Exploring the Liminal Nightclub in Genre Film with Miskatonic and Daniel Pietersen
Doors: 7pm. The talk will begin at 7:15. Please don’t be late.
I'm in this bar called Tech Noir.
I know it. It's on Pico.
There was a time - a time always only slightly in the future - when a certain kind of film seemed to feature a certain type of scene, set in a certain kind of place. The lights dimmed, the music rose and bodies began to writhe under burning neon and flashing strobes. You know the place. You’ve been there. You can call it Tech Noir or The Boiler Room but this place is really one place, and it goes by one name:
Nightclub.
Even in the real world nightclubs are weird places. As welcoming as they are threatening, untrustworthy lights illuminating a crepuscular space between night and day. Between the real and unreal. Clubbers play by their own rules, different from those of the outside world, and masks hide their daytime faces. Smoke billows. Eyes stare. Hands drag you onto the haunted dance floor…
In this lecture Daniel Pietersen will explore depictions of nightclubs in genre film and investigate how those scenes aren’t just a breathing space for the characters, a moment of reflection for the audience or simply an opportunity for the producers to push one more song onto the soundtrack album. Rather, this talk will outline how they work as liminal, transitional pivots where our understanding of their host film’s narrative is broken down, reconfigured and often subverted; it’s inside Tech Noir where we learn, as horrified as Sarah Connor, of The Terminator’s true nature; the ghost of Alex Murphy starts to reappear underneath the industrial hammering of RoboCop’s anonymous club; Pinhead performs that most transgressive of horror film blasphemies and changes the rules in the infernal Boiler Room of Hellraiser III.
Most fundamentally, this lecture will interrogate how the cultural understanding that nightclubs are play-grounds - where daytime rules don’t fully apply - allows filmmakers an opportunity to play with, or wholly transgress, film’s structures and conventions in a way that can be opposed in more mainstream genres. It will look at how the confusion of duration and persistence inherent in the nightclub experience allows physical appearance or emotional personae to change and develop, facilitating a process of narrative and character development often more natural, often more convincing, than more filmic methods like montage or exposition.
You might be murdered on the dance floor so come with me if you want to live.
This will not give you access to any online events. You will require a different ticket for that. These events are in-person only, and are not live streamed - sorry.