he had accepted that Britain’s defensive frontier lay on the banks of the river Rhine. True, Baldwin’s reputation suffered in 1935. After campaigning during the general election in support of collective security in view of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, he soon abandoned the League of Nations. This was interoperated by many as an act of political deception, but Baldwin’s handling of the ‘Abdication Crisis’ in 1936 restored his reputation. On the eve of his retirement, Baldwin was once more characterised as the archetypical English gentlemen who governed genuinely in the national interest, the ideal figurehead for a national government. If he had any regrets they related to handing on the British ‘torch of freedom’ to his successor Neville Chamberlain. Baldwin recognised that his successor lacked the common touch, which had been a key feature of his own leadership.

A few examples should illustrate my point. On 20 May 1937, a few weeks after the Coronation, Thomas Jones, Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, wrote in his diary: ‘Outside on the pavement, on the Foreign Office side, people were waiting on the chance of a glimpse of him and earlier in the week there had been crowds shouting, “We want Baldwin,” but he had not responded. He has ceased to be thought of as leader of the Tory Party and stands out as the national leader “par excellence”.’ Of his retirement, the writer, journalist, and broadcaster, Harold Nicholson proclaimed, ‘No man has ever left in such a blaze of affection.’ This was a common view shared both by political and educated elites and by the general public. On 9 February 1938, Viscount Hinchingbrooke wrote an account of a private meeting with Baldwin: ‘[Baldwin’s] conscience is clear about rearmament…He believes sincerely that we started rearming as soon as we could and the country could not have stood it a moment sooner, nor had the Government the information to acquaint the country with.’

Baldwin retired in 1937 simply because he was an old man (he was 70) who had been at the forefront of British politics for most of the interwar period. He thought about retiring much earlier in the 1930s but he felt that it was his duty to remain in power to bring the ‘Abdication Crisis’ to an acceptable conclusion. Now he was happy to relinquish his role as PM. Churchill was not a central figure in this story nor was he an important adviser to King George VI during 1937-39. Indeed, during the ‘Abdication Crisis’ Churchill had played a major role in advising Edward VIII on how to stay on the throne. He was seen as a troublemaker who was bent on disrupting Baldwin’s honourable efforts to secure the retention of public values and constitutional propriety. If anyone should have advised George VI on his broadcasts it should have been Baldwin who had mastered the medium like no other politician. Churchill had few occasions to broadcast in the 1930s because he was denied access by Conservative Central Office which selected Conservative political speakers.

In one scene in the film there is a wall-poster enjoining people to ‘Stand by the King’. This was produced by the fascist Blackshirt newspaper. There was some fear at the time that Churchill and other political rogues such as the fascist leader Oswald Mosley would work to construct a King’s party to rival the National government and the crowning of George VI. Of course, nothing like this ever occurred, but it was not until the war years that Churchill assumed much importance and established a genuine rapport with George VI. So the imposition of Churchill on much of this story at the expense of Baldwin, not to mention Chamberlain who barely gets a mention, is largely based on a retrospective popularisation of Churchill as the ‘greatest Briton’.

However, what the film does recapture rather successfully is the response of educated elites in the 1930s to the importance of radio as a national unifying medium, which could be used for the projection of Christian values and democratic constitutionalism against revolutionary ideas of both left and right. The interwar years saw the development of a democratic and commercial media culture, which responded to the franchise reforms of 1918 and 1928. Britain was now a democracy and educated elites could no longer dictate policy or define the parameters of political debate like they had done during the long nineteenth century. Some elites refused to engage with new media because they judged its sensationalism to be unworthy, but others sought to adjust to it and use it to further their ambitions. In the film, you get a good sense of how elites lamented a by-gone age. George V recognises broadcasting as a necessity but he cannot hide his contempt for the changing role of the monarchy and his closer relationship with his subjects. Likewise, Archbishop Lang describes radio as ‘a Pandora’s box’ and he makes sure to edit the newsreels before they are broadcast.

