School of Creative Arts Research Forum

Two in-person seminars by Prof Ruth Barton (TCD) and Victor Morozov (TCD) as part of the School of Creative Arts Research Forum.

The two seminars will feature Prof Ruth Barton presenting 'Bad Sisters and the remaking of Dublin' and Victor Morozov presenting 'Television on the Front Line: Analysing the Media Footage of the Romanian Revolution and the Irish “Troubles”' Abstracts
'Bad Sisters and the remaking of Dublin' Apple TV+’s 2022 series, Bad Sisters, is a remake of the Belgian series, Clan, of 2012. The black comedy centres on a family of Dublin sisters who plot to kill their brother-in-law, JP (Claes Bang). Bad Sisters is ostensibly set in the vicinity of the Forty Foot, an iconic sea swimming area in South County Dublin, although the actual shooting locations also include scenes set in Malahide in North County Dublin, Northern Ireland, and London. The series has been compared with Big Little Lies (HBO 2017-19), both in terms of look and plot, and series creator and star, Sharon Horgan, has said in an interview that they initially referenced Big Little Lies but wanted to make Bad Sisters more realistic. In this paper, which is a work in progress, Barton considers the issue of relocating the original TV series from one territory to another with a particular emphasis on how Dublin is constructed as a middle-class space. She will consider how this reflects Bad Sisters’ transnational identity but also the identity of its star and creator, Sharon Horgan. Noting the series’ success in Ireland (as determined by figures on FlixPatrol.com), its high production values, and the unexpected commissioning of a second season, she will consider how Horgan successfully integrated a sense of a local identity with a global recognition factor. Barton will also argue that the series would have been unlikely to have benefited from the same budget if it had been funded by Ireland’s national TV station, RTÉ. 'Television on the Front Line: Analysing the Media Footage of the Romanian Revolution and the Irish “Troubles”' The second part of the twentieth century saw the deep transformation of television from a luxury domestic feature to a popular audiovisual medium. This massive growth – there were 4,000 television sets in 1955 in Ireland; by 1966, over half of the Irish households were equipped with one – did not translate into a reappraisal of its own possibilities until very late. Indeed, after decades of constant devaluation whenever it bore comparison to its traditional rival the cinema, it looked like television’s hour of glory would never materialize. It did so, however, as soon as the evolution of the technological aspects – colour, portable sound, and, more decisively, live broadcast – allowed it to. This presentation, then, originates in a paradox first noted by the great film critic Serge Daney: how did cinema’s traditional “ally” – History with a capital H – manage to deeply influence the meaning of television? How did it manage to transform it not only into a vital messenger – bringing information to the many – but also into a political actor advocating change? By choosing to investigate the televisual treatment of two historical events that seem quite separate at first glance – the intense, highly concentrated and quickly deflated Romanian Revolution and the protracted, diffuse Irish “Troubles” – Morozov's research attempts to propose an updated perspective on certain regimes of visibility that recent military conflicts have entailed via their quasi-simultaneous transmission on TV sets around the world, while also restoring a valuable, if somehow neglected, fragment of media history. Ruth Barton is Professor in Film Studies. She has written widely on Irish cinema. Her most recent monograph, Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2019 by Manchester University Press. She is a member of the European Regional Screen Production Network, and is on the editorial board of IJAMCP (the Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy). She has written critical biographies of Hedy Lamarr and Rex Ingram and is a regular film critic on RTÉ Radio’s arts’ programme, Arena. Victor Morozov was born in Romania in 1998. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Film and Drama Studies from the Université Grenoble-Alpes in Grenoble, France (the first year took place at Trinity College Dublin in conjunction with the Erasmus academic exchange). His Master’s degree in Film Studies is from the Université Paris VIII Vincennes–Saint-Denis in Paris. He is currently working as a postgraduate researcher within the Film Department of Trinity College Dublin, focusing on a comparative analysis between the televisual footage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 and that of the Irish “Troubles”. He has written extensively on film, both in academic journals (Revista Transilvania) and in the French and Romanian general press (Cahiers du cinéma, Revue Débordements, Revista VATRA, Observator Cultural, Ziarul Metropolis, Acoperisul de Sticla, etc.) and acted as the weekly film columnist of the Romanian cultural magazines Dilema Veche and Scena9 for the past five and three years, respectively. He was a participant in the Talents Sarajevo and Rotterdam Film Festival Young Critics Academy workshops dedicated to young film critics. Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: smcqueen@tcd.ie