Tales of two conferences

ALTHOUGH none of the contributions at last weekend's Centenary of Cinema Conference, Projecting The Nation: National Cinema In An International Frame, dealt directly with Michael Collins, the questions raised - of representation and national self expression within a globalising entertainment industry - were regularly illustrated by references to Neil Jordan's epic by many of the participants.

In the main keynote addresses, the cultural theorist Frederic Jameson identified what he saw as certain key elements that defined, a national cinema, while Dudley Andrew of the University of Iowa argued that cinema offers an ethic of transition" between the culture of the 19th century and the new technologies of the 21st.

In a stimulating and wide ranging paper, the Australian critic Meaghan Morris offered a survey of trends in contemporary Australian politics and culture through films such as Babe, Romper Stomper and the Mad Max trilogy.

In addition to the main addresses, a series of panels discussed such questions as the place of "peripheral visions" in international cinema, and the role of gender in national discourses. Two discussions cent red on issues of production in Ireland, with RTE and the Arts Council coming, under attack for their respective policies on film making.

Ed Buscombe, former head of publishing at the British Film Institute, and John Hill of the University of Ulster both scrutinised the current state of British cinema, while the film historian Kevin Rockett delineated changing Irish production policy in recent years, and Jeff Chown of Northern Illinois University cited the work of documentarists Alan, Gilsenan and John T. Davis as examples of how Irish film makers were reversing the Hollywood gaze.

THE painter R.B. Kitaj speaks for many artists when he says that "film connects me more with my time than any other popular imagery". Artists are increasingly being influenced by film, "the dominant art form of the 20th century", as Declan McGonagle, director of IMMA, called it. Introducing a one day seminar on, Art And Cinema at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham last Friday, he described the 1990s as "a dynamic period of transition" leading to crossovers between different art disciplines and, forms. The purpose of the seminar, organised by MEDIA Desk Ireland and IMMA, was to explore some of these points of intersection.

The Glasgow born, Los Angeles based artist and curator, Tom Lawson, set the agenda by chronicling the fluctuating responses of artists' in this century to narrative and representation, both in art and cinema. Modernism's abandonment of representation was followed by a renewed interest in it from the 1960s onwards and the use of popular culture as source material, notably by Andy Warhol, whose determination to adsorb mainstream culture and kitsch led to a fascination with the process of film making.

Lawson's description of the current generation of artists' (such as

Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst, Lisa Roberts, Steve McQueen) "total identification" from the floor, that the film media present a crisis for artists, who can't compete with their power and popularity.

This anxiety was emphatically dispelled by Philip Dodd, editor of the magazine Sight And Sound, who argued that it was film, not art, that was under pressure, with its dominance passing away, under threat from video technology. Art and film have been bound up with each other for the whole century, he argued, illustrating his point with excerpts from the work of Peter Greenaway and adding that, unlike film makers, artists have no qualms about mastering new technologies.

Other themes that recurred included the reasons for the absence of a strong visual culture in Ireland, and whether film makers can be called artists - a term, described by Rod Stoneman of the Film Board as "problematic", but which the director Pat Murphy reclaimed by calling herself "an artist who makes films - and that's my job."