To my fellow, web based, film critics and bloggers,
I’ve kept widely silent on the ethical issue of set visits, swag, and the potential effects they have on our online community for roughly a year. Those following my Twitter feed (@damorton16) and noticing that I regularly write for Pajiba can probably infer what side of the line I’m on but, before I get to that, a brief context could serve useful.
I come out of journalism. I began as a film critic for my high school newspaper, The Pirate, before becoming an intern and freelance writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2001 during my senior year. I was shown the ropes of arts and entertainment coverage by some of the best writers the state of Wisconsin had to offer, many of whom have moved on to bigger and better things at the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald. My writing was critiqued, I was given tips on how to “get” the story and, most significant to this discussion, I was instilled with an ethical code that many of those writers and critics followed. Most notably, do not get involved with the Hollywood studios.
That latter lesson came out of a soul crushing turn that a story I was being led to departed on. Universal Pictures had been keen on the coverage that my section, the teen-centered “Jump” page, was offering. My editor came up to me and said that the studio wanted to fly me out to Hawaii not to review the upcoming Kate Bosworth and Michelle Rodriguez surfer film Blue Crush (2002) but to cover the press junket. My ears perked up; I could take a trip to Hawaii as an eighteen year old high school student! Yet, before my hopes could balloon, before I could pack my bags, my editor said something to the effect of “Sorry, can’t let you do it.” I felt like a kid getting kicked out of a candy store for a moment before he sat me down and said, “It’s not ethical. The editors feel if they send you on this trip, you and the paper will be indebted to Universal and will ultimately write a positive review of the film. We need to keep you objective.”
I may have been temporarily bitter about this turn of events, but I slowly began to see the truth in it. As my freelance career took off and I was sent DVD screeners to review, I was occasionally pressured to write positive reviews at a risk of losing the ability to get free screeners. Later, when I wrote a negative review for an album at my college newspaper, the UWM Post, I was approached by a colleague who berated me. It turned out the album involved the talent of a family member and the colleague felt that I had done his kin a disservice with the review and wanted me to retract it. My editor got wind of the exchange and called out my colleague, once again on ethical grounds. Hopefully, you will have noticed a continuity here: the ethics of journalism demand that you do not give up your position as an objective observer by letting swag or personal relationships get in the way of your evaluation.
After moving on from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and my four year tenure at the UWM Post, I took some time off from the journalism racket. My graduate course work in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California-Los Angeles did not leave me with a lot of free time. I was taking the relatively popular path from going from film criticism to film theory and history (see Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Bogdanovich, et al.). After finishing my master’s degree and beginning my Ph.D. course work, I decided to get back to journalism. Cinema studies has many benefits, teaching America’s youth about film and walking them through old favorites and getting to think critically about the art around them being paramount, but I missed writing for a wider audience and sharing my cinephilia with others. So, thanks to Brian Prisco, a friend of a friend at the time, I was encouraged over a birthday celebration of Korean BBQ to send Dustin Rowles an e-mail.
Dustin told me of the guiding philosophy for Pajiba right off the bat: I was not to accept free screeners, I was not, despite my Los Angeles base of operations, to partake in the fruit of set visits and swag. I was fine with this. My career path had shown me what those rewards could lead to and, guided by an ethical code I had assembled out of journalism, academia, and documentary filmmaking (self-conscious objectivity, as you see here), I didn’t really give a damn. Writing criticism was my hobby, another way to feel fulfilled by a subject area I deeply admired. So I started writing up old movies I appreciated and watching ones I was unfamiliar with, getting the occasional assignment but, for the most part, left to my own devices.
A year after writing for Pajiba, I found myself neck deep in dissertation research, focusing on comic book films. Attending 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, I was approached by another blog, The Playlist, to write coverage based on round-table interviews, many of which focused on some of the same films I was writing about. In order to flesh out my dissertation, I accepted the gig and told Dustin that I would not be contributing to Pajiba for a brief period of time, as the content was not of the species he desired. I worked in dissertation related questions with those prepared by my editors at The Playlist and I got some great research done, especially when it came to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), research I later presented at the 2011 annual conference of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Yet, what troubled me was how close some of the other writers were to the talent and the projects to the point that I felt like I had betrayed my profession by attending a round-table on the Universal lot (how’s that for dramatic symmetry!).
I told a dear friend of mine, a former journalist turned public relations rep for medical giant, about my dilemma. He was, as always, pragmatic. He told me that in his experience, both the papers he had written for and the businesses he covered normally set a limit on the value of free swag that should be offered and that transparency was the best solution. “If you took a free CD, just say that at the bottom of the review. At least you’re being true to yourself and to your reader that way,” he said. So, whenever that situation took place again (which it rarely did, given my busy, Ph.D. student schedule), I did.
I continued on my dissertation research, occasionally interviewing filmmakers and personnel to flesh out the industrial context behind the trend of comic book adaptations. One such encounter was with a head of marketing for a major studio. We spoke about the comic book projects he had worked on and I asked him if he thought directors hiring comic book personnel (Dave Gibbons on Watchmen, Frank Miller on Sin City are examples) was a means of fan lip service or a genuine act of filmmaking collaboration. He insisted it was the latter and then dropped the bomb shell, “The best marketing decision our studio ever made was inviting bloggers to the set. They get the word out to the main demographic: the fans. We can cross a title over to a wider demographic from there.”
Boom went the dynamite. My academic career suddenly intersected with my hobby as a film critic and I was troubled by the Eisensteinian collision. Now, I understand that set visits can lead to context (they have in the case of my dissertation) but the most important thing we can do for our profession and our readers is to be transparent and to disclose the exclusive nature of these visits (swag is hard to defend in 99% of the cases, unless the swag is being reviewed, like a soundtrack or a DVD screener, but those even make me feel uncomfortable, as seen in the aforementioned cases). The biggest critique lobbed at the practice of online criticism and journalism is our lack of an ethical code, it gives print-based critics Armond White and Richard Schickel ammunition to pounce on our work as being unprofessional. As White once crowed, “All this distortion owes to what’s been called film culture’s “democratization,” a misleading term for how the expansion of film discussion beyond journalism’s art pages and all over the Internet has weakened our cultural foundation and decentered aesthetic and political authority. As uncredentialed experts multiply and flounder, we’re all victimized by hype. [...] Professional dignity is the last thing Internetters respect. Their loudmouth enmity and lack of knowledge are so overwhelming that it is imperative to put this crisis in perspective.”
As a writer at Film Rant later noted, while reflecting on White’s statements that, “as a paid professional writer producing online content for various websites on a daily basis, I’m in the lucky position of having a job that I love. While much of the work I do is based around marketing and PR, it is written to a very specific house style and is monitored closely for journalistic integrity. The only reason I mention this is that I think this gives me a slight advantage over some online writers in that I habitually adhere to codes of conduct that others do not. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is a wealth of great talent out there whose work I enjoy reading and interacting with via blog posts, podcasts and Twitter. The problem is that to some small degree, Mr. White has a point.”
I’m not ready to go on the record as agreeing with Armond White, as I do not think, despite my background in journalism and Cinema and Media Studies, that a film blogger or critic need have credentials. The professional practice of film criticism, in both print and online, is a relatively new career. Did Jean-Luc Godard go to school for journalism or criticism? Even one of Armond White’s heroes, Pauline Kael, never graduated from college. What we do need, however, is an ethical code that holds us together as a community. My proposed solution is a relatively hands off one: transparency and disclosure. It is not my place to judge you for taking an apple from the tree of knowledge. While I may feel uncomfortable with it, that is a choice that belongs to you and your editorial team. However, I implore you, for the sake of online criticism and the career we have all established, together, to disclose it for both our sake and the sake of the readers. Do not let movie studio marketing execs feel like the best decision they ever made was inviting us into their paradise.
Yours,
Drew Morton
Drew Morton is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching associate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California-Los Angeles. Aside from a handful of DVD screeners (2001-2006) and a”Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” soundtrack (2010, which he only accepted after reviewing the film as a utilized source in his dissertation), he no longer accepts swag. He has never participated in a set visit, although he has participated in round-table interviews specifically for The Playlist. Aside from the occasional guild member screening, he pays for all of his movie tickets, DVDs, and Blu-Rays.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Adaptations - MPCA/MACA
I am currently seeking original work in the area of FILM ADAPTATIONS for the annual Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association Annual Conference. Abstracts can include a wide variety of approaches to Adaptation Studies. These may include research on film adaptations of literary works, comic books, video games, television shows, mythology, other films, radio shows, cartoons, nonfiction books, etc.,
Please email a paper abstract by Saturday, April 30, 2010 to sbalcerzak@niu.edu. Along with a paper description, include university affiliation, professional address, and email address. I also welcome panel proposals, with three or more participants, consisting of a panel description along with a full list of presenters and paper titles. Please include university affiliation, professional address, and email address for each presenter and the chair.
Scott Balcerzak
Assistant Professor of Film and Literature
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
sbalcerzak@niu.edu
Conference dates: Friday, Oct 14- Sunday, Oct 16
Hotel: Hilton Milwaukee City Center http://www.hiltonmilwaukee.com/home.html
Deadline for Papers: Apr 30, 2011
Please email a paper abstract by Saturday, April 30, 2010 to sbalcerzak@niu.edu. Along with a paper description, include university affiliation, professional address, and email address. I also welcome panel proposals, with three or more participants, consisting of a panel description along with a full list of presenters and paper titles. Please include university affiliation, professional address, and email address for each presenter and the chair.
Scott Balcerzak
Assistant Professor of Film and Literature
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
sbalcerzak@niu.edu
Conference dates: Friday, Oct 14- Sunday, Oct 16
Hotel: Hilton Milwaukee City Center http://www.hiltonmilwaukee.com/home.html
Deadline for Papers: Apr 30, 2011
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
CFP: Global Innovations in Post-World War II Cinema (MSA 13; Oct 6-9, 2011)
Prospective Conference Panel
Modernist Studies Association 13: Structures of Innovation, Buffalo, NY
Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2011
As the field of “new modernist studies” continues grappling with its geohistorical expansions, and also its containment within definitional and disciplinary boundaries, Susan Stanford Friedman proposes a transformative model of “planetary modernist studies” in the September issue of Modernism/Modernity. This approach holds fruitful possibilities for histories and theories of modernist film aesthetics, an area that has yet to be fully investigated through these recent methodological developments. Friedman explains that modernist studies should avoid the familiar polarization of aesthetics and politics, and rather “be open to different kinds of aesthetic innovation linked to different modernities around the world and through time.” “In this regard,” she argues, “the aesthetic is always imbricated in the political, the historical. And vice versa” (488).
