In Review of Cultural Exchanges

Cultural Exchanges was last week and, I have to say, I was less than impressed with the organisation of the week in general. A friend and I booked four events on the internet, but only one of them actually successfully booked. Unusually, this was the Sue Townsend talk, which neither of us had expected to be able to get a place for. However, the E-mail had said to try turning up “in GOOD time” before the event to see if there had been any cancellations. This was precisely what we did.

The first event on the list was Kamilla Elliott on Tuesday at 2pm. We arrived five minutes beforehand and headed towards the door, somewhat sheepishly, expecting to be accosted by the volunteers in charge of this event, asking us to tick off our names on a register. Instead, a man simply said: “Are you here for Kamilla Elliott?” We replied: “Yes.” Just go straight in.” said the man. And so we did. We were quite glad of that; having walked all the way up to the third floor of the Clephan Building, I would have been less than pleased to have to simply turn tail and go all the way back down. Yes I am that lazy. The lecture theatre was quite full, but we found a space. It then became evident that extra people were joining and standing at the back, which seemed a little… odd to me.

As for the talk itself, it got off to a late start due to technical difficulties, in that the music for the Powerpoint presentation was not coming through the sound system of the room. About ten minutes and three technical support types later, we were ready to go. (The cure had been restarting the computer, if you’d like to know, which had been Kamilla’s idea…) Kamilla Elliott’s lecture was entitled Unfilmable Books and dealt with books which have been deemed ‘unfilmable’ and the reasons why so many filmmakers insist on turning such pieces of literature into film. This talk immediately caught my eye in the list of events, as I have often found myself reading a book and then watching the film of it and being horrified by the appalling adaptation which I have been shown. In my experience, Stephen King’s The Shining and Suzuki Kouji’s Ring are prime examples of this, taking books which have more than could possibly ever be successfully filmed and attempting it anyway. And failing.

However, I found the lecture itself to be rather boring and, if I may say so, almost pompous in a way. I know that Kamilla Elliott is an expert in her field, having studied this subject for a long time and written books about it, and that the audience was also made up of a lot of Film Studies or Media students, but I was in neither category. In my opinion, when giving a talk, you cannot simply assume that everyone will be an expert in what you are talking about. In contrast to this, of course you cannot simply dumb down the subject to the extent that you are explaining every little term and idea, as this will quickly grow to be tedious. However, the intricate and overly-long sentences which I often found myself faced with in this lecture took things a little too far. Long sentences filled with complicated words and ideas are perfectly fine to use when writing a literary piece on the subject, but they simply will not do in a talk of this nature. A reader of a book can skip back over what they have read as often as they need to in order to understand what the author is saying, but it is much harder to pick up these things when simply listening to the words. Because of this, I often found myself rather lost in a tangle of words and sentences and therefore unable to focus and concentrate on the talk. This was a shame, as Kamilla had a lot of interesting points buried under all of those long words.

The lecture was interspersed with a lot of various multimedia inserts which broke it up quite well. The talk began with an excerpt from A Day in the Life by The Beatles, illustrated with the lyrics, which appeared projected on the screen as the words came in the song. There were also video extracts from the films Adaptation and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. From what we were shown and told about these two films, I thought that they were both very interesting and wonderful examples of ‘unfilmable books’, despite having never read them myself. These extracts also made me want to further research these books and films and were rather attention-grabbing when surrounded by the mass of words.

Kamilla was forced to cut out a section of her lecture due to the late start and at the end of the lecture, there was no time for questions from the audience, though we were invited to come down and talk to her on the way out of the lecture theatre if there was anything which we wanted to ask. I gave that a miss.

My friend and I decided to give Mark Clayden a miss later that day and it was a good thing, as I am informed that he didn’t turn up. Though I am not certain on that fact, so please don’t blame me if it’s not true.

Sue Townsend was on Thursday at 1pm. We got there fifteen minutes early and found ourselves in something midway between a crowd and a queue outside the door. We were then informed that the event “was full”. We protested that we had booked it and were met with the reply: “We cannot guarantee you a seat, even if you have booked”… What the hell? So what was the point in booking? We left this group of people in a less than pleased state, with a classmate who had been really looking forward to this event, who had also booked and was really disappointed. I don’t for a second imagine that we were the only ones in this state. Especially as I had a dozen or so people around me grumbling the exact same things that we were about how disorganised and ridiculous it was.

Later that day, we went to attempt to see Mark Thomas and were met with a woman with a clipboard asking if we had booked. People who had booked were told to go straight ahead and have their names checked off and those who had not were asked to queue at the side and would be let in, possibly, once those who had booked had arrived. At last… a sensible system. Which was apparently only discovered on the second-to-last day of the event. Well done De Montfort. Eventually, we were let into the lecture hall and were surprised by how many free seats there were for something which had been ‘fully booked’ when we tried to get our seats for it and been forced to queue outside.

This event was conducted like an interview with a second man sitting at the front with Mark Thomas. I have no idea who this other man was, partly due to the fact that they were both sitting on rather low, comfortable chairs, making it almost impossible to see them over the heads of the people in rows in front. I didn’t really know anything about Mark Thomas when I went into that lecture hall, but learned a lot over the hour about who he was, what he stood for and even, to an extent, events of his childhood. Although it was a lot more politics-based than I was expecting (Admittedly, probably because I didn’t really know who he was) I actually found myself rather interested in what he had to say, though I have no interest in politics at all. I don’t, however, remember a lot of the specifics of what he was talking about, probably because it was not exactly my area of expertise.

Mark Thomas spoke in an interesting, colloquial manner, as though having a discussion with the audience, most likely helped by the interview style of the event. It was easy to follow what he was saying, even with my limited political knowledge, if a tad uninteresting in places, for me at least. There was a fair bit of humour in this hour, which was pleasant, and a lot of ground was covered.

My main problem with this event was the fact that it ran over. The ‘interview man’ had suggested finishing the talk at 5:45pm so that there was plenty of time for questions, as “a lot of these talks have been running over, leaving us without time for questions”. This seemed like a good idea, until the first question took the best part of ten minutes to answer. Admittedly, it was a very interesting and fascinating answer, which I very much enjoyed hearing, but the following questions, also hand-picked to require extremely long answers, meant that the lecture ran over quite a bit. When a lecture is already five minutes over its supposed ending time, you really shouldn’t say: “Okay, just a last two questions now”. But that was exactly what the ‘interview man’ said. It was gone 6:10pm when it eventually ended, but as there were so many people about, it was near 6:20 when I managed to leave the building.

In conclusion really, I felt that the range of subjects covered in the Cultural Exchanges programme weren’t varied enough for the interests of most of the students I spoke to and that the entire event itself was poorly organised. This isn’t exactly the first time Cultural Exchanges has been put on, but apparently they have yet to work out the best way of going about the whole thing. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of staff and guides around and loads of helpful signs with arrows on, but it just plain wasn’t what I was expecting it to be.

Roll on next year…