Conference Report: 25th SERCIA Conference: “Trouble on Screen”

Abstract

Anglophone), a society founded in 1993 to gather researchers in the field of English-speaking cinema, held its 25th conference in September 2019 at Université de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest, France. Remarkably organized by Elizabeth Mullen, Associate Professor at Université de Bretagne Occidentale, the conference, which lasted for three days from September 4 th to 6 th , included 18 panels with 3-4 speakers working on cinema and television and reflected SERCIA's vast research interests; the works of art studied ranked from mainstream to avant-garde, through silent, classical or contemporary, and came from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and multiple other geographical locations. This conference was punctuated by two impressive keynotes given by Timothy Corrigan (University of Pennsylvania) and Janet Staiger (University of Texas at Austin). 2 This year, the conference revolved around the theme "Trouble on Screen / Trouble(s) à l'écran," and more generally on the capacity of cinema and television to be, on the one hand, a source of entertainment, comfort and escape from our troublesome daily lives and, on the other, a source of destabilization and trouble, leading us to question our representation of normality. Whether this trouble is narrative, visual and/or aural, or situated on the level of production or reception, it deals with the ability of cinema and television to encapsulate the complexities of human societies. One of the questions addressed by this year's discussions was that of the notion of trouble on screen as a means to depict a complex reality or to depart from realism. At stake was the question of the reliability of filmic representations. Films could be seen as a way to document the complex realities of the world, the depths of human psychology and the authenticity of human nature. On the contrary, the screen could also become a place of estrangement from everyday realism, film and television being media that cast a