Yet as the film also recognises, the role of the monarchy and its ability to communicate with the general public was vital in this period. Although the monarchy’s political power had declined, it gained in popularity during 1935-37, a period that saw the Silver Jubilee (a new addition to monarchical pageantry), George V’s death, the ‘Abdication Crisis’, and the Coronation of George VI. A resurgence of royalist feeling amongst the general public even inspired the creation of the social research organisation, Mass Observation, which sought to explain why this had occurred. Certainly, this popular feeling for monarchy lasted until the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Indeed, it is at least arguable that such feeling continues to exist today as millions lined the streets of London during both her Silver Jubilee in 1977 and her Golden Jubilee in 2002. George VI’s Christmas broadcast was extremely popular, but it was meant to end the tradition once and for all. It was only on the eve of war that George VI was persuaded to embrace it again. In the end, his D-Day broadcast proved to be the most listened-to broadcast of the war years.

Stammering: Lost for Words

2011-01-20T08:27:00.000-08:00

The Guardian recently published a piece by Keith Austin, in which The King's Speech is described by the British Stammering Association as a “once-in-a-generation moment to create change and to increase awareness”.

Read the whole article here.

The screening of The King's Speech on Tuesday 25th January is now sold out. However, if you have been unable to get tickets, please do attend the discussion, in First Space, Chapter, starting straight after the film at approximately 8pm.

The speakers at the discussion will be: Dr William Housley (School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University), Dr Gary Love (School of History, Archeaology and Religion, Cardiff University), Calum Delaney (Programme Leader and Head of Centre, Speech and Language Therapy, UWIC), and John Evans (British Stammering Association). The discussion will cover experiences of stammering, concepts of language and communication, speech pathology, political rhetoric and the mediated public sphere, and the impact of radio and newsreels on public life in the first half of the 20th century.

The King's Speech - new speaker added

2011-01-17T02:28:00.000-08:00

We have added a speaker to our next sciSCREEN event - a screening and discussion of the Golden Goble winning The King's Speech on Tuesday the 25th January at 6pm.

John Evans (The British Stammering Association) has been added to our line-up of Dr William Housley (School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University), Dr Gary Love (School of History, Archeaology and Religion, Cardiff University), and Calum Delaney (Programme Leader and Head of Centre, Speech and Language Therapy, UWIC). The discussion will cover experiences of stammering, concepts of language and communication, speech pathology, political rhetoric and the mediated public sphere, and the impact of radio and newsreels on public life in the first half of the 20th century.

Tickets for the film can be bought from Chapter. The discussion is free.

Happy New Year from sciSCREEN

2011-01-07T08:57:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year. As you all know our next sciSCREEN will be on Tuesday January 25th from 6pm when we will be screening 'The King's Speech'. For all of you wanting to keep up-to-date with what is going on- we have now set up a Twitter account at www.twitter.com/sciSCREEN. Other ways to keep in touch with us are by joining our mailing list sciscreen[at]cardiff.ac.uk or joining our facebook group by searching for Cardiff sciSCREEN.

To find out more about the senior partners in Cardiff sciSCREEN please visit the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics' website at www.cf.ac.uk/cngg or visit their public engagement website www.genomicminds.co.uk/ where you can find out more about the origins of Cardiff sciSCREEN, and please visit the Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) at www.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/cesagen and the Wales Gene Park at www.wgp.cf.ac.uk/.

Recent sciSCREEN events have been kindly sponsored by the Cardiff University Community Engagement Team.

Hope to see you at The King's Speech on the 25th. Please note that the film is proving popular and so we advise people to book in advance.

A Review of Cardiff sciSCREEN's 2010 Programme

2010-12-24T08:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all those who have supported Cardiff sciSCREEN during 2010. Below is a short overview of our 2010 programme of events.

We launched Cardiff sciSCREEN in March 2010 after winning a small grant from the British Science Association (BSA) to run two public engagement events as part of 2010 Science and Engineering Week.

Nerves were jangling when on Sunday March 14th we held our first event and screened the BAFTA award winning film 'A Single Man' in Cinema One at Chapter Arts Centre. After a short introduction by Dr. Katie Featherstone, the film commenced and was proceeded by talks from four academics from Cardiff University - Dr. Paul Keedwell, Dr Iain Morland, Dr. Jonathan Scourfield and Susan Bisson - who discussed some of the themes brought up by the film. These included the concepts of grief and depression, the portrayal of psychiatry in film, gender and sexuality and the Sociology of Suicide. An audience of 70-75 attended the event and the debate continued with a wine reception in the room 'First Space'. Phew one down and it seemed to go well.

