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/
Thursday, July 22, 2010
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
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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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
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