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CFP: proposal deadline 1st April 2008
Continuity and Innovation:
Contemporary Film Form and Film Criticism
5th – 7th September 2008, University of Reading Film Conference
Contemporary film displays both its debt to the established forms and
practices of narrative cinema, and to international developments in
aesthetic practice and in new technologies that subtly shift the boundaries
of cinema’s aural and visual field.
At the same time, contemporary film criticism negotiates a shifting
relationship with its own histories and present – its histories of textual
analysis and film theory, and its present landscape of concerns with
identity, new delivery and reception contexts, digital remediation, and so
on, explored against the backdrop of a volatile socio-historical moment.
This conference seeks to consider the critical challenges contemporary film
form poses for us as film critics and theorists, in an approach rooted in
the detail of the film text itself. In addition, the conference wishes to