On Monday March 29th we held our second event funded by the BSA. This time we showed the newly released film 'The Wolfman' also in Cinema One of Chapter Arts Centre. Whereas speaker talks at 'A Single Man' were conducted inside the cinema, this time speakers delivered their 5 minute presentation in the room 'First Space'. Once more we were lucky enough to attract four speakers and talks were delivered by the clinical lecturer Dr. Ian Jones, historian Dr. Keir Waddington and culture, media and science experts Dr. Joan Haran and Dr. Rebecca Williams on trigger events for periods of psychosis, the historical treatment of 'madness', theories of risk and containment and the gothic imagination. The event was again extremely well attended with 75-80 people continuing the debate close to closing time.

The growing sciSCREEN Team were all encouraged by the public interest in sciSCREEN and many of the nice comments we were receiving from attendees. We therefore worked hard to try to continue the format and on Thursday May 27th we ran our third event. This sciSCREEN was kindly funded by the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University. In Cinema Two - the smaller cinema - at Chapter Arts Centre we screened another award winning film; this time it was 'The Hurt Locker'. Unfortunately as interest in Cardiff sciSCREEN had grown the film sold out and we had to turn a number of people away from the screening. Despite this we invited everyone to the post-film talks and discussions, and although Cinema Two only holds 57 seats 70 people attended the talks by Professor Jon Bisson, Dr. Jonathan Webber, Dr. Tracey Loughran, Dr. David Machin - all from Cardiff University, and Lt. Felix Carman of the Royal Navy. Together, the speakers presented and discussed the concepts of mental health in the military, the boundaries between bravery and recklessness, the history of shell shock and PTSD and representations of warfare in the media in the room 'Media Point'.

On Bank Holiday Friday, August 27th we held our fourth Cardiff sciSCREEN. Funded by the Cardiff Neurosciences Centre and the Cardiff Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute we screened the film 'Inception'. Speakers included Professor Mark Blagrove of Swansea University, Professor Ken Peattie (Cardiff University), Professor Allessandra Tanesini (Cardiff University) and Dr. Robin Smith (Cardiff University) who spoke about Lucid Dreaming, the ownership of our thoughts, corporate espionage, de ja vu, and the urban environment. A record 90 people attended the talks as video gamers sat next to Professors debating the issues that were brought up until the wee hours. If it wasn't for last orders I fear some may still have been there.

Our 5th Cardiff sciSCREEN event was part of what we called our 'sciSCREAM weekend' to coincide with Halloween. On Sunday October 31st we screened the 1920s black and white classic 'Der Golem', kindly funded by the Communications and International Relations Divisions (CAIRD) at Cardiff University. With the added bonus of live musical accompaniment by the excellent Reflektor 2 we had the pleasure to listen to talks by Professor Paul Atkinson and Dr. Chris Groves from Cardiff University and Dr. Mikel Koven of the Univeristy of Worcester. 65 people attended the discussion and debtae which included talks on the philosophy of vitalism, esoteric and explicit knowledge and Jewish myths and folklore in film.

A few days earlier - as part of the sciSCREAM package - we also distributed hand-outs written by Dr. Andrew Lawrence on the Psychology of Disgust relating it to another film screened on Friday October 29th at Chapter: 'The Human Centipede'.

On Tuesday November 9th we held our 6th and final Cardiff sciSCREEN of 2010. Funded by BRASS we organised the event to celebrate Cardiff University's Sustainability Week. This was our first chance to try something a little different and to screen a documentary. Therefore in Cinema One we showed the award winning 'The Garden'. With 5 talks by Dr. Diego Vasquez, Dr. Hilary Rogers, Dr Arthur Getz, Jessica Paddock - all from Cardiff University and Steve Garrett from Riverside Market the attendees discussed the topics of class and food consumption, plant science, vulnerable communities and sustainable food development with the speakers. 72 people attended the film and 58 attended the talks and discussions.

