Lecture / Talk

SCORCHED EARTH isn't just a theme—it’s a violent reclamation, a response to the world that refuses to listen, to the systems that demand silence in the face of inequality. It is the aftermath of greed and of rage that cannot be contained. It is when the land, stripped and burnt, becomes a reflection of ourselves. Yet within that devastation, there is also a seed, fragile and stubborn, pushing through the charred remains — a defiance, a refusal to be obliterated.

From Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs 1991 to Brady Blackburn in The Rider 2017, characters engage us morally and emotionally in diverse ways, visiting varied social questions and constituencies. Join Professor Murray Smith from the University of Kent, UK, who will discuss the vast space of character design, within which there is room enough for the comic and the dramatic, the realist and the reflexive, the
good, the bad, the ugly, and all points in between.

Co-presented with the School of Communications and Arts, University of Queensland, this talk will be followed by a free screening of Chloé Zhao's The Rider 2017.