Jeudi 29 mai de 14h00 à 17h30 – Bozar Bruxelles.

CONFÉRENCE ET TABLE-RONDE

” COMPLEXE NARRATIVE “

Avec la participation de
Vincent Colonna, philosophe et auteur de L’Art des Séries
Michaël Roskam & Matthieu Donck, réalisateurs
Marnie Blok & Luc Jabon, scénaristes
Drs. Anneleen Masschelein, Heidi Peeters, Thomas Van Parys (KUL) & Dr. Sarah Sepulchre (UCL)

Modérateur : Alok Nandi, réalisateur multimedia

14.00-15.00 Round Table
15.00-16.00 Heidi Peeters & Thomas Van Parys
16.00-16.30 BREAK
16.30-17.30 Vincent Colonna

14.00-15.00

In the first part, we want to zoom in on the dominant “middle field”, i.e., people in Belgium and Holland who are currently working on series. There will be a debate between Michaël Roskam, Belgian writer-director of Bullhead, who is working on a pilot for HBO; Marnie Blok, a Dutch actress and writer who has worked on a series based on musician Ramses Shaffy and Luc Jabon, a Brussels screenwriter with 30 years of experience both in cinema and in television, who also teaches a seminar on screenwriting theories at the Sorbonne and who is the president of SACD Belgium.

15.00-16.00
How to… Write a Television Screenplay?: Handbooks for Aspiring Screenwriters
By Heidi Peeters & Thomas Van Parys
The 21st century’s revolution of quality television series has brought about a new branch of do-it-yourself manuals: handbooks on writing television fiction. Manuals by showrunners, scriptwriters for successful television series or less well-known authors lure aspiring television writers with promising subtitles like “How to succeed as a professional writer in TV”, “A professional tv-writer’s real world guide to getting paid to write great television” and “21 navigational tips for screenwriters to create and sustain a hit tv-series”. We will delve into this phenomenon and take a deeper look at what these manuals have to offer.
Dr. Heidi Peeters is a researcher at the KU Leuven Institute for Cultural Studies and Literature and Media Innovation (IAP 7/01). She has published on film and literature and taught at KU Leuven, the University of Antwerp and the Media, Arts and Design Faculty.

The Complex TV Narrative: Success vs Failure
Since 2001 (e.g. Alias, 24) there has been a boom of complex long-term TV narratives, i.e. the American commercial drama series in which each episode is part of an overarching story. Their high degree of complexity has quickly become the standard format in the rapidly evolving TV industry, and the more demanding structure of most new high-profile shows (e.g. Fringe, Homeland) is often integral to their success.
In academia, such TV series are being studied by a growing number of narratologists, with Jason Mittell being the most prolific. I will present the key insights of his descriptive model of “Complex TV”, and use it to compare successful TV series with so-called ‘failed’ TV series (e.g. FlashForward, The Event).

Dr. Thomas Van Parys is a post-doctoral researcher of the FWO (Research Foundation – Flanders) at the Faculty of Arts and the Institute for Cultural Studies, KU Leuven, where he is currently working on a research project about seriality in the contemporary long-term television narrative. With I.Q. Hunter, he recently edited a collection of essays entitled Science Fiction across Media: Adaptation/Novelization, published by Gylphi in 2013.

16.00-16.30 BREAK

16.30-17.30

The sophisticated series, an artistic form of the third millenium
By Vincent Colonna
The conference will try to display how quality TV series, from Game of Thrones to Les Revenants, via Mad Men and Ainsi Soient-ils, have found a specific language by breaking the rules of classical television, and more specifically on dialogue, speed, linear storytelling, the trustworthy narrator and the stylistic transparence. By refusing the model of “filmed theatre”, the series have become highly elaborated and have achieved an artistic quality close to author based cinema. But how series differ from cinema, is by the fact that series have retained the narrative of the XIX century, the one Americans call The Well Made Play. It is thus an old dramatic scheme- rejected by avant-garde theatre – that makes the difference between series and cinema, and that has turned it into an art form.

Vincent Colonna has been working in the audiovisual field for more than 20 years. He is head of the Protagoras firm, aimed at qualitative studies for TV networks and scriptdoctoring. He has published essays on literature and autofiction, and in 2010, a first book on the art of tv series focused on popular/classical series. In 2015 he will release a second book focused on the more artistic/sophisticated series. Writing under the Barouk Salamé moniker, he is also a scriptwriter and author of thrillers.

Après le succès de la première édition de 2013, Are You Series? revient au Palais de Beaux-Arts pour vous offrir le meilleur des séries télévisées internationales.

Are You Series? vous offre l’occasion exceptionnelle de découvrir sur grand écran le gratin des feuilletons télévisés. Quatre jours de projections, d’introductions et de débats animés par des spécialistes vous permettront de partager avec eux les émotions suscitées par les héros du petit écran, d’échanger vos impressions et de réfléchir à l’écriture et l’avenir des séries. Des productions nationales et des séries venues des quatre coins du monde (États-Unis, Europe, Moyen-Orient…) vous attendent. Vous pourrez notamment voir Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, une grande fresque allemande sur la Seconde Guerre mondiale qui défraya la chronique, en présence de son producteur Nico Hofmann, ou Burning Bush, une minisérie qui retrace la lutte pour la liberté menée dans la Tchécoslovaquie communiste, en présence de sa réalisatrice Agnieszka Holland. Ne manquez pas la conférence et le quiz sur les génériques mythiques, d’Amicalement Vôtre à Mad Men, les premiers épisodes de séries réputées de Sundance Channel: Portlandia, Rectify et Red Road et de nombreuses autres surprises proposées par Are You Series?. La télévision de qualité en qualité cinéma ? Vous ne pourrez plus vous en passer !