In 2011 we hope to continue Cardiff sciSCREEN and we begin on Tuesday 25th January when we will show 'The King's Speech. This event has kindly been funded by CAIRD once again. Before I go and leave you to your christmans lunches though, let me take this opportunity to thank a few people and groups. Cardiff sciSCREEN wouldn't happen without the help of the rest of the Cardiff sciSCREEN Team - Dr. Katie Featherstone, Dr. Choon Key Chekar, Dr. Andrew Bartlett, Dr. Michael Arribas Ayllon, Dr. Richard Watermeyer, Claudine Anderson and Cerys Ponting. It also wouldn't run without the enthusiasm and hard work of Sally Griffith from Chapter Arts Centre. Thanks are also reserved to all our speakers in 2010 (whose talks can be found by scrolling down the right hand side of the blog), to all those who have funded individual sciSCREEN events and to the many of you who have attended our events. Have a Merry Christmas and hope to see you in the New Year.

What did I learn from The Garden? Steve Garrett

2010-12-16T06:37:00.000-08:00

This is a short essay by Steve Garrett of Riverside Market relating to our sciSCREENing of The Garden in November.

Politics is all about power. Politicians cannot be trusted, as they play the power and influence game.

Power is ruthless. Power corrupts.

Not all community workers are saints.

People like Horowitz (the landowner) apparently put their bigotry even before profits.

Racism can exist between different non-white communities.

Conflict will arise within even the most well-meaning group.

Getting huge publicity and celebrity endorsement does not guarantee success.

Any campaign relies on a very few highly motivated and skilled individuals.

If you hang in long enough external circumstances may change in your favour.

There might not be a happy ending – but new and unexpected hybrid ideas may spring from the compost pile of failure (and they haven’t given up yet).

I’ve been working in Wales for more than twelve years to build alternative and economically viable, environmentally sustainable local food chains that bring benefits to Welsh producers and community members in Cardiff.

Why? – I love markets, I want a future world for my kids and I hate Tesco. So – I set up a social enterprise which runs farmers markets, a community allotment, a programme of outreach and education activities and most recently market garden horticulture and training enterprise. I know I am in very good company in this work with many excellent projects in Wales and the U.K.

That’s a good feeling – and the people I have met – traders and customers – are in my experience human beings at their best. The only possible losers to this work might be supermarkets – other than that it is a win-win-win situation on the Triple bottom line. It also contributes to Gross National Happiness…that’s the best part.

There is a deep instinct in all of us to re-connect with the land (Mother Earth) and to engage with the deeply satisfying process of growing food. At the same time, most of us are grateful that we don’t have to get up at dawn to tend to animals or spend all day in the fields planting, weeding and harvesting But luckily there are people who seem to like that – and the purpose of an economy is that they can be free to do that while I am free to hopefully do something that I enjoy and other people need.

Meanwhile in their rapacious expansion, the large food retailers and producers have so dominated the food economy in the West (Food Inc) and in their endless search for greater profit at any cost have developed a wasteful, in humane but profitable system that depends entirely on oil. It can’t last, oil is running out – so it is intelligent if nothing else for us to devise a different system that is rooted in how the world works – and in the past two years there have been all kinds of programmes, films etc. echoing this message

The Welsh Assembly Government launched a Community Grown Food Action Plan which was an addition to the other range of policy documents and strategies relating to local food that have come out of the Assembly in recent months. It’s a welcome statement of support for the concept, However, I personally think it fails to adequately identify and suggest ways to address the biggest obstacle to more food growing in Wales – that is access to land. As simple as that. Groups and individuals all over the country who are looking to grow food are running into obstacles from local authorities and landowners which prevent them from just getting on with it.

This wasn’t the case during the war, by the way, when because of food shortages areas of Roath Park and many school playgrounds were ploughed up for planting as a part of the war effort. And as someone reminded me recently – there’s no such thing as ‘Council’ land – it’s all our land which they manage on our behalf, and perhaps we need to be inspired by our French comrades and be a bit more insistent about having our demands met by the powers that be.

The concept of Transition Towns has been a helpful one and a useful idea that people can get a hold of and understand. The basic message is: things have to change. Because external circumstances are changing rapidly and in ways we can’t predict. I sometimes feel as if we’re in a Titanic situation – everything seems safe and sound, but if we don’t change course, disaster is coming

The typical human response is to carry on with life-as-normal until there is a crisis and then get in a panic. But sooner or later we may find ourselves having to mimic the actions of the Cuban government which quickly allocated land and seeds to as many people as possible in cities like Havana to grow food to make up for the shortfall resulting from the normal oil-dependant agriculture system farms when the Russians cut oil supplies to Cuba.