Moving beyond traditional formalist and auteurist theoretical paradigms, as well as Euro-centric conceptions of film history and periodicity, this panel seeks to explore the heterogeneous ways in which post-World War II art cinema articulates the modern and breaks from the classical. Further, it aims to situate the aesthetic innovations of different cinematic modernisms in a global context to understand their roles within different political and cultural modernities. How do the visual, media, and national cultures of the postwar era encompass a range of ideological and stylistic contradictions through cinema as much as—or maybe more than—a coherent set of underlying modernist principles?
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
- New readings of canonical films or new perspectives on key figures and movements (Blow-Up, Jean-Luc Godard, film noir, etc.)
- The relationships between late modern art cinema of the 1950s/60s and the early modern avant-garde of the 1920s/30s
- The intersections of modernist cinema with literature, architecture, fashion, photography, music, or visual art and design
- Transnational influences: modernism and/in Hollywood
- Non-Western modernisms
- Sounds of modernism
- Experiencing modernism onscreen: affect and phenomenology
- Film performance and celebrity culture
- Film production and distribution
- Film exhibition and reception
- Archiving modernism and the circulation of cinema
- New media and technologies
- Identity politics of modernism
- Linguistic and cultural translation
Send 300 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Please visit the MSA website for more details about the 2011 conference.
Modernist Studies Association 13: Structures of Innovation, Buffalo, NY
Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2011
As the field of “new modernist studies” continues grappling with its geohistorical expansions, and also its containment within definitional and disciplinary boundaries, Susan Stanford Friedman proposes a transformative model of “planetary modernist studies” in the September issue of Modernism/Modernity. This approach holds fruitful possibilities for histories and theories of modernist film aesthetics, an area that has yet to be fully investigated through these recent methodological developments. Friedman explains that modernist studies should avoid the familiar polarization of aesthetics and politics, and rather “be open to different kinds of aesthetic innovation linked to different modernities around the world and through time.” “In this regard,” she argues, “the aesthetic is always imbricated in the political, the historical. And vice versa” (488).
Moving beyond traditional formalist and auteurist theoretical paradigms, as well as Euro-centric conceptions of film history and periodicity, this panel seeks to explore the heterogeneous ways in which post-World War II art cinema articulates the modern and breaks from the classical. Further, it aims to situate the aesthetic innovations of different cinematic modernisms in a global context to understand their roles within different political and cultural modernities. How do the visual, media, and national cultures of the postwar era encompass a range of ideological and stylistic contradictions through cinema as much as—or maybe more than—a coherent set of underlying modernist principles?
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
- New readings of canonical films or new perspectives on key figures and movements (Blow-Up, Jean-Luc Godard, film noir, etc.)
- The relationships between late modern art cinema of the 1950s/60s and the early modern avant-garde of the 1920s/30s
- The intersections of modernist cinema with literature, architecture, fashion, photography, music, or visual art and design
- Transnational influences: modernism and/in Hollywood
- Non-Western modernisms
- Sounds of modernism
- Experiencing modernism onscreen: affect and phenomenology
- Film performance and celebrity culture
- Film production and distribution
- Film exhibition and reception
- Archiving modernism and the circulation of cinema
- New media and technologies
- Identity politics of modernism
- Linguistic and cultural translation
Send 300 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Please visit the MSA website for more details about the 2011 conference.
Friday, September 24, 2010
CFP: New essays for collection on Nicholas Ray
Going Home: Essays on Nicholas Ray in Cinema Culture
Editors: Steven Rybin and Will Scheibel
We are currently accepting proposals for a new collection of essays on Nicholas Ray, tentatively titled Going Home: Essays on Nicholas Ray in Cinema Culture. A university press has shown an interest in this collection.
Ray was the “cause célèbre of the auteur theory,” as critic Andrew Sarris once put it, but unlike his senior colleagues in Hollywood such as Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, he remains a director relatively ignored by academic film scholarship. Marking the event of his 100th birthday, this new anthology of critical, historical, and theoretical perspectives on his films and work aims to revisit Ray in the wake of renewed interest in the director, evinced by the upcoming restoration of Ray’s final film, We Can’t Go Home Again (1976), for a re-release at the 2011 Venice International Film Festival. Additionally, the Harvard Film Archive hosted a Ray retrospective earlier this summer, Ray’s daughter Nikka is writing a memoir, author Patrick McGilligan is completing a new biography, and film archivist Michael Chaiken is at work on the sale of Ray material with New York rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz.
The aim of this collection, therefore, is to demonstrate to academic film studies the ongoing vitality of Ray’s cinema, to reassess his career in the new millennium from different methodological approaches, and to consider his place within film culture at large. Essays in the book may touch on one of the following topics, but others are welcome (historical approaches are of particular interest):
• New readings of Ray’s classic films: They Live By Night (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), On Dangerous Ground (1951), The Lusty Men (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Bigger Than Life (1956), Bitter Victory (1957)
• New readings of relatively ignored Ray films: Hot Blood (1955), Wind Across the Everglades (1958), Party Girl (1958), The Savage Innocents (1960), King of Kings (1961)
• Defenses of Ray’s disvalued or forgotten films: A Woman’s Secret (1949), Knock on Any Door (1949), Born to Be Bad (1950), Flying Leathernecks (1951), Run for Cover (1955), The True Story of Jesse James (1957), 55 Days at Peking (1963)
• Reevaluations, reexaminations, and reinvestments in older frameworks familiar from earlier writing on Ray (the ongoing vitality of auteurism and mise en scène criticism to contemporary film studies and Ray scholarship, for example)
• Ray’s career in media other than film: architecture, theater, radio, and television
• The transnational reception of Ray’s films in Europe during the 1950s and in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s that led to his canonization as a ‘Hollywood auteur’
• Ray in the studios, with producers John Houseman and Howard Hughes; Ray out of the studios, with producers Robert Lord, Paul Graetz, Stuart Schulberg, and Samuel Bronston
• Ray’s abandoned projects
• The rise of youth culture and a youth market in the 1950s
• Gender, sexualities, and whiteness: representation/identification/difference
• Screening social class
• Space: rural vs. sub/urban America
• Place: Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, the backroads of Oklahoma, “the frontier,” etc.
• Outlaws and folk heroes, celebrity, and the myth of ‘the rebel’
• Marginalized figures, victims of society, and the politics of rebellion
• Ray’s non-Hollywood films: We Can’t Go Home Again (1973-1976); The Janitor (1974); Marco (1978)
• Film performance, stardom, and its aesthetic/social/historical contexts: Ray’s collaborations with James Dean, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan, Gloria Grahame, Robert Mitchum, Natalie Wood, James Cagney, and others
• Ray in film studies/film pedagogy; Ray as pedagogue
• Ray’s international legacy and influence on the French New Wave, as well as on post-classical filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders
• What happened to Nicholas Ray?
• Other topics are imaginable and welcome.
Send 300-500 word abstract and a short author bio to Steven Rybin (smrybin@comcast.net) and Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com); please copy both of us on the email.
Deadline for abstracts: December 1, 2010.
Deadline for final essays: November 1, 2011
Steven Rybin, Ph.D.
School of Liberal Arts
Georgia Gwinnett College
1000 University Center Ln.
Lawrenceville, GA 30043
Will Scheibel
Indiana University
Department of Communication & Culture
800 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
Editors: Steven Rybin and Will Scheibel
We are currently accepting proposals for a new collection of essays on Nicholas Ray, tentatively titled Going Home: Essays on Nicholas Ray in Cinema Culture. A university press has shown an interest in this collection.
Ray was the “cause célèbre of the auteur theory,” as critic Andrew Sarris once put it, but unlike his senior colleagues in Hollywood such as Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, he remains a director relatively ignored by academic film scholarship. Marking the event of his 100th birthday, this new anthology of critical, historical, and theoretical perspectives on his films and work aims to revisit Ray in the wake of renewed interest in the director, evinced by the upcoming restoration of Ray’s final film, We Can’t Go Home Again (1976), for a re-release at the 2011 Venice International Film Festival. Additionally, the Harvard Film Archive hosted a Ray retrospective earlier this summer, Ray’s daughter Nikka is writing a memoir, author Patrick McGilligan is completing a new biography, and film archivist Michael Chaiken is at work on the sale of Ray material with New York rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz.
The aim of this collection, therefore, is to demonstrate to academic film studies the ongoing vitality of Ray’s cinema, to reassess his career in the new millennium from different methodological approaches, and to consider his place within film culture at large. Essays in the book may touch on one of the following topics, but others are welcome (historical approaches are of particular interest):
• New readings of Ray’s classic films: They Live By Night (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), On Dangerous Ground (1951), The Lusty Men (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Bigger Than Life (1956), Bitter Victory (1957)
• New readings of relatively ignored Ray films: Hot Blood (1955), Wind Across the Everglades (1958), Party Girl (1958), The Savage Innocents (1960), King of Kings (1961)
• Defenses of Ray’s disvalued or forgotten films: A Woman’s Secret (1949), Knock on Any Door (1949), Born to Be Bad (1950), Flying Leathernecks (1951), Run for Cover (1955), The True Story of Jesse James (1957), 55 Days at Peking (1963)
• Reevaluations, reexaminations, and reinvestments in older frameworks familiar from earlier writing on Ray (the ongoing vitality of auteurism and mise en scène criticism to contemporary film studies and Ray scholarship, for example)
• Ray’s career in media other than film: architecture, theater, radio, and television
• The transnational reception of Ray’s films in Europe during the 1950s and in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s that led to his canonization as a ‘Hollywood auteur’
• Ray in the studios, with producers John Houseman and Howard Hughes; Ray out of the studios, with producers Robert Lord, Paul Graetz, Stuart Schulberg, and Samuel Bronston
• Ray’s abandoned projects
• The rise of youth culture and a youth market in the 1950s
• Gender, sexualities, and whiteness: representation/identification/difference
• Screening social class
• Space: rural vs. sub/urban America
• Place: Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, the backroads of Oklahoma, “the frontier,” etc.
• Outlaws and folk heroes, celebrity, and the myth of ‘the rebel’
• Marginalized figures, victims of society, and the politics of rebellion
• Ray’s non-Hollywood films: We Can’t Go Home Again (1973-1976); The Janitor (1974); Marco (1978)
• Film performance, stardom, and its aesthetic/social/historical contexts: Ray’s collaborations with James Dean, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan, Gloria Grahame, Robert Mitchum, Natalie Wood, James Cagney, and others
• Ray in film studies/film pedagogy; Ray as pedagogue
• Ray’s international legacy and influence on the French New Wave, as well as on post-classical filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders
• What happened to Nicholas Ray?
• Other topics are imaginable and welcome.
Send 300-500 word abstract and a short author bio to Steven Rybin (smrybin@comcast.net) and Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com); please copy both of us on the email.
Deadline for abstracts: December 1, 2010.
Deadline for final essays: November 1, 2011
Steven Rybin, Ph.D.
