CALL FOR PAPERS
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Cinema Studies' Historical Turn: The Influence and Implications of Early Cinema


Graduate Conference on Cinema

Conference Date: Saturday April 1, 2006, University of Chicago
Keynote Address: Jennifer Bean, University of Washington


DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: December 15, 2005



Cinema Studies' Historical Turn: The Influence and Implications of 
Early Cinema will be the third Graduate Cinema Conference at the 
University of Chicago, a one-day event that will bring together new 
work being done by graduate students on cinema history and 
historiography. Since the late 1970s, the scholarly study of early 
cinema history has revolutionized the field of cinema studies and led 
to the critical reassessment of many long-held assumptions about film 
history. Today, the way scholars approach the beginnings of cinema 
history largely determines how they view the broader implications of 
film history, theory, and practice. Nevertheless, as a recent issue 
of _Cinema Journal_ (Winter 2005) has pointed out, historical 
research only figures as approximately twenty percent of the work 
being done in the field. If those numbers are indicative of the 
interests of a newer generation of film scholars, the so-called 
"historical turn" in cinema studies has only made a partial 
revolution. In order for it to come full circle, those working on 
issues of historiography must continue to confront the important 
questions of why and, more importantly, how we ought to study film 
history, particularly in light of previous work done on early cinema.

A central goal of the conference is to provide a forum for graduate 
students who are exploring questions about early cinema's status in 
film history, theory, and practice and, more broadly, the 
historiographic issues that such questions raise for cinema studies 
as a whole. Early cinema continues to offer scholars a framework both 
for conducting historical research and for engaging with fundamental 
concerns about the nature of the medium-concerns relevant both at 
cinema's inception and in its historical transformations. Early 
cinema was, for example, the first global cinema: it was produced and 
distributed around the world, and the influence and implications of 
its circulation still raise relevant questions for today's media 
histories and practices. Additionally, early cinema has itself become 
inspiration for more recent films such as Guy Maddin's _Archangel_ 
and Bill Morrison's _Decasia_. While such historically-inflected 
productions have roots in the experimental work of a prior generation 
of filmmakers (e.g. Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs), they 
also emerge from and are indebted to cinema studies' historical turn. 
The ways in which they reflect upon the historicity of film raise 
significant questions for cinema studies, particularly now in the 
21st century when the future of the medium is an open and pressing 
issue.

We welcome papers from graduate students that explore historiographic 
questions specifically in relation to the study of early cinema. In 
particular, we are interested in proposals pertaining to the 
following areas:

* early cinema's historiographical impact on the development of the 
discipline of cinema and media studies

* how the methodologies developed for the study of early cinema might 
be applied to different historical contexts and to other critical and 
theoretical questions (e.g. approaches to genre, gender, class, or 
race; intermedial genealogies; intersections with modernity; 
aesthetic histories)

* conceptual frameworks for exploring the international character of 
early cinema in relation to later global media cultures

* perspectives on what early cinema history might teach us about the 
present and future possibilities of the medium, particularly as it 
pertains to more recent cinematic practices (e.g. Guy Maddin and Bill 
Morrison; digital, experimental, and post-classical filmmaking, etc.)


The keynote speaker for the conference will be Jennifer Bean, 
Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies, Comparative Literature, and 
Women's Studies at the University of Washington. She is editor, with 
Diane Negra, of _A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema_ (Duke University 
Press, 2002) and is currently completing a book titled _Bodies in 
Shock: Gender, Genre, and the Cinema of Modernity, 1912-1924_.

The deadline for abstracts (300-400 words) is December 15, 2005. 
Please e-mail all abstracts to [log in to unmask] with 
"Conference Abstract" in the subject heading.

Limited financial assistance for travel may be available for 
international students.



For more information, contact Sarah Keller: [log in to unmask]; or 
Joshua Yumibe: [log in to unmask]

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