So – although there still seem to be plenty of people willing to carry on buying strawberries in November as if everything is OK – and perhaps they fly to Spain for a winter break - there are green shoots of hope. The demand for allotments across the UK has gone through the roof in recent years, and the level of supply cannot keep up! At the same time The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens has been supporting groups across Wales who are keen to enjoy all the benefits of horticultural therapy.

Boris Johnson is aiming to support 2012 growing spaces in London before…you guessed it…2012 (How long before we are drowning in a sea of 2012 related marketing? I think it’s hilarious that the two main sponsors of the Olympics are MacDonald’s and Coke, leading Tim Lang to make the observation that the games will end up being the super-fat watching the super fit).

Meanwhile, the public at large can have an influence on the emergence of a more balanced and beautiful food economy by cutting back on buying out of season, frozen and processed and imported food; throwing less way; buying local when possible; and digging up their lawn to plant potatoes. (In Australia now – land of the big front lawn – the new way of keeping up with the neighbours is by showing off the size of your lettuces which grow there, rather than the size of the car in the garage).

Chapter Arts Centre is doing it’s bit with a wonderful edible landscaping project in front of the building, And maybe before long we’ll see status-seekers and cool people wearing muddy wellies to show what they’ve been up to that day, and being sure to leave (or apply) plenty of dirt under their fingernails before going out on the pull.

The Importance of Social Class Analysis for Sustainability: Reflections on 'The 'Garden' By Jessica Paddock

2010-12-13T03:47:00.000-08:00

Below is a short piece written by Jesssica Paddock from the Cardiff School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University and relates to our sciSCREENing of The Garden in November.

This documentary – ‘The Garden’ - judiciously follows the journey embarked upon by a community of farmers in South Central Los Angeles as they battle notices of eviction issued by the city council on behalf of a powerful developer. The land from which these community gardeners face eviction - ‘loaned’ to the community in order to grow food in what otherwise could be described as a ‘food desert’ - served to enable the community to access fresh and healthy food as well as empowering the predominantly Latino community to exert some control over their means of subsistence in a neighbourhood suffering the consequences of the riots of 1992, also known as the ‘Rodney King Uprising’.

As well as conveying the frustration and despair of these community gardeners as they engage in the necessary legal processes by which to delay and hopefully to prohibit eventual eviction from the land - on the grounds of the illegality of the ‘back room deals’ made between the city council and the landowner – ‘The Garden’ carries the viewer along with the farmers’ heartbreaking journey towards their final eviction, where small and major victories are marred by a spiteful verdict issued on behalf of the landowner.

Despite raising the seemingly impossible sum of sixteen million dollars with the help of celebrity endorsement from actresses and rock bands to eminent politicians at community fund-raisers, these community gardeners were refused the right to purchase the land, despite substantial financial gains to be made on behalf of the landowner. In closing the documentary, a statement made by this powerful developer and landowner is presented via a voiceover as the camera spans across the land vacated by the gardeners that remained untouched by the developer. This statement reads ‘It’s not about money, I don’t like these people, I don’t like their cause’.

Such a distressing ending to the documentary is testament to one theme that has been of particular interest to me throughout my studies; class. The theme of class occurs throughout the documentary as it charts the battle waged by the city council against the plight of urban farmers seeking to preserve their way of life in a devastated neighbourhood of Los Angeles. This theme emerges as clear boundaries demarcate those with the cultural, social and economic capital necessary to fight legal battles that require organisation within the legitimate legal structures - resources held in abundance by lawyers, the city council, and the landowner who provided a contrast to the gardeners, who felt they were initially ill equipped to engage with legal processes. For example, the language of the law and the necessity to speak in English at first inspired little confidence from many of these gardeners. Despite minor – and some major - victories won throughout the legal battle, boundaries were drawn and distinctions were made between the different ways of life that resonate with those often made within the context of ‘alternative’ food consumption here in the UK. In my research, such distinctions of class around issues of food consumption were encountered whilst undertaking qualitative and quantitative research that sought to explore the relationship between social class and the potential success of a sustainable development agenda.

