The Sydney Literature & Cinema Network welcomes Dr Kim Wilkins, Dr Karen Pearlman, and Dr Jason Jacobs as keynote speakers for Caméra-Stylo 6.

Large cities and metropolitan areas play a key role in the world economy, global society, and the popular imaginary. Whether seductive and seedy or clean and creative, the city has long featured on screen as a site of professional and economic promise as well as (often fraught) personal revelation—from Moonlight Cowboy (1969) to Muriel’s Wedding (1994), Unorthodox (2020) to Emily in Paris (2020–). Yet, as many of us know—either from first-hand experience or media coverage—in recent decades city-living has become increasingly unaffordable. Prohibitively expensive, even. Across the globe, housing crises proliferate. The promises of urbanism become ever more entangled with the realities of inequality. Among the multifactorial challenges and contradictions that underpin urban change, ‘gentrification’ has become the dominant term for conceptualizing spatial inequality both on and off-screen.

Gentrification’s prevalence as a narrative and thematic preoccupation in contemporary literature, cinema, and television have led scholars and critics to identify gentrification styles, cycles, scripts, and plots, while concomitantly the term ‘gentrification’ has emerged as a cultural concept that exceeds its definition as a process of demographic replacement and spatial change along socio-economic lines. Indeed, in contemporary parlance “gentrification” has become a somewhat sweeping criticism or metaphor to describe commercialization and/or discrimination where issues of representation are at stake, particularly where marginalized identities are (perceived or actually) erased, or filtered out, of a sociocultural or political space. In this talk I argue that—beyond its narrative depiction or metaphoric use—gentrification is a contemporary sensibility of place-making. It is a process that structures the construction, and our encouraged comprehension of, mainstream screen cities and the actual cityscapes they virtualize. Reading screen cities through the lens of gentrification means coming face to face with who and what we have come to expect to find where.

Kim Wilkins is Associate Professor in Media Aesthetics and Head of Screen Cultures at the University of Oslo. She is the author of American Eccentric Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2019) and co-editor with Timotheus Vermeulen of Refocus: The Films of Richard Linklater (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) with Wyatt Moss-Wellington of Refocus: The Films of Spike Jonze (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and The Body Swap Film (Berghahn, forthcoming 2026), also co-edited with Wyatt Moss-Wellington. Her essays have appeared in Screen, The New Review of Film and Television, Film Criticism, Sydney Studies in English, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Cinephile, Mediapolis and numerous anthologies. She is currently completing a monograph theorizing the screen aesthetics of gentrification for Oxford University Press, as well as a collection on the studio A24 for Edinburgh University Press and on Ari Aster for Bloomsbury—both co-edited with Bruce Isaacs.

A keynote for Camera-Stylo 2025

Karen Pearlman, Macquarie University 

Abstract

Breaking Plates: creative entanglements across 125 years is a hybrid keynote, investigating entanglements of documentary and fiction forms; archival and contemporary media; authorial and collaborative practices; first and fifth wave feminisms; and creative and analytic research methods as practiced by writer/director/editor/performer and screen academic Karen Pearlman. The keynote includes critical discussion and a screening of the award winning, 25-minute film Breaking Plates (Pearlman et al. 2024). Breaking Plates, a raucous documentary about the not-so-silent women of the silent film era, entangles “sober” documentary form with comedic and chaotic archive clips and contemporary re-animations. It asks the cross-dressed cowgirls and slapstick comediennes of early cinema: what did you know?  What can we learn?  And why are we so much more polite? This keynote unpacks the making of this cross-generational conversation to demonstrate the ‘distributed creativity’ model of film authorship and how directorial ‘vision’ is necessarily entangled with the agency, creativity, and intelligence of key cast and crew – past and present. This discussion and screening will put to the test Pearlman’s proposition that research can be fast moving and comedic, and still be an effective catalyst for reflection and insight. It will enact the core feminist principle that if we want to tell different stories, we have to tell stories differently.

Karen will also be screening her recent film Breaking Plates after her keynote on Thursday night.

Associate Professor Karen Pearlman 

Kim Wilkins' keynote will be held at the University of Sydney on Wednesday, July 16. It will be held in Lecture Theatre ... in the New Law Building Annex from 17:15. For directions, search New Law Building Annex in Google Maps. The opening keynote will be followed by wine and cheese.

The rest of the conference is held at Macquarie University's Wallumattagal (North Ryde) Campus. Thursday's and Friday's panels take place across two streams in the Arts Precinct. Directions to the Arts Precinct are found by searching 25 Wally's Walk into Google Maps. Panel stream 1 will be in room B602 on level 6 of building B, and panel stream 2 is located in C326, which is found by going down to level 5 and along the hallway to building C. Signs will be posted to help navigate between the two rooms. 

Karen Pearlman's keynote on Thursday, July 17, will be in the screening theatre in 10 Hadenfeld Avenue from 17:15. Her keynote will be followed by a screening of one of Karen's short films and a video essay by Cormac Donnelly on the concept of Caméra-Stylo. 

The conference dinner follows Karen's keynote. We will journey together on the metro to The Prophet in Surry Hills. 

Jason Jacobs' keynote will be in 25 Wally's Walk Building C, function room C122 from 17:15.

After Jason's keynote and the closing remarks, we will again head into the city to Brewdog in Redfern for drinks and dinner. 

Getting to Macquarie University and the University of Sydney.

Macquarie University is accessed via the 'Macquarie University' stop on the Sydney Metro. The metro can be accessed from Central or around the city. You can also change onto the metro from a train service at Chatswood or Epping. The Arts Precinct is a 15-minute walk from the Macquarie University Metro stop. A car park (West 3) is right outside Building C, and payment can be made via the Cellopark app.

The New Law Annex Building at the University of Sydney can be accessed via bus services on Princes Highway/City Road. The nearest train station is Redfern, about a 20-minute walk.