Breaking Cinema with a Selfie Stick: Constructive Film Studies & the Point of my Podcast

I have been developing a film related podcast project called Breaking Cinema that has been having some teething problems. 

Primary among these problems is a lack of a clarity in regards to the specific focus of the podcast project and it is for this reason that I have not until now detailed the Breaking Cinema podcast on this blog.

However, the project now has a focus that is becoming clearer by the day!

A rough approximation of what the eventual logo will look like. Probably.

For the longest time, the best description I could provide to the other project members was that...

"This podcast is not just about films." 

Essentially what I have been trying to say with this statement is that the focus of Breaking Cinema aligns itself with what I was gunning for in my award-winning undergraduate theoretical dissertation, Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, and my continuing transdisciplinary research project, Ways 2 Interface.

And that focus was concerned with moving the study of cinema beyond textual critical analysis of two-dimensional images on a screen and placing greater transdisciplinary emphasis on the wider and empirical implications of the spectator's involvement and human culture as a whole.

"The fundamental focus of the project is the idea of an interfacing process - the introspective and expressive capacity inherent to us all - that we have always interwoven throughout our day-to-day existences and that we continue to do so at a formidably greater capacity in our contemporary digital realities. By examining the habits and manifestations of our cognitive, corporeal, cultural and connected ways to interface, 'Ways 2 Interface' will aim to build a unified understanding of this interfacing process - the brand at the heart of all our stories." 

- Welcome #2Interface, Ways 2 Interface 

Now, after nearly a year of actively working away on this project and recording various test episodes, I am now in a position where I can say that I very nearly have the project's focus and format fully figured out. Finally!

And this epiphany was in great part assisted by the following spontaneous forty-minute reflection I produced while I had a touch of the flu and was in a hugely lucid state of mind...

Breaking Cinema with a Selfie Stick, A Flu-Induced Reflection by Peter O'Brien

Sometimes all you need is a bit of flu!

More coming soon.