In the UK we have seen a growing number of consumers shopping for food in settings alternative to the conventional retail outlets such as the supermarkets. However, in my research I have sought to understand who shops in such settings and for what reasons, or, more specifically, I have sought to explore the settings of alternative food consumption in relation to whether or not these settings embody any relation to class. Were these spaces of food consumption serving any function that could be seen as reproducing relations of class inequality?

For example, in ‘The Garden’, the community gardeners appear to represent a number of points of departure from discourses that circulate the topics of food consumption and the working classes in the UK. The gardeners of South Central Los Angeles were actively engaged in producing their own food, and through this labour, presented themselves as capable working class social subjects. However, in the UK, the working classes are often - through the lens of popular media texts as well as via data collected in my research – represented as incapable and inactive social subjects, disengaged from the land, from food, and from manual labour.

In light of such disparities it is worth pointing out here that the South Central gardeners had been stripped of a central resource - the land itself - that seemed to enable the enactment of a capable and active self and community. Here in the UK, the loss of the working class labourer is mourned, and their perceived rejection of menial work in the service sector and in traditional working class jobs i.e. producing food, is vilified as evidence of the ‘laziness’ of the working classes who are perceived to have ‘lost their roots’. So, when taking into account these two apparently divergent stories of a connected working class community on the one hand, and a ‘disengaged’ and ‘disconnected’ working class social subject on the other, can we deny the importance of social class analysis in exploring possible avenues towards sustainability?

How, then, in light of such dynamics, can the absence of working class people from settings that engage with alternative forms of food production and consumption be theorised? Moreover, are current approaches to ‘alternative’ food production and consumption sensitive to the politics of class in both a structural as well as cultural sense? To what extent do current practices of sustainable and alternative food production and consumption reflect an agenda that embodies the values and practices of only some classes and not others? These are but a few of the issues explored in my doctoral research.

The Golem and Me By Mikel Koven

2010-12-10T05:15:00.000-08:00

Below is an essay by Dr. Mikel Koven from the Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts at the Universty of Worcester and relates to our sciSCREENing of Der Golem in October.

I appear to be here as a combination of token film studies expert, token folklorist and token Jew; and that’s not an altogether negative position to be in. I’ve had a close relationship with Wegener’s Das Golem for many years now; it has been a film which seems to follow me around. For example, I wrote the short piece on the film in the book 101 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die, and when I was curating the St. John’s Jewish Film Society, back in Newfoundland, Canada, it was one of the first films I screened. While only tangentially about Wegener’s Expressionist classic, one of my first published articles was on the Golem legends, particularly its manifestation in an episode of The X-Files (‘”Have I Got a Monster for You!”: Some Thoughts on the Golem, The X-Files and the Jewish Horror Movie’ Folklore 111.2(2000): 217-230). So the mud-man of Jewish folklore has been following me around for some time.

My original proposal for doctoral research was actually on the concept of “the Jewish horror movie”, a good chunk of which would derive explicitly from Jewish folklore. I never wrote that particular thesis, but the idea has never left me, and one of these days hope to actually write that book. So talking about Das Golem is accompanied by a feeling of ‘coming home’.

One of the aspects of this story which has always fascinated me was that it is not simply one story; there is a whole cycle of Golem legends, collected and retold by Chaim Bloch in a collection originally published in German in 1917. A few years earlier, Gustav Meyrink’s expressionist novel, Der Golem (1914), was also published – Meyrink was a compatriot of Kafka’s. So, what’s not to like? It is within this context – of German expressionist literature, art, theatre & cinema, of Jewish folklore collection and Kafka-esque angst – which Wegener’s film needs to be seen.

The Man of Clay By Paul Atkinson

2010-12-10T03:38:00.000-08:00

Below is an essay by Professsor Paul Atkinson from the Cardiff School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University and relates to our sciSCREENing of Der Golem in October.

