Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference, March 17-21, 2010
The Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, Los Angeles, CA
Deadline for submissions to this panel: August 9, 2009 11:59 PM CST
Submissions sought for a panel that considers the relationship between film reviewing and media culture. Papers addressing film criticism in ways that relate to the overall conference theme (SCMS at 50: Archiving the Future/Mobilizing the Past) are particularly welcome.
Cinema scholars such as Robert Kapsis, Barbara Klinger, and Charles Maland have examined the role of reviews in discursively constructing popular genres and directorial reputations during the Classical Hollywood era. Over the past three years, however, more than 55 professional film critics have lost their jobs, a statistic reported by Sean P. Means of The Salt Lake Tribune, who attributes this plight to buyouts, layoffs, reassignment, retirement, or the death of their print publications. Meanwhile, online criticism continues to flourish, as evidenced by review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes, movie websites such as IMDB, and blogs dedicated to film analysis and evaluation. This panel aims to investigate not only the status of the film critic in the contemporary mediascape, but also the impact of print and Internet film reviewing on global cinema culture.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
- Film reviews as historical evidence
- The future of film criticism
- Reviewing, academia, and cinephilia
- Popular opinion, moviegoing, and the DVD market
- Film criticism and film advertising
- The cultural presence of the public intellectual
- Canonicity, connoisseurship, and taste politics
- Print media vs. new media
- Coverage of international/independent films and film festivals
- Genre definitions (e.g. David Edelstein’s coinage of “torture porn”)
- The cult of the director
- The influence of the late Manny Farber
Send 300 word abstract and full academic CV (as separate e-mail attachments) to: Will Scheibel (willscheibel@gmail.com). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2010 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/
Will Scheibel
Indiana University
Department of Communication & Culture
800 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47404
Sunday, May 31, 2009
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6 comments:
Hmm, that looks like a tough topic for documentary scholars.
Hey Selmin! I saw your “A Delay in Advance: Anticipation and Virtuality in Videograms of a Revolution” for Visible Evidence - it sounds like a great paper!!! I am hugely intrigued and would absolutely love to hear it, but USC is a little far for me. Would you be able to e-mail me an abstract? Or - better still - the paper? No worries if not, but it's an awesome title!! :-)
Will - an intriguing panel proposal! Are you focusing only on English-language critics though (I am thrown by your phrase "global cinema culture"? The film critic scene is different in different parts of the world - well, at least re Japanese and Mandarin-writing critics. Just food for thought.
(Back to) Selmin - on an entirely separate note, Roger Federer won Roland Garros over the weekend! You must be ecstatic - I am! :-D
Jenna (aka fellow Federer fan)
Thanks for both of your comments.
Selmin: Granted, I have a limited knowledge of documentary scholarship, but I think you're probably right. With the exception of covering popular figures like Herzog, Moore, and Morris, I'm not sure that mainstream film reviewing has impacted media culture in its engagement with doc. cinema as much as it has with Hollywood/narrative movies (going all the way back to the writings of Crowther, Farber, etc.). However, I certainly welcome any proposals that do find ways to historically or theoretically address docs. and film criticism -- perhaps by going after that very lack of journalistic attention.
Jenna: Yes, you bring up a great point! While most of the existing metacritical scholarship deals with commercial reviewing in the U.S. and the U.K. (or the influence of the French), I would love to see work done on more international and de-Westernized criticism -- as it is indeed quite different in certain cases. By referring to "global cinema culture," I hope to encourage submitters to think of reviewing in that global context (how U.S. criticism impacts distribution, exhibition, and attendance overseas; how non-U.S. critics impact the culture of movies stateside; how films are circulated; etc.).
Will, I just tried to make a funny/friendly comment; of course, not every panel has to address documentary film :-)
Jenna, I am very excited about VE myself, been missing it since it was held in Europe for the past 2 years. I am still working on the ideas but will send you the paper once I have a draft that I am happy with :-) We need to find a common venue to meet soon. I haven't seen any Mabusers in a long while and am longing for meet-ups. As for Fedex, I feel like I can die happily after seeing him show off his Coupe des Mousquetaires on facebook. Noone can bring up the silly oh-but-he-never-won-roland- garros argument ever again! Remind us to have a toast next time we get together ;-)
Hey, Selmin,
Yes, Mabuse get-together. . . (sorry to hijack, Will). I am bummed that the spring plans fell through, but I've been meaning to drop a note to see if anything else is going on. Maybe FB is the place to set-up get-togethers now!
I did want to say that Scott and I will be in Detroit for the PCA conference in Nov., so hopefully we'll see you then if not sooner.
peace.
Aaarrgh - sorry all for the delay in replying......
Will - thanks for clarifying! The ideas of "cultural flow" in your explanation are very interesting and I think much can be said about them (on top of specific national/cultural contexts) - I look forward to reading more about your panel!
Selmin - sure, take your time writing and thanks very much in advance for your paper! It really does sound intriguing and I await with anticipation! Thanks again!
PS It's Wimbledon next week!! Nadal's injured, Murray has yet to prove himself with the top guys on grass, Federer's in form after Roland Garros - I think he has every shot at a 6th title!! Go Federer, allez, allez!!!
Jason - I'm not on FB :-( (just today someone wrote to me asking me if I was on it!) - can we stick to the blog, please?
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