School of Liberal Arts
Georgia Gwinnett College
1000 University Center Ln.
Lawrenceville, GA 30043
Will Scheibel
Indiana University
Department of Communication & Culture
800 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
Monday, August 02, 2010
SCMS CFP: All-Consuming Identities: Media, Identity, Consumption
The emphasis on appealing to niche audiences in contemporary media products has encouraged interest in exploiting perceptible and potentially profitable identity traits—including race, class, gender, and sexuality—as a way to marshal consumption by specific audiences and to extend the value of consumable media beyond their originary forms. This kind of exploitation may seem to be the direct result of the current media environment, but it has arguably been an operative technique for designing media products and inducing their consumption since the inception of mass media in the nineteenth century. Looking at how identity traits have been deployed to promote consumption of media products in different ways and at different times is valuable to understanding the larger sociocultural and economic forces at play in the creation and overall proliferation of a variety of media forms. Accordingly, the main purpose of this panel is to look at how identity traits—of actors, celebrities, characters, producers, or audiences—are utilized to encourage consumption of media products both on and off screen. Submissions may address any aspect of identity and any form of screen or broadcast media and their extensions, and employ
August 15th, 2010 to:
Jennifer Jones (jones334 [at ] indiana.edu)
Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Communication and Culture
- celebrity or star studies;
- auteur studies;
- branding;
- audience or reception studies;
- historical research; and/or
- industrial analysis.
August 15th, 2010 to:
Jennifer Jones (jones334 [at ] indiana.edu)
Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Communication and Culture
Thursday, July 22, 2010
[Reminder]: CFP: Auteur as Citizen: Nicholas Ray and New Directions in Director Studies
Prospective Panel: Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, March 10-13, 2011
Ritz Carlton Hotel, New Orleans, LA
Deadline for submissions: Sunday, August 8, 2010 11:59 PM EDT
Respondent: Dana Polan, Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University and author of In a Lonely Place (BFI Publishing, 1993)
Submissions are still welcome for essays that consider the relationship between film authorship and citizenship with respect to Nicholas Ray, director of They Live By Night (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Bigger Than Life (1956).
Ray was the “cause célèbre of the auteur theory,” as critic Andrew Sarris put it, and yet unlike his senior colleagues Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, he remains a director largely ignored by academic film scholarship on Hollywood. Marking his 100th birthday, this interdisciplinary panel aims to revisit Ray in the wake of renewed interest in the director: the Harvard Film Archive is currently hosting a Ray retrospective; his widow Susan Ray is in the progress of restoring his final film, We Can’t Go Home Again (1976), for re-release at the 2011 Venice International Film Festival; film archivist Michael Chaiken is at work on the sale of Ray material with New York rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz; Ray’s daughter Nikka is completing a memoir; and author Patrick McGilligan is writing a new biography.
Rather than taking a traditional auteurist reassessment based on style and “personal vision” alone, we want to reframe film authorship studies to explore the communal responsibility and public life of the director at the intersections of auteurism and civic discourse. The tensions between individuality and community, and rebellion and conformism, both in Ray’s films and in his reputation working in the Classical Hollywood system, make him a representative case study in this regard. Through this socio-historical lens, we want to investigate more broadly how both the biographical legends and aesthetic practices of directors articulate civic identity in ethical, political, cultural, and national contexts.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
• Ray’s background in architecture, radio, and socialist theater
• The transnational reception of Ray’s films in Europe during the 1950s and in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s that led to his canonization as a “Hollywood auteur”
• The rise of youth culture and a youth market in the 1950s
• Gender, sexualities, and whiteness: representation / identification
• Screening social class
• Space: rural vs. (sub)urban America
• Place: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, the backroads of Oklahoma, “the frontier,” etc.
• Outlaws and folk heroes, celebrity, and the myth of “the rebel”
• Marginalized figures, victims of society, and the politics of rebellion
• Ray’s non-Hollywood films: We Can't Go Home Again (1973-76), The Janitor (1974) and Marco (1978)
• Film performance, stardom, and its social contexts: Ray’s collaborations with James Dean, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan, and others
• Ray’s international legacy and influence on the French New Wave, as well as on filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders
Send 300 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Steve Rybin (smrybin@comcast.net) and Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15, 2010. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2011 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Ritz Carlton Hotel, New Orleans, LA
Deadline for submissions: Sunday, August 8, 2010 11:59 PM EDT
Respondent: Dana Polan, Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University and author of In a Lonely Place (BFI Publishing, 1993)
Submissions are still welcome for essays that consider the relationship between film authorship and citizenship with respect to Nicholas Ray, director of They Live By Night (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Bigger Than Life (1956).
Ray was the “cause célèbre of the auteur theory,” as critic Andrew Sarris put it, and yet unlike his senior colleagues Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, he remains a director largely ignored by academic film scholarship on Hollywood. Marking his 100th birthday, this interdisciplinary panel aims to revisit Ray in the wake of renewed interest in the director: the Harvard Film Archive is currently hosting a Ray retrospective; his widow Susan Ray is in the progress of restoring his final film, We Can’t Go Home Again (1976), for re-release at the 2011 Venice International Film Festival; film archivist Michael Chaiken is at work on the sale of Ray material with New York rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz; Ray’s daughter Nikka is completing a memoir; and author Patrick McGilligan is writing a new biography.
Rather than taking a traditional auteurist reassessment based on style and “personal vision” alone, we want to reframe film authorship studies to explore the communal responsibility and public life of the director at the intersections of auteurism and civic discourse. The tensions between individuality and community, and rebellion and conformism, both in Ray’s films and in his reputation working in the Classical Hollywood system, make him a representative case study in this regard. Through this socio-historical lens, we want to investigate more broadly how both the biographical legends and aesthetic practices of directors articulate civic identity in ethical, political, cultural, and national contexts.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
• Ray’s background in architecture, radio, and socialist theater
• The transnational reception of Ray’s films in Europe during the 1950s and in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s that led to his canonization as a “Hollywood auteur”
• The rise of youth culture and a youth market in the 1950s
• Gender, sexualities, and whiteness: representation / identification
• Screening social class
• Space: rural vs. (sub)urban America
• Place: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, the backroads of Oklahoma, “the frontier,” etc.
• Outlaws and folk heroes, celebrity, and the myth of “the rebel”
• Marginalized figures, victims of society, and the politics of rebellion
• Ray’s non-Hollywood films: We Can't Go Home Again (1973-76), The Janitor (1974) and Marco (1978)
• Film performance, stardom, and its social contexts: Ray’s collaborations with James Dean, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan, and others
• Ray’s international legacy and influence on the French New Wave, as well as on filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders
Send 300 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Steve Rybin (smrybin@comcast.net) and Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15, 2010. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2011 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Thursday, July 08, 2010
SCMS CFPs: 'Filming the Internet,' 'Appropriating Vertigo'
Here are two SCMS CFPs on interesting topics from a former and a current student - Anthony Coman and Paul Petrovic.
sb
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Filming the Internet
John Badham's 1983 film War Games marked the beginning of cinema's relationship with a new medium: the Internet. Since then, as the technology has become ubiquitous in homes and in places of work, the internet has achieved increasing prominence in a variety of film genres. While some theorists have addressed Hollywood's attitude towards competing media in a more general sense, less has been written about the sociological and historical implications of the internet itself on screen. This proposed panel will look at the technophobic and technophilic narratives of internet technology in the context of its rapid integration into our daily lives and expanding presence on film over the last three decades.
Possible paper topics may include:
• Politicization or sexualization of internet and computing technology.
• Trends in the evolving tropes/emerging archetypes of the Internet film sub-genre.
• The internet and gender.
• The internet and criminality.
• The anachronistic future of internet computing.
• Spacial representation of the internet.
• Historicizing the internet on film.
• Critical, popular, scientific, or governmental reception of internet narratives.
Please submit an abstract with 5 item bibliography and CV or author's bio to awcoman@ufl.edu. Submit abstracts by Sunday, August 8th. All submissions will receive a response on or before Sunday, August 15th.
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Appropriating Vertigo
Since Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was released over half a century ago, its reputation has gone from ambivalent to laudatory. Owing to its themes of voyeurism and its ideas of a subjective self-deception, countless directors have appropriated and translated the film by doing everything from changing the locale to things to reversing the gender roles.
Some intertextual homages to Vertigo include Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992), Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995), Gilles Mimouni’s L’Appartement (1996), and Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of Cinema (2005).
More covert influences can be found within the filmographies of Park Chan-wook, Catherine Breillat, Gillian Armstrong, and Sam Mendes, all of whom list Vertigo as among their favorite films.
This panel seeks to revitalize the freshness of Hitchcock and Vertigo’s appeal to culture. In addition to complicating old readings—such as the initial adaptation between the film and the novel d’Entre les Morts, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac—this panel wants to highlight new associations in which contemporary filmmakers from all cultures translate Hitchcock’s Vertigo’s mood and neuroses onto their screens. I am also open to papers exploring the film’s influence in graphic novels, television programs, and video games.
Please send a 300-word abstract with five bibliographic sources and a brief author bio to pauldpetrovic@gmail.com, by 11:59 CST July 30, 2010.
sb
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Filming the Internet
John Badham's 1983 film War Games marked the beginning of cinema's relationship with a new medium: the Internet. Since then, as the technology has become ubiquitous in homes and in places of work, the internet has achieved increasing prominence in a variety of film genres. While some theorists have addressed Hollywood's attitude towards competing media in a more general sense, less has been written about the sociological and historical implications of the internet itself on screen. This proposed panel will look at the technophobic and technophilic narratives of internet technology in the context of its rapid integration into our daily lives and expanding presence on film over the last three decades.
Possible paper topics may include:
• Politicization or sexualization of internet and computing technology.
• Trends in the evolving tropes/emerging archetypes of the Internet film sub-genre.
• The internet and gender.
• The internet and criminality.
• The anachronistic future of internet computing.
• Spacial representation of the internet.
• Historicizing the internet on film.
• Critical, popular, scientific, or governmental reception of internet narratives.
Please submit an abstract with 5 item bibliography and CV or author's bio to awcoman@ufl.edu. Submit abstracts by Sunday, August 8th. All submissions will receive a response on or before Sunday, August 15th.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Appropriating Vertigo
Since Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was released over half a century ago, its reputation has gone from ambivalent to laudatory. Owing to its themes of voyeurism and its ideas of a subjective self-deception, countless directors have appropriated and translated the film by doing everything from changing the locale to things to reversing the gender roles.
Some intertextual homages to Vertigo include Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992), Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995), Gilles Mimouni’s L’Appartement (1996), and Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of Cinema (2005).
More covert influences can be found within the filmographies of Park Chan-wook, Catherine Breillat, Gillian Armstrong, and Sam Mendes, all of whom list Vertigo as among their favorite films.
This panel seeks to revitalize the freshness of Hitchcock and Vertigo’s appeal to culture. In addition to complicating old readings—such as the initial adaptation between the film and the novel d’Entre les Morts, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac—this panel wants to highlight new associations in which contemporary filmmakers from all cultures translate Hitchcock’s Vertigo’s mood and neuroses onto their screens. I am also open to papers exploring the film’s influence in graphic novels, television programs, and video games.
Please send a 300-word abstract with five bibliographic sources and a brief author bio to pauldpetrovic@gmail.com, by 11:59 CST July 30, 2010.
Monday, July 05, 2010
Hollywood On-the-Air: Rehistoricizing Cinema and Radio
With the influx of new research on media convergence, this panel explores the relationship between two of the most popular American entertainment mediums of the last century: radio and cinema. As film grew in popularity during the first half of the 20th century, so did radio, with the U.S. Census reporting by 1950 that 95 percent of the country owned receivers. This panel will discuss the complicated commercial, aesthetic, technological, and sociological relationships between these two mediums during the development of our entertainment industry.
Papers could consider, for example: radio/screen stardom, screen-to-radio adaptations (or vice versa), sound technologies, vocal performance, music history, news reporting, audience studies, and other topics pertaining to the cross-media relationship between radio and film. Papers historically focused within the 20th century are particularly welcome, though I will also consider innovative research on current trends.
Please send a 250 word abstract with 5 bibliographic sources and a brief author bio by August 5, 2010 to sbalcerzak@niu.edu.
Scott Balcerzak
Assistant Professor of Film and Media
Department of English
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
Papers could consider, for example: radio/screen stardom, screen-to-radio adaptations (or vice versa), sound technologies, vocal performance, music history, news reporting, audience studies, and other topics pertaining to the cross-media relationship between radio and film. Papers historically focused within the 20th century are particularly welcome, though I will also consider innovative research on current trends.
Please send a 250 word abstract with 5 bibliographic sources and a brief author bio by August 5, 2010 to sbalcerzak@niu.edu.
Scott Balcerzak
Assistant Professor of Film and Media
Department of English
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
Monday, June 14, 2010
CFP: Auteur as Citizen: Nicholas Ray and New Directions in Director Studies
Prospective Panel:
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, March 10-13, 2011
Ritz Carlton Hotel, New Orleans, LA
Deadline for submissions: Sunday, August 8, 2010 11:59 PM EDT
Essay submissions sought that consider the relationship between film authorship and citizenship with respect to Nicholas Ray, director of They Live By Night (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Bigger Than Life (1956).
Ray was the “cause célèbre of the auteur theory,” as critic Andrew Sarris put it, and yet unlike his senior colleagues Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, he remains a director largely ignored by academic film scholarship. Marking his 100th birthday, this interdisciplinary panel aims to revisit Ray in the wake of renewed interest in the director: his widow Susan Ray is currently restoring his final film, We Can’t Go Home Again (1976), for re-release in 2012; his daughter Nikka Ray is at work on a memoir; and writer Patrick McGilligan is completing a new biography. Rather than taking a traditional auteurist reassessment based on style and “personal vision” alone, we want to reframe authorship studies to explore the communal responsibility and public life of the director at the intersections of auteurism and civic discourse. The tensions between individuality and community, and rebellion and conformism, both in Ray’s films and in his reputation working in the Classical Hollywood system, make him a representative case study in this regard. Through this lens, we want to investigate more broadly how both the biographical legends and aesthetic practices of directors articulate civic identity in ethical, social, political, cultural, and national contexts.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
• Ray’s background in architecture, radio, and socialist theater
• The transnational reception of Ray’s films in Europe during the 1950s and in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s that led to his canonization as a “Hollywood auteur”
• The rise of youth culture and a youth market in the 1950s
• Gender, sexualities, and whiteness: representation / identification
• Screening social class
• Space: rural vs. (sub)urban America
• Place: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, the backroads of Oklahoma, “the frontier,” etc.
• Outlaws and folk heroes, celebrity, and the myth of “the rebel”
• Marginalized figures, victims of society, and the politics of rebellion
• Ray’s non-Hollywood films: We Can't Go Home Again (1973-76), The Janitor (1974) and Marco (1978)
• Film performance, stardom, and its social contexts: Ray's collaborations with James Dean, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan, and others
• Ray’s international legacy and influence on the French New Wave, as well as on filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders
Send 300 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Steve Rybin (smrybin@comcast.net) and Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15, 2010. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2011 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, March 10-13, 2011
Ritz Carlton Hotel, New Orleans, LA
Deadline for submissions: Sunday, August 8, 2010 11:59 PM EDT
Essay submissions sought that consider the relationship between film authorship and citizenship with respect to Nicholas Ray, director of They Live By Night (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Bigger Than Life (1956).
Ray was the “cause célèbre of the auteur theory,” as critic Andrew Sarris put it, and yet unlike his senior colleagues Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, he remains a director largely ignored by academic film scholarship. Marking his 100th birthday, this interdisciplinary panel aims to revisit Ray in the wake of renewed interest in the director: his widow Susan Ray is currently restoring his final film, We Can’t Go Home Again (1976), for re-release in 2012; his daughter Nikka Ray is at work on a memoir; and writer Patrick McGilligan is completing a new biography. Rather than taking a traditional auteurist reassessment based on style and “personal vision” alone, we want to reframe authorship studies to explore the communal responsibility and public life of the director at the intersections of auteurism and civic discourse. The tensions between individuality and community, and rebellion and conformism, both in Ray’s films and in his reputation working in the Classical Hollywood system, make him a representative case study in this regard. Through this lens, we want to investigate more broadly how both the biographical legends and aesthetic practices of directors articulate civic identity in ethical, social, political, cultural, and national contexts.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
• Ray’s background in architecture, radio, and socialist theater
• The transnational reception of Ray’s films in Europe during the 1950s and in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s that led to his canonization as a “Hollywood auteur”
• The rise of youth culture and a youth market in the 1950s
• Gender, sexualities, and whiteness: representation / identification
• Screening social class
• Space: rural vs. (sub)urban America
• Place: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, the backroads of Oklahoma, “the frontier,” etc.
• Outlaws and folk heroes, celebrity, and the myth of “the rebel”
• Marginalized figures, victims of society, and the politics of rebellion
• Ray’s non-Hollywood films: We Can't Go Home Again (1973-76), The Janitor (1974) and Marco (1978)
• Film performance, stardom, and its social contexts: Ray's collaborations with James Dean, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan, and others
• Ray’s international legacy and influence on the French New Wave, as well as on filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders
Send 300 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Steve Rybin (smrybin@comcast.net) and Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15, 2010. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2011 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Debating Roger Ebert on Video Games
Film critic Roger Ebert recently elaborated (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html) on his controversial statement that “video games cannot be art.” Now, I should note as a hopeful cinema studies scholar that Roger’s work pushed me to study film and I constantly find myself reflecting on his Great Movies books. However, I am also a hopeful media studies scholar, a field which includes video games, a form which I enjoy as both a player and a Ph.D. student---you can find a visual essay a produced on the Wii with two classmates here (http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall09_TowardsANewGenre.html). That said, I disagree with Roger’s assessment of the medium and here are a few reasons why.
First, and I’m jumping to the halfway point of the essay here, as Roger is debating an analysis by USC’s Kellee Santiago during the first part. For Ebert, the accepted definition of art serves as the jumping off point for differentiating video games from art. Ebert begins with Plato’s definition that art is “the imitation of nature.” Isn’t the drive for immersion in video games concerned with imitating nature? Video game producers have become increasing concerned with photorealism and gestural play (games like Guitar Hero and Wii Tennis that seek to mimic real-life gestures). Couldn’t these aesthetic preoccupations be interpreted as a desire to imitate nature?
Ebert then goes on to cite a Wikipedia definition that differentiates game from art, as art “is more concerned with the expression of ideas.” Isn’t the popular game Bioshock (2007) an eight-hour exploration regarding morality? The player is yoked into an analysis of the dangers of free will (within the confines of the pre-determined narrative of a game) that is firmly tied to politics. Admittedly, there are prolonged moments of fighting adversaries and dodging attacks, but the narrative contained within the game is very much concerned with the expression of ideas, even going so far as to interrogate some (particularly the Ayn Rand desire for capitalist self-interest). Now, Ebert could contest that I have identified an outlier to the norm. That said, if we accept the Wikipedia definition, would a film like Transformers (2007) reach the definition of art? Do all films express ideas, making them art? How many texts practicing the expression of ideas does it take to turn a medium into an art form?
Ebert then proposes that he tends “to think of art as usually the creation of one artist,” implying that video games do not reach this definition because of the scope of their production teams. Yet, Hollywood films go through a similar production process. Thus, if a video game cannot be art because it goes beyond the ability of one creative person, the majority of films would not be considered art according to Ebert. For Ebert to try to trace back a film to one creative personnel (as he does with a tribal dance) is to take a time machine back to 1962 when Andrew Sarris proposed the auteur theory. It is a romantic gesture that ignores the actual workings of the studio system as documented by Thomas Schatz.
Ebert’s next point of analysis is that games cannot be art because the player can win and they have “rules, points, objectives, and an outcome.” Indeed, games can be won and they do have rules, but the majority of them are narratives. The tension between game play and story (much to the frustration of theorists attempting to grapple with video games as a narrative or ludic form) is part of the essence of most video games. In order for the player to keep progressing through the ludic passages of Bioshock, they require story to motivate them in the form of setting up a goal and to elaborate upon the world. For Ebert to assume games are only rules and winning overlooks the narrative aspect of games and game play.
Ebert ends his analysis that with the sentiment that art is a matter of taste and that Plato’s definition that art imitates nature is insufficient. For Ebert, art grows better as it “improves or alters nature through an [sic.] passage through what we might call the artist’s soul or vision.” For Ebert, the games Santiago proposes do not capture his taste and therefore cannot be art. I would propose he actually play the following games that might bolster Santiago’s claims better than the ones she chooses and revisit his analysis: Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), Fallout 3 (2008), and Heavy Rain (2010). Secondly, as I’ve already observed, how can the majority of films be considered as the expression of a singular artist? Film is, for the most part, the art of collaboration through which nature is altered by the talents of many artists.
Putting his theory into practice, he notes how Santiago’s analysis defines video games as “development, finance, publishing, marketing, education, and executive management” after noting “the only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation.” Ebert’s closing statement, the resting of his case as he calls it, implies that video games cannot be art because they are profit driven. What, may I ask, is the bulk of Hollywood films? Let’s not be ignorant; when RKO hired Orson Welles to direct Citizen Kane (1941), it wasn’t to lose money on a film that would take decades to be recognized as a major aesthetic achievement. In the end, film and video games, as many of the video game scholars born out of cinema and media studies have documented, have multiple affinities. They are both media forms that are defined by narrative texts produced by multiple personnel with a profit motive. To call video games art is not the same as trying to call a baseball game art (baseball games do not rely on an authored narrative) nor is it a ridiculous gesture used to justify the passage of leisure time. Rather, the gesture is to validate a means of potential artistic expression. If a critic and historian of cinema can’t respect the parallel inherent in the similar position film occupied years ago, I’m not sure who can.
First, and I’m jumping to the halfway point of the essay here, as Roger is debating an analysis by USC’s Kellee Santiago during the first part. For Ebert, the accepted definition of art serves as the jumping off point for differentiating video games from art. Ebert begins with Plato’s definition that art is “the imitation of nature.” Isn’t the drive for immersion in video games concerned with imitating nature? Video game producers have become increasing concerned with photorealism and gestural play (games like Guitar Hero and Wii Tennis that seek to mimic real-life gestures). Couldn’t these aesthetic preoccupations be interpreted as a desire to imitate nature?
Ebert then goes on to cite a Wikipedia definition that differentiates game from art, as art “is more concerned with the expression of ideas.” Isn’t the popular game Bioshock (2007) an eight-hour exploration regarding morality? The player is yoked into an analysis of the dangers of free will (within the confines of the pre-determined narrative of a game) that is firmly tied to politics. Admittedly, there are prolonged moments of fighting adversaries and dodging attacks, but the narrative contained within the game is very much concerned with the expression of ideas, even going so far as to interrogate some (particularly the Ayn Rand desire for capitalist self-interest). Now, Ebert could contest that I have identified an outlier to the norm. That said, if we accept the Wikipedia definition, would a film like Transformers (2007) reach the definition of art? Do all films express ideas, making them art? How many texts practicing the expression of ideas does it take to turn a medium into an art form?
Ebert then proposes that he tends “to think of art as usually the creation of one artist,” implying that video games do not reach this definition because of the scope of their production teams. Yet, Hollywood films go through a similar production process. Thus, if a video game cannot be art because it goes beyond the ability of one creative person, the majority of films would not be considered art according to Ebert. For Ebert to try to trace back a film to one creative personnel (as he does with a tribal dance) is to take a time machine back to 1962 when Andrew Sarris proposed the auteur theory. It is a romantic gesture that ignores the actual workings of the studio system as documented by Thomas Schatz.
Ebert’s next point of analysis is that games cannot be art because the player can win and they have “rules, points, objectives, and an outcome.” Indeed, games can be won and they do have rules, but the majority of them are narratives. The tension between game play and story (much to the frustration of theorists attempting to grapple with video games as a narrative or ludic form) is part of the essence of most video games. In order for the player to keep progressing through the ludic passages of Bioshock, they require story to motivate them in the form of setting up a goal and to elaborate upon the world. For Ebert to assume games are only rules and winning overlooks the narrative aspect of games and game play.
Ebert ends his analysis that with the sentiment that art is a matter of taste and that Plato’s definition that art imitates nature is insufficient. For Ebert, art grows better as it “improves or alters nature through an [sic.] passage through what we might call the artist’s soul or vision.” For Ebert, the games Santiago proposes do not capture his taste and therefore cannot be art. I would propose he actually play the following games that might bolster Santiago’s claims better than the ones she chooses and revisit his analysis: Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), Fallout 3 (2008), and Heavy Rain (2010). Secondly, as I’ve already observed, how can the majority of films be considered as the expression of a singular artist? Film is, for the most part, the art of collaboration through which nature is altered by the talents of many artists.
Putting his theory into practice, he notes how Santiago’s analysis defines video games as “development, finance, publishing, marketing, education, and executive management” after noting “the only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation.” Ebert’s closing statement, the resting of his case as he calls it, implies that video games cannot be art because they are profit driven. What, may I ask, is the bulk of Hollywood films? Let’s not be ignorant; when RKO hired Orson Welles to direct Citizen Kane (1941), it wasn’t to lose money on a film that would take decades to be recognized as a major aesthetic achievement. In the end, film and video games, as many of the video game scholars born out of cinema and media studies have documented, have multiple affinities. They are both media forms that are defined by narrative texts produced by multiple personnel with a profit motive. To call video games art is not the same as trying to call a baseball game art (baseball games do not rely on an authored narrative) nor is it a ridiculous gesture used to justify the passage of leisure time. Rather, the gesture is to validate a means of potential artistic expression. If a critic and historian of cinema can’t respect the parallel inherent in the similar position film occupied years ago, I’m not sure who can.
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Deadline extended for SAMLA: Flannery O'Connor in Film
CFP: Flannery O'Connor in Film
South Atlantic Modern Language Association
2010 Conference (Atlanta, GA November 5-7).
Abstracts due: April 30.
contact email: akking@olemiss.edu
This panel affiliated with the Flannery O'Connor Society welcomes
papers that explore the SAMLA 2010 special focus "The Interplay of
Text and Image" in O'Connor and film. While papers dealing with film
adaptations of O'Connor's works will be considered, the session's
specific goal is to expand our understanding of how filmmakers have
incorporated and/or have contrasted O'Connor's themes, character
types, etc. in their own works. Preference will be given to papers
that seek creative connections between O'Connor's works and films that
are not obvious adaptations of O'Connor's fiction.
Please e-mail abstracts (500 words) to Amy K. King at
akking@olemiss.edu before Friday, 30 April 2010.
South Atlantic Modern Language Association
2010 Conference (Atlanta, GA November 5-7).
Abstracts due: April 30.
contact email: akking@olemiss.edu
This panel affiliated with the Flannery O'Connor Society welcomes
papers that explore the SAMLA 2010 special focus "The Interplay of
Text and Image" in O'Connor and film. While papers dealing with film
adaptations of O'Connor's works will be considered, the session's
specific goal is to expand our understanding of how filmmakers have
incorporated and/or have contrasted O'Connor's themes, character
types, etc. in their own works. Preference will be given to papers
that seek creative connections between O'Connor's works and films that
are not obvious adaptations of O'Connor's fiction.
Please e-mail abstracts (500 words) to Amy K. King at
akking@olemiss.edu before Friday, 30 April 2010.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Adaptations - MPCA/MACA, Oct 1-3 2010, Minneapolis
I am currently seeking original work in the area of FILM ADAPTATIONS for the annual Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association Annual Conference. Abstracts can include a wide variety of approaches to Adaptation Studies. These may include research on film adaptations of literary works, comic books, video games, television shows, mythology, other films, radio shows, cartoons, nonfiction books, etc.,
Please email a paper abstract by Friday, April 30, 2010 to . Along with a paper description, include university affiliation, professional address, and email address. I also welcome panel proposals, with three or more participants, consisting of a panel description along with a full list of presenters and paper titles. Please include university affiliation, professional address, and email address for each presenter and the chair.
Scott BalcerzakAssistant Professor of Film and LiteratureNorthern Illinois UniversityDeKalb, IL 60115
sbalcerzak@niu.edu
Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association ConferenceSheraton Bloomington Hotel
Minneapolis South, 7800 Normandale BoulevardMinneapolis, Minnesota 55439
Friday-Sunday
1-3 October 2010
Please email a paper abstract by Friday, April 30, 2010 to . Along with a paper description, include university affiliation, professional address, and email address. I also welcome panel proposals, with three or more participants, consisting of a panel description along with a full list of presenters and paper titles. Please include university affiliation, professional address, and email address for each presenter and the chair.
Scott BalcerzakAssistant Professor of Film and LiteratureNorthern Illinois UniversityDeKalb, IL 60115
sbalcerzak@niu.edu
Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association ConferenceSheraton Bloomington Hotel
Minneapolis South, 7800 Normandale BoulevardMinneapolis, Minnesota 55439
Friday-Sunday
1-3 October 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
CFP: Understanding Machinima
Hi all
I'm working on putting together a collection on machinima (filmmaking in virtual worlds) and it would be great to have some contributions from Mabusers! Machinima kinda falls between film and other media (virtual worlds, games (Drew?)) but I think/hope there is potential. Take a look!
Cheers
Jenna
**********************************
UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA:
essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds
Call for Papers
Submissions are invited for an edited book with the working title Understanding Machinima: essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds. Machinima - referring to "filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies" as well as works which use this animation technique, including videos recorded in computer games or virtual worlds - is challenging the notion of the moving image in numerous media contexts, such as video games, animation, digital cinema and virtual worlds. Machinima's increasingly dynamic use and construction of images from virtual worlds - appropriated, imported, worked over, re negotiated, re-configured, re composed - not only confronts the conception and ontology of the recorded moving image, but also blurs the boundaries between contemporary media forms, definitions and aesthetics, converging filmmaking, animation, virtual world and game development. Even as it poses these theoretical challenges, machinima is expanding as a practice via internet networks and fan-based communities as well as in pedagogical and marketing contexts. In these ways, machinima is also transformative, presenting alternative ways and modes of teaching and commercial promotion, in-game events and, perhaps most significantly, networking cultures and community-building within game, virtual and filmmaking worlds, among others.
Divided into these two sections - machinima (i) in theoretical analysis; and (ii) as practice - this first collection of essays seeks to explore how we can understand machinima in terms of the theoretical challenges it poses as well as its manifestations as a practice. We are primarily concerned with offering critical discussions of its history, theory, aesthetics, media form and social implications, as well as insights into its development and the promise of what it can become. How does machinima fit in the spectrum of media forms? What are the ontological differences between images from machinima and photochemical/digital filmmaking? How does machinima co-opt the affordances of the game engine to provide narrative? How may machinima, developed from the products of game and virtual world marketing, be used as an artistic tool? How is machinima self-reflexive, if at all, of the virtual environments from which they arise? What are the implications of re-deploying these media formats into alternative media forms? How does the open-source economy that currently defines much of global machinima relate it to broader cultural production generally?
In particular, we are looking for essays that address (but not limited to) the following ideas:
* History: context; definitions; culture; relationships to gaming and play; development of technology; hardware and games; archiving of play;
* Theory: image; ontology; time; space; narrative; realism; spectatorship; subjectivity; virtual camera; materiality;
* Aesthetics: poetics; play; visuality; détournement; remix; digital mashup; appropriation; recombinative narratives; audio and visual theory; spatiality; narrative architecture;
* Contemporary media contexts: comparative media; machinima vis-à-vis video games, (digital) cinema, animation, virtual worlds; the visual economy of machinima versus film
* Communities: Machinima as community-based practice and performance; user created content; online publishing; fan (fiction) communities; open source; cultural reflection
* Pedagogy: digital literacy; teaching models and practices; student-centered learning; critical making; collaborative authorship; rhetorics; problem based learning;
* Marketing: crowd sourcing; viral marketing; peer to peer sharing; commercials, trailer promotions; grass roots versus astro turf; serials and sequels.
Please submit a 300 word abstract and a short bio via e-mail to understandingmachinima@gmail.com by 30 August 2010. We expect that final essays should not exceed 7,000 words and be due on 30 December 2010.
Jenna P-S. Ng
Jim Barrett
HUMlab, Umeå University
Sweden
I'm working on putting together a collection on machinima (filmmaking in virtual worlds) and it would be great to have some contributions from Mabusers! Machinima kinda falls between film and other media (virtual worlds, games (Drew?)) but I think/hope there is potential. Take a look!
Cheers
Jenna
**********************************
UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA:
essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds
Call for Papers
Submissions are invited for an edited book with the working title Understanding Machinima: essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds. Machinima - referring to "filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies" as well as works which use this animation technique, including videos recorded in computer games or virtual worlds - is challenging the notion of the moving image in numerous media contexts, such as video games, animation, digital cinema and virtual worlds. Machinima's increasingly dynamic use and construction of images from virtual worlds - appropriated, imported, worked over, re negotiated, re-configured, re composed - not only confronts the conception and ontology of the recorded moving image, but also blurs the boundaries between contemporary media forms, definitions and aesthetics, converging filmmaking, animation, virtual world and game development. Even as it poses these theoretical challenges, machinima is expanding as a practice via internet networks and fan-based communities as well as in pedagogical and marketing contexts. In these ways, machinima is also transformative, presenting alternative ways and modes of teaching and commercial promotion, in-game events and, perhaps most significantly, networking cultures and community-building within game, virtual and filmmaking worlds, among others.
Divided into these two sections - machinima (i) in theoretical analysis; and (ii) as practice - this first collection of essays seeks to explore how we can understand machinima in terms of the theoretical challenges it poses as well as its manifestations as a practice. We are primarily concerned with offering critical discussions of its history, theory, aesthetics, media form and social implications, as well as insights into its development and the promise of what it can become. How does machinima fit in the spectrum of media forms? What are the ontological differences between images from machinima and photochemical/digital filmmaking? How does machinima co-opt the affordances of the game engine to provide narrative? How may machinima, developed from the products of game and virtual world marketing, be used as an artistic tool? How is machinima self-reflexive, if at all, of the virtual environments from which they arise? What are the implications of re-deploying these media formats into alternative media forms? How does the open-source economy that currently defines much of global machinima relate it to broader cultural production generally?
In particular, we are looking for essays that address (but not limited to) the following ideas:
* History: context; definitions; culture; relationships to gaming and play; development of technology; hardware and games; archiving of play;
* Theory: image; ontology; time; space; narrative; realism; spectatorship; subjectivity; virtual camera; materiality;
* Aesthetics: poetics; play; visuality; détournement; remix; digital mashup; appropriation; recombinative narratives; audio and visual theory; spatiality; narrative architecture;
* Contemporary media contexts: comparative media; machinima vis-à-vis video games, (digital) cinema, animation, virtual worlds; the visual economy of machinima versus film
* Communities: Machinima as community-based practice and performance; user created content; online publishing; fan (fiction) communities; open source; cultural reflection
* Pedagogy: digital literacy; teaching models and practices; student-centered learning; critical making; collaborative authorship; rhetorics; problem based learning;
* Marketing: crowd sourcing; viral marketing; peer to peer sharing; commercials, trailer promotions; grass roots versus astro turf; serials and sequels.
Please submit a 300 word abstract and a short bio via e-mail to understandingmachinima@gmail.com by 30 August 2010. We expect that final essays should not exceed 7,000 words and be due on 30 December 2010.
Jenna P-S. Ng
Jim Barrett
HUMlab, Umeå University
Sweden
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Call For Work: OPEN SPACE/SINGAPORE/SOUTHEAST ASIA
OPEN SPACE/SINGAPORE/SOUTHEAST ASIA
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
We seek submissions for a curated online and on-site exhibition exploring the theme of Open Space. This exhibition will be showcased at the International Communication Association (ICA) Conference in Singapore from June 22-26, 2010. Open Space is mounted as the digital arts exploration of the conference theme Im/Material.
WHAT IS OPEN SPACE?
Open Space imagines a zone of horizontality mobilizing collaboration, participation, complex interactive dialogues, process, permeability, and community. The term open space originates in landscape design, where space is privileged over mass to stage meaningful and often surprising encounters and interactions. It has also emerged as a key environmental concept in the greening of global cities, in architecture, and in international organizational design. Indeterminancy, flexibility, and contingency constitute key strategies in open space. Open Space proposes a relational mode rather than a fixed object. Open Space suggests work that mobilizes an ethics of convenings and encounters in a sustainable zone. Open Space spurs collaborative knowledges and produces new provisional microterritories through engagement. Open Space is where technologies meet people meet spaces.
WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
We seek works and makers exploring the concepts and practice of Open Space in Singapore and Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, and Indonesia). We are particularly interested in makers, artists, collectives, and collaborative projects from these regions. Works that are transnational and translational with a central concern of Southeast Asia as nexus will also be considered.
The Open Space/Singapore/Southeast Asia exhibition is looking for digital arts and design projects in any of the following forms/interfaces: online art projects, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), social gaming, creative robotics and digital devices, locative media, mobile applications, ambient screens, user-generated community narratives and maps, innovative digitally-based cartography projects, web-based archival projects, social media interfaces and projects, installation, live DJ/VJ remixes
Additionally, any other digital and analog forms that engage a collaborative aesthetic and participatory ethics are eligible for inclusion.
PRACTICAL DETAILS FOR PARTICIPATING PROJECTS
Deadline: March 3, 2010
To submit work: Please send a short, one paragraph description of your project, a short bio, and a link to your project or documentation of your project in an email inquiry to Patricia Zimmermann, Shaw Foundation Professor, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, at tpatricia@ntu.edu.sg no later than March 3, 2010
Exhibition: Projects will be featured on the ICA/WKWSCI website as the Open Space Exhibition. A limited number of artists/makers/collaborative teams will be selected from the overall exhibition to present at sessions and venues at ICA in Singapore June 22-26, with airfare and accommodation provided.
CURATORIAL TEAM
Patricia R. Zimmerman, Nikki Draper, Sharon Lin Tay, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Wenjie Zhang, Singapore, with curatorial associate Jenna Ng, Sweden.
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION
The International Communications Association (ICA) (http://www.ica2010.sg) is the largest international academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching, and application aspects of human and mediated communication. ICA has over 4,500 members from 76 countries. Over 2,000 scholars, writers, and communications practitioners from around the world attend the conference. ICA 2010 is the first time in seven years that the annual conference will be held in Asia.
ICA 2010 CONFERENCE THEME: IM/MATERIAL
Communication is in many respects im/material because it constitutes the very nexus where the material and immaterial dimensions of our world meet each other. Communication is indeed spectral or ghostal because our interactions consist of making present what could have remained absent from a debate, a discussion, a conversation and so on. (from the conference website: http://www.ica2010.sg/conference.html)
WEE KIM WEE SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION
The host for ICA 2010 is the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI)(http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/sci), at Nanyang Technological University (NTU)in Singapore. Ranked as one of the world’s top 100 universities, NTU(http://www.ntu.edu.sg) is a research-intensive university with globally acknowledged strengths in science and engineering. WKWSCI is one of the premiere institutions for research and teaching in communication and information in Asia. It houses the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre , the Asian Communication Resource Centre, and the Singapore Internet Research Centre.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
We seek submissions for a curated online and on-site exhibition exploring the theme of Open Space. This exhibition will be showcased at the International Communication Association (ICA) Conference in Singapore from June 22-26, 2010. Open Space is mounted as the digital arts exploration of the conference theme Im/Material.
WHAT IS OPEN SPACE?
Open Space imagines a zone of horizontality mobilizing collaboration, participation, complex interactive dialogues, process, permeability, and community. The term open space originates in landscape design, where space is privileged over mass to stage meaningful and often surprising encounters and interactions. It has also emerged as a key environmental concept in the greening of global cities, in architecture, and in international organizational design. Indeterminancy, flexibility, and contingency constitute key strategies in open space. Open Space proposes a relational mode rather than a fixed object. Open Space suggests work that mobilizes an ethics of convenings and encounters in a sustainable zone. Open Space spurs collaborative knowledges and produces new provisional microterritories through engagement. Open Space is where technologies meet people meet spaces.
WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
We seek works and makers exploring the concepts and practice of Open Space in Singapore and Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, and Indonesia). We are particularly interested in makers, artists, collectives, and collaborative projects from these regions. Works that are transnational and translational with a central concern of Southeast Asia as nexus will also be considered.
The Open Space/Singapore/Southeast Asia exhibition is looking for digital arts and design projects in any of the following forms/interfaces: online art projects, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), social gaming, creative robotics and digital devices, locative media, mobile applications, ambient screens, user-generated community narratives and maps, innovative digitally-based cartography projects, web-based archival projects, social media interfaces and projects, installation, live DJ/VJ remixes
Additionally, any other digital and analog forms that engage a collaborative aesthetic and participatory ethics are eligible for inclusion.
PRACTICAL DETAILS FOR PARTICIPATING PROJECTS
Deadline: March 3, 2010
To submit work: Please send a short, one paragraph description of your project, a short bio, and a link to your project or documentation of your project in an email inquiry to Patricia Zimmermann, Shaw Foundation Professor, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, at tpatricia@ntu.edu.sg no later than March 3, 2010
Exhibition: Projects will be featured on the ICA/WKWSCI website as the Open Space Exhibition. A limited number of artists/makers/collaborative teams will be selected from the overall exhibition to present at sessions and venues at ICA in Singapore June 22-26, with airfare and accommodation provided.
CURATORIAL TEAM
Patricia R. Zimmerman, Nikki Draper, Sharon Lin Tay, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Wenjie Zhang, Singapore, with curatorial associate Jenna Ng, Sweden.
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION
The International Communications Association (ICA) (http://www.ica2010.sg) is the largest international academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching, and application aspects of human and mediated communication. ICA has over 4,500 members from 76 countries. Over 2,000 scholars, writers, and communications practitioners from around the world attend the conference. ICA 2010 is the first time in seven years that the annual conference will be held in Asia.
ICA 2010 CONFERENCE THEME: IM/MATERIAL
Communication is in many respects im/material because it constitutes the very nexus where the material and immaterial dimensions of our world meet each other. Communication is indeed spectral or ghostal because our interactions consist of making present what could have remained absent from a debate, a discussion, a conversation and so on. (from the conference website: http://www.ica2010.sg/conference.html)
WEE KIM WEE SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION
The host for ICA 2010 is the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI)(http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/sci), at Nanyang Technological University (NTU)in Singapore. Ranked as one of the world’s top 100 universities, NTU(http://www.ntu.edu.sg) is a research-intensive university with globally acknowledged strengths in science and engineering. WKWSCI is one of the premiere institutions for research and teaching in communication and information in Asia. It houses the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre , the Asian Communication Resource Centre, and the Singapore Internet Research Centre.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
CFP: Toward a Social Cinema: The Left Bank Group & the Political Documentary
Visible Evidence Panel Proposal for 2010:
This panel explores the phenomenon Richard Roud famously called the “Left Bank Cinema” in documentaries by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Georges Franju, Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin and lesser-known contemporaries Eli Lotar and Nicole Védrès. In addition, we will trace antecedents as far back as Jean Vigo’s A propos de Nice, Vigo’s 1930 manifesto, “Towards a Social Cinema,” and interwar films by Joris Ivens and Henri Storck. While Vigo was canonized by the directors and critics associated with the Nouvelle Vague such François Truffaut and André Bazin, this adulation remained more a cult of personality than a rigorous engagement with Vigo’s ideas. Fortunately, his commitment to social issues was taken up by the Left Bank group, who had broader cultural ambitions than the Cahiers group. Rather than concentrating on cinephilia and auteurs, the members of the Left Bank group engaged social and political issues with a humanist sensibility and personal points of view. This panel seeks to explore this engagement between 1945 and 1967, especially as it addresses the aftermath of World War II, decolonization, global societies in transition, and the Viet-Nam war. Through this line of interrogation, we hope to account critically for the origins, development, and efficacy of a social cinema within an international context.
Chair Biographies:
Steven Ungar, Professor of French & Comparative Literature at The University of Iowa, is the author of books on Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. His recent work in film includes Popular Front Paris & the Poetics of Cultures (Harvard, 2005, co-authored with Dudley Andrew), Cléo de 5 à 7 (BFI, 2008), and an article on Jean Vigo’s notion of social cinema. His current project is Making Waves, a book-length study of early postwar French documentary (circa 1945-1967) linked to and around Left Bank filmmakers.
Ryan Watson is a Ph.D. candidate in Film Studies at The University of Iowa. His writing on documentary films and videos has appeared in the Journal of Film and Video and Afterimage. He has presented his work on documentary films and videos at Visible Evidence, the British Association of American Studies and the US Cultural Studies Association.
Please send proposals to Steve Ungar (steven-ungar@uiowa.edu) or Ryan Watson (ryan-watson@uiowa.edu) by MARCH 12th.
This panel explores the phenomenon Richard Roud famously called the “Left Bank Cinema” in documentaries by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Georges Franju, Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin and lesser-known contemporaries Eli Lotar and Nicole Védrès. In addition, we will trace antecedents as far back as Jean Vigo’s A propos de Nice, Vigo’s 1930 manifesto, “Towards a Social Cinema,” and interwar films by Joris Ivens and Henri Storck. While Vigo was canonized by the directors and critics associated with the Nouvelle Vague such François Truffaut and André Bazin, this adulation remained more a cult of personality than a rigorous engagement with Vigo’s ideas. Fortunately, his commitment to social issues was taken up by the Left Bank group, who had broader cultural ambitions than the Cahiers group. Rather than concentrating on cinephilia and auteurs, the members of the Left Bank group engaged social and political issues with a humanist sensibility and personal points of view. This panel seeks to explore this engagement between 1945 and 1967, especially as it addresses the aftermath of World War II, decolonization, global societies in transition, and the Viet-Nam war. Through this line of interrogation, we hope to account critically for the origins, development, and efficacy of a social cinema within an international context.
Chair Biographies:
Steven Ungar, Professor of French & Comparative Literature at The University of Iowa, is the author of books on Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. His recent work in film includes Popular Front Paris & the Poetics of Cultures (Harvard, 2005, co-authored with Dudley Andrew), Cléo de 5 à 7 (BFI, 2008), and an article on Jean Vigo’s notion of social cinema. His current project is Making Waves, a book-length study of early postwar French documentary (circa 1945-1967) linked to and around Left Bank filmmakers.
Ryan Watson is a Ph.D. candidate in Film Studies at The University of Iowa. His writing on documentary films and videos has appeared in the Journal of Film and Video and Afterimage. He has presented his work on documentary films and videos at Visible Evidence, the British Association of American Studies and the US Cultural Studies Association.
Please send proposals to Steve Ungar (steven-ungar@uiowa.edu) or Ryan Watson (ryan-watson@uiowa.edu) by MARCH 12th.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
South Atlantic Modern Language Association: Flannery O'Connor in Film
This panel affiliated with the Flannery O'Connor Society welcomes papers that explore the SAMLA 2010 special focus "The Interplay of Text and Image" in O'Connor and film. While papers dealing with film adaptations of O'Connor's works will be considered, the session's specific goal is to expand our understanding of how filmmakers have incorporated and/or have contrasted O'Connor's themes, character types, etc. in their own works. Preference will be given to papers that seek creative connections between O'Connor's works and films that are not obvious adaptations of O'Connor's fiction.
Please e-mail abstracts (500 words) to Amy K. King at
akking@olemiss.edu before Friday, 26 March 2010.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
MCLLM Conference
The 18th annual
Midwest Conference on Language, Literature, and Media (MCLLM)
will be held April 9-10, 2010 at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois.
Keynote speaker:
Dr. George Lakoff, University of California-Berkeley,
author of Metaphors We Live By (1980), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (1987), Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999), The Political Mind : Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain (2008).
This year’s theme is Interdisciplinarity. As exemplified by Dr. Lakoff’s application of his theories across a variety of disciplines, investigation and education at the points of disciplinary intersection are becoming increasingly important in academia and our world at large.
We invite proposals for fifteen minute papers from scholars at all stages of their careers. Topics related to this year’s theme may include, but are not limited to, writing across the curriculum, linguistics and literature, cross-cultural film studies, technical communication, cognitive research and application, the construction of gender and ethnicity, language policy, and theories of knowledge creation; however, MCLLM also welcomes papers on all areas of language, literature, and media studies. Individual or panel (three to four people) proposals are welcome.
Deadline for submission has been extended to February 1, 2010.
Please include a cover page with your name, affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. Please submit your 250 word abstract as an attachment to mcllm@niu.edu.
mcllm@niu.edu
Department of English
Northern Illinois University
http://www.engl.niu.edu/mcllm/
Midwest Conference on Language, Literature, and Media (MCLLM)
will be held April 9-10, 2010 at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois.
Keynote speaker:
Dr. George Lakoff, University of California-Berkeley,
author of Metaphors We Live By (1980), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (1987), Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999), The Political Mind : Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain (2008).
This year’s theme is Interdisciplinarity. As exemplified by Dr. Lakoff’s application of his theories across a variety of disciplines, investigation and education at the points of disciplinary intersection are becoming increasingly important in academia and our world at large.
We invite proposals for fifteen minute papers from scholars at all stages of their careers. Topics related to this year’s theme may include, but are not limited to, writing across the curriculum, linguistics and literature, cross-cultural film studies, technical communication, cognitive research and application, the construction of gender and ethnicity, language policy, and theories of knowledge creation; however, MCLLM also welcomes papers on all areas of language, literature, and media studies. Individual or panel (three to four people) proposals are welcome.
Deadline for submission has been extended to February 1, 2010.
Please include a cover page with your name, affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. Please submit your 250 word abstract as an attachment to mcllm@niu.edu.
mcllm@niu.edu
Department of English
Northern Illinois University
http://www.engl.niu.edu/mcllm/
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Save UI Cinema & Comparative Literature
Below is a message from Prof. Corey Creekmur posted today on the SCMS website. As graduate of The University of Iowa's cinema program, I wanted to help spread the word. Discouraging to say the least.
Thanks very much!
Corey Creekmur
Director of Film Studies
Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature
The University of Iowa
Dear Alumni and Friends,
An ad hoc entity called the Provost's Task Force on Graduate Education and Selective Excellence has just recommended the elimination of the PhD program in Film Studies at the University of Iowa, along with the MA and PhD programs in Comparative Literature. It has also recommended that the MFA in Film and Video Production be moved to a newly proposed Division of Communications (with Journalism and Communication Studies), and that the MFA in Translation be moved to a newly proposed Division of World Languages and Cultures (with the foreign languages). These undesirable and illogical moves would in effect dismember the current Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. Ours are not the only programs under threat, but ours is the only department that would be obliterated if the committee’s recommendations were to be followed.
The committee was made up of mostly non-Humanists, and it did its work mostly on the basis of statistics like time to degree, GRE scores of applicants, and years of support offered to grad students. It identified the placement of Iowa Film Studies graduates as "good," but did not note that our graduates can be found at many of the world's finest universities, including Yale, Brown, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, among many others. It did not employ any outside evaluators. It did not collect information on the work of faculty. It did not collect information on program costs (the members of the committee know very well that Humanities grad degrees are dirt cheap by comparison with degrees in lab sciences). In short, the excellence of our programs was not something the committee had any basis for evaluating. We are preparing a response -- due very soon -- and would like your help, in part because you are in the position to offer an evaluation.
Clearly, the impressive legacy and ongoing vitality of the Film Studies program at Iowa were ignored in this decision. We are enormously proud of the accomplishments of our graduates, who have been crucial to the development and continued growth of Film Studies as a scholarly discipline in North America and beyond. Our current students promise to continue that legacy into the future. Former Iowa students are among the most productive scholars and influential teachers in the field, and while we do our best to continually inform the administration of this fact, we would now greatly appreciate your helping us to clearly and forcefully articulate the importance of the excellence of our programs to those who will be deciding on the future of our programs.
Please send me a brief testimonial – a few lines would do it – about the importance of the program/s, Iowa’s place as a leader in X (your choice), how study here helped you, etc. While the MFA in Film and Video Production is not currently threatened, the committee did not consider the MFA as connected to Film Studies, although the programs have always benefited enormously from close cooperation and linked interests. Its recommendations suggest in fact that it saw all the programs as separate entities that can be shoved around without affecting the program health of the others. If they do this, I think it will destroy not only Film Studies and Comp Lit but hard Film and Video Production and Translation as well.
I know I’m missing people but want to get this out as soon as possible. Please pass the word to other grads.
An ad hoc entity called the Provost's Task Force on Graduate Education and Selective Excellence has just recommended the elimination of the PhD program in Film Studies at the University of Iowa, along with the MA and PhD programs in Comparative Literature. It has also recommended that the MFA in Film and Video Production be moved to a newly proposed Division of Communications (with Journalism and Communication Studies), and that the MFA in Translation be moved to a newly proposed Division of World Languages and Cultures (with the foreign languages). These undesirable and illogical moves would in effect dismember the current Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. Ours are not the only programs under threat, but ours is the only department that would be obliterated if the committee’s recommendations were to be followed.
The committee was made up of mostly non-Humanists, and it did its work mostly on the basis of statistics like time to degree, GRE scores of applicants, and years of support offered to grad students. It identified the placement of Iowa Film Studies graduates as "good," but did not note that our graduates can be found at many of the world's finest universities, including Yale, Brown, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, among many others. It did not employ any outside evaluators. It did not collect information on the work of faculty. It did not collect information on program costs (the members of the committee know very well that Humanities grad degrees are dirt cheap by comparison with degrees in lab sciences). In short, the excellence of our programs was not something the committee had any basis for evaluating. We are preparing a response -- due very soon -- and would like your help, in part because you are in the position to offer an evaluation.
Clearly, the impressive legacy and ongoing vitality of the Film Studies program at Iowa were ignored in this decision. We are enormously proud of the accomplishments of our graduates, who have been crucial to the development and continued growth of Film Studies as a scholarly discipline in North America and beyond. Our current students promise to continue that legacy into the future. Former Iowa students are among the most productive scholars and influential teachers in the field, and while we do our best to continually inform the administration of this fact, we would now greatly appreciate your helping us to clearly and forcefully articulate the importance of the excellence of our programs to those who will be deciding on the future of our programs.
Please send me a brief testimonial – a few lines would do it – about the importance of the program/s, Iowa’s place as a leader in X (your choice), how study here helped you, etc. While the MFA in Film and Video Production is not currently threatened, the committee did not consider the MFA as connected to Film Studies, although the programs have always benefited enormously from close cooperation and linked interests. Its recommendations suggest in fact that it saw all the programs as separate entities that can be shoved around without affecting the program health of the others. If they do this, I think it will destroy not only Film Studies and Comp Lit but hard Film and Video Production and Translation as well.
I know I’m missing people but want to get this out as soon as possible. Please pass the word to other grads.
Thanks very much!
Corey Creekmur
Director of Film Studies
Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature
The University of Iowa
Monday, January 11, 2010
New Special Issue of Scope: An Online Journal of Film & TV Studies
I am very pleased to say that my special issue of Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies has just been published. It explores processes of adaptation in film, television and new media. Hope you enjoy.
Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation
Edited by Iain Robert Smith
Click here to access the full issue
--
Part I: Hollywood Cinema and Artistic Imitation
Exploitation as Adaptation
I. Q. Hunter
The Character-Oriented Franchise: Promotion and Exploitation of Pre-Sold Characters in American Film, 1913-1950
Jason Scott
Novelty through Repetition: Exploring the Success of Artistic Imitation in the Contemporary Film Industry, 1983-2007
Stijn Joye
Part II: Found Footage and Remix Culture
A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet
Eli Horwatt
Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives
Emma Cocker
Music Videos and Reused Footage
Sérgio Dias Branco
Part III: Modes of Parody and Pastiche
From Cult to Subculture: Reimaginings of Cult Films in Alternative Music Video
Brigid Cherry
Queering the Cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a Horror Icon in Charles Lum's Indelible
Darren Elliott
Irony Inc.: Parodic-Doc Horror and The Blair Witch Project
Jordan Lavender-Smith
Part IV: Transnational Screen Culture
A Marxist's Gotta Do What a Marxist's Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier
Austin Fisher
"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake
Neelam Sidhar Wright
"La Television des Professeurs?": Charles Dickens, French Public Service Television and Olivier Twist
Pamela Atzori
--
Iain
Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation
Edited by Iain Robert Smith
Click here to access the full issue
--
Part I: Hollywood Cinema and Artistic Imitation
Exploitation as Adaptation
I. Q. Hunter
The Character-Oriented Franchise: Promotion and Exploitation of Pre-Sold Characters in American Film, 1913-1950
Jason Scott
Novelty through Repetition: Exploring the Success of Artistic Imitation in the Contemporary Film Industry, 1983-2007
Stijn Joye
Part II: Found Footage and Remix Culture
A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet
Eli Horwatt
Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives
Emma Cocker
Music Videos and Reused Footage
Sérgio Dias Branco
Part III: Modes of Parody and Pastiche
From Cult to Subculture: Reimaginings of Cult Films in Alternative Music Video
Brigid Cherry
Queering the Cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a Horror Icon in Charles Lum's Indelible
Darren Elliott
Irony Inc.: Parodic-Doc Horror and The Blair Witch Project
Jordan Lavender-Smith
Part IV: Transnational Screen Culture
A Marxist's Gotta Do What a Marxist's Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier
Austin Fisher
"Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? ...Indian!": Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake
Neelam Sidhar Wright
"La Television des Professeurs?": Charles Dickens, French Public Service Television and Olivier Twist
Pamela Atzori
--
Iain
Thursday, December 24, 2009
CFP: Visible Evidence 2010
Dear friends,
This year, Visible Evidence, the international conference on documentary film and media will be held in my home turf Istanbul and I am helping with the organization so I wanted to post the CFP here to encourage you colleagues/friends to submit an abstract. I would be happy to show anyone around while I am there so don't miss this opportunity to consider a summer trip to the good old Byzantine/Ottoman/Turkish city with your own personal guide, who also happens to tolerate crazy academic talk.
Best,
Selmin
Visible Evidence XVII Istanbul 9-12 August 2010
Call for Proposals
Visible Evidence, the ambulatory international conference on documentary,
will hold its 17th edition at Boğazici University in Istanbul, Turkey, from 9-12
August 2010. Hosted by docIstanbul, a non-profit training, research, policy and
networking center focusing on documentary film at Bogazici University, Visible
Evidence XVII marks the first time that the preeminent documentary studies
conference takes place in Turkey, or for that matter, anywhere in the ‘Middle East’.
This year’s conference will address all topics and current issues relating to documentary, with a specific regional emphasis on Turkey and its neighbors.
Thus, although we welcome all proposals, we would like to encourage proposals
with a focus on the following topics:
• Documentary from Turkey, Iran, the “Middle East” more generally, the Balkan
States and Greece
• Turkic Documentary (from Turkic nations including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan; and communities such as Tatars)
• Border-crossings in Documentary: Transnationalism, Border Trade, Migration, and
Exile
• Diasporic Documentary (especially, but not exclusively: German, Dutch, Belgian,
British, North American, etc. –– Turkish/Kurdish documentary)
• Fortress Europe (exclusion, policy and ideology)
• Minoritarian Discourses within the Region (Kurdish, Armenian, Arab, Alevi,
Assyrian, Jewish, queer, etc.)
• Activist media from the region
Sessions will last for two hours and be limited to four papers of no more than 20 minutes each. All papers to be presented in English. For more information, check the Visible Evidence website, which will have the latest information: http://visibleevidence.org/
Please note there is a three-tiered Proposal process:
• Panel Topic Proposals Deadline: 29 January 2010
• Panel-specific Papers Deadline: 12 March 2010
• Open Call for Papers not already included in panels Deadline:
30 March 2010
1. CALL FOR PANEL TOPIC PROPOSALS DEADLINE: 29 JANUARY
(submit electronically to Alisa Lebow: asl36@earthlink.net)
300 word panel proposal. This is to be an open panel, not pre-constituted. Notification of acceptance will follow by 15 February.
2. CALL FOR PANEL-SPECIFIC PAPER PROPOSALS DEADLINE: 12 MARCH
Once the panels are approved, the accepted panels will be posted on the Visible Evidence website, and the selection committee will issue a further call for papers (250-300 words, one page) by 12 MARCH, directing respondents to the panel chairs who will have until 19 MARCH to confirm line-ups and notify the conference committee.
3. OPEN CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 30 MARCH
(submit electronically to Alisa Lebow: asl36@earthlink.net)
Open call for paper proposals (250-300 words, one page) should be submitted by MARCH
30. Final notification of acceptance will follow by 30 APRIL.
The conference selection committee is comprised of:
Alisa Lebow, Brunel University, Conference Chair
Zeynep Tül Akbal, Bahceşehir University
Can Candan, Boğazici University
Elizabeth Cowie, University of Kent
Ahmet Gurata, Bilkent University
Louise Spence, Kadir Has University
This year, Visible Evidence, the international conference on documentary film and media will be held in my home turf Istanbul and I am helping with the organization so I wanted to post the CFP here to encourage you colleagues/friends to submit an abstract. I would be happy to show anyone around while I am there so don't miss this opportunity to consider a summer trip to the good old Byzantine/Ottoman/Turkish city with your own personal guide, who also happens to tolerate crazy academic talk.
Best,
Selmin
Visible Evidence XVII Istanbul 9-12 August 2010
Call for Proposals
Visible Evidence, the ambulatory international conference on documentary,
will hold its 17th edition at Boğazici University in Istanbul, Turkey, from 9-12
August 2010. Hosted by docIstanbul, a non-profit training, research, policy and
networking center focusing on documentary film at Bogazici University, Visible
Evidence XVII marks the first time that the preeminent documentary studies
conference takes place in Turkey, or for that matter, anywhere in the ‘Middle East’.
This year’s conference will address all topics and current issues relating to documentary, with a specific regional emphasis on Turkey and its neighbors.
Thus, although we welcome all proposals, we would like to encourage proposals
with a focus on the following topics:
• Documentary from Turkey, Iran, the “Middle East” more generally, the Balkan
States and Greece
• Turkic Documentary (from Turkic nations including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan; and communities such as Tatars)
• Border-crossings in Documentary: Transnationalism, Border Trade, Migration, and
Exile
• Diasporic Documentary (especially, but not exclusively: German, Dutch, Belgian,
British, North American, etc. –– Turkish/Kurdish documentary)
• Fortress Europe (exclusion, policy and ideology)
• Minoritarian Discourses within the Region (Kurdish, Armenian, Arab, Alevi,
Assyrian, Jewish, queer, etc.)
• Activist media from the region
Sessions will last for two hours and be limited to four papers of no more than 20 minutes each. All papers to be presented in English. For more information, check the Visible Evidence website, which will have the latest information: http://visibleevidence.org/
Please note there is a three-tiered Proposal process:
• Panel Topic Proposals Deadline: 29 January 2010
• Panel-specific Papers Deadline: 12 March 2010
• Open Call for Papers not already included in panels Deadline:
30 March 2010
1. CALL FOR PANEL TOPIC PROPOSALS DEADLINE: 29 JANUARY
(submit electronically to Alisa Lebow: asl36@earthlink.net)
300 word panel proposal. This is to be an open panel, not pre-constituted. Notification of acceptance will follow by 15 February.
2. CALL FOR PANEL-SPECIFIC PAPER PROPOSALS DEADLINE: 12 MARCH
Once the panels are approved, the accepted panels will be posted on the Visible Evidence website, and the selection committee will issue a further call for papers (250-300 words, one page) by 12 MARCH, directing respondents to the panel chairs who will have until 19 MARCH to confirm line-ups and notify the conference committee.
3. OPEN CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 30 MARCH
(submit electronically to Alisa Lebow: asl36@earthlink.net)
Open call for paper proposals (250-300 words, one page) should be submitted by MARCH
30. Final notification of acceptance will follow by 30 APRIL.
The conference selection committee is comprised of:
Alisa Lebow, Brunel University, Conference Chair
Zeynep Tül Akbal, Bahceşehir University
Can Candan, Boğazici University
Elizabeth Cowie, University of Kent
Ahmet Gurata, Bilkent University
Louise Spence, Kadir Has University
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