At almost the same time as the film was being made, another version of the golem myth was being transformed into a modern art-work. Nicolae Bretan composed a one-act opera on the topic in 1923. Bretan was the first composer of Romanian opera, being of Transylvanian origin. Based on a poem by Mihali Eminescu, ‘The Ghosts’, the opera is yet another version of a European Jewish myth that has a long history and exists in many transformations. In the opera and the poem, the focus is much more intimate than the film. It concentrates on Rabbi Löw, his grand-daughter Anna and the Golem (whose creation precedes the action). The Golem is in love with Anna, whom he has touched and kissed. She is now gravely ill, as the touch of the man of clay is fatal. The Golem confesses his desire, and begs the Rabbi to give him the remaining power he lacks – the power to procreate. To save Anna’s life, the Rabbi kills the man of clay, ripping from beneath the tongue the fragment of parchment that has hitherto animated him. The opera provides an interesting version of the myth. The Golem himself is the tragic hero of the piece. He and Anna represent two alternative creations of the Rabbi. The Golem’s inability to procreate mirrors the Rabbi’s own creation that itself denies life. It also reminds us that whatever the detail of any given version, the ‘monster’ is always incomplete in some vital way.

In general the Golem is a very variable creature. In some versions, it is a comic figure – clumsy but not malign. In others, it runs out of control like the sorcerer’s apprentice. In the film we see both sides of the man of clay – a helpful domestic helper, rather engagingly doing the shopping, and then out of control, creating mayhem and death. Visually, there are some important parallels with the early Frankenstein of James Whale. But the underlying mythology is very different. The Frankenstein ‘monster’ is created out of science: The body-parts are those of the anatomy schools and their grave-robbers. They are animated by galvanic force – one of the key elements to animate science of the romantic period. The Golem is animated by the word, or more accurately the text. In many versions (as in the opera) it is a word written on parchment. In others (as in the film) it is an amulet inserted into the clay. This representation of esoteric knowledge is diametrically opposed to the science of Mary Shelley’s Creation.

Both versions, of course, give us a vision of an imperfect, incomplete, creation that embodies and yet escapes the creator’s desires. In both, the creature is pathetic rather than horrific. The Golem adds another dimension to the abjection of the creature: by virtue of its Jewish origins, the creature and its creator are both ‘other’, and both need to be controlled – walled up and secluded in the ghetto. When the Golem breaks out of the ghetto walls, it is after all to a world of Christian imagery and blonde children. It is not, I think, necessary to search for specifically anti-Semitic sentiment here to recognise how the Jew stands for an orientalised alterity. Hence the Jewish creature is doubly monstrous.

The King's Speech sciSCREEN now January 25th

2010-12-08T04:38:00.000-08:00

Our next sciSCREEN we now be on Tuesday January 25th at 6pm in Cinema One of Chapter Arts Centre where we will be screening The King's Speech. Please note that there has been a slight change of date to what was previously advertised.

We currently have 4 speakers lined up - Dr. William Housley and Dr. Gary Love from Cardiff University, Calum Delaney from UWIC, and John M Evans trustee of the British Stammering Association - who will talk to concepts of language and communication, speech pathology, political rhetoric, the mediated public sphere, and the impact of radio and newsreels on the general public.

Tickets for the filming can be bought from Chapter's website. Speakers talks, discussion and debate and the free wine will commence in First Space shortly after the film finishes.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list please send an e-mail to sciscreen[at]cardiff.ac.uk

Monstrosity and the Wolfman in Media and Culture By Rebecca Williams

2010-12-06T08:46:00.000-08:00

Below is an essay by Dr. Rebecca Williams from the Communication, Culture and Media Studies Unit at the University of Glamorgan and relates to our sciSCREENing of The Wolfman in March.

Tropes from the horror genre continue to fascinate and frighten us across a range of contemporary media forms including television, literature, and film. Indeed, the final line of Joe Johnston’s ‘The Wolfman’ perhaps sums up one of the questions so central to discussions over the representation of the werewolf, and cinematic monsters more broadly, within media and cultural studies. The final words of the movie echo those uttered earlier in the narrative - “It is said there is no sin in killing a beast, only a man. But where does one begin and the other end?”.

It is this inability to distinguish man from monster – the threat of existing as neither and being in a perpetual state of inbetween-ness – which the horror genre has often tapped into through its depictions of the monstrous. At the centre of this fascination stands the figure of the ‘monster’; the ghost, vampire, or in the case of ‘The Wolfman’, the werewolf. Figures such as these have often functioned as objects of fear due to their ability to straddle the established cultural boundaries which we have come to view as safe and as non-permeable.

Writers such as the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva and the film theorist Barbara Creed have suggested that it is the ability of the monstrous figure to violate and threaten such boundaries that is the source of their horror. The figure who can cross between life and death, between male and female or, in the case of the Wolfman, between man and beast has been at the centre of media and cultural studies approaches to horror for decades. In violating our expectations of nature and humanity, such representations continue to attract audiences. For example, the violation of the boundary between man and beast is rendered quite literally in the effects sequences that depict Lawrence’s transformation into the wolf, complete with ripping skin, the extending of teeth and the crunching of bones as the body transforms. This emergence of the animal within quite graphically displays the disintegration of the body’s boundaries.

The famous transformation scene from An American Werewolf in London

However, the werewolf is not always a one-dimensional object of repulsion and terror. The horror genre has always offered more complex representations of the monstrous; presenting figures who might frighten and terrify but who are also often sympathetic characters who elicit our compassion. Throughout horror film’s history characters such as the Wolfman have occupied this dual role of arousing a range of responses and sensations, from fear to empathy and understanding. Within ‘The Wolfman’ there exists such a tension between horror and sympathy for Benicio del Toro’s tormented Lawrence Talbot. The audience may feel repulsion at his acts since the film does not shy away from fairly graphic representations of the bloody violence inflicted upon humans by Talbot in wolf form. Images of blood, entrails, bodies ripped apart are all represented on screen, showing in some detail the destruction of the body of man by the far stronger beast. However, the film also portrays Talbot as a flawed and tragic hero – many of his victims cannot be easily seen as entirely innocent since they include a group of suspicious and intolerant villagers who threaten to kill Talbot and several medical practitioners who have been responsible for tormenting him in the name of science and mental healthcare at an asylum in London. Furthermore, the film also presents an even worse form of monstrosity through the figure of Lawrence’s father John who is characterised as a true villain who delights in the power of the wolf and who urges Lawrence to embrace the glorious possibilities that lycanthropy offers. In refusing to make Lawrence’s character the true monster within the film ‘The Wolfman’ follows the horror genre’s tendency towards representing varying degrees of monstrosity and often limiting the monstrosity of lead characters by constructing an even more horrific and villainous monster who can become the true object of fear and loathing.

Several writers have noted the links between werewolves and femininity due to the connection of their transformations to the lunar cycle and its associations with female menstruation (for example, this is a clear theme in the 2000 werewolf movie ‘Ginger Snaps’). However, ‘The Wolfman’ avoids the potential feminisation of the male via his links to the wolf and instead presents ideas around tragic family legacies and the family/hereditary nature of Lawrence’s predicament, issues of masculinity, and whether human capacity for brutality can in many senses be considered ‘worse’ than that of the beast. Anthony Hopkins’ characters’ delight and joy in the power of his monstrosity contrasts with Lawrence’s obvious pain and regret at the violent acts he has committed whilst in wolf form. Linked to the depiction of the relationship between father and son are issues surrounding masculinity and what it means to be a man and The Wolf Man can be argued to depict masculine struggle with the ‘beast within’. Certain cultural theorists have linked this to issues around identity and subjectivity in which typical patriarchal order can be threatened by the eruption of the un-tamed beast within which disrupts the norms of society.

Furthermore, in one powerful scene between Lawrence and Emily Blunt’s character Gwen, the emergence of the beast is strongly linked to Lawrence’s desire for Gwen. As she dresses his wounds, he becomes drawn to her chest and her neck – suggesting the blood lust of his beastly alter ego but also making a clear association with sexual desire and the impropriety of acting on such feelings. In the nineteenth century society of the film’s world, the repression of the inner beast can be read as a metaphor for the struggle between proper behaviour and natural animal desires. Whilst a range of different interpretations of the film can be made from within media and cultural studies approaches, Joe Johnston’s reworking of ‘The Wolfman’ shows that our fascination with monstrous figures endures, and continues to represent issues around identity, cultural norms, and our fears of those who appear to be able to cross the established cultural boundaries we take for granted within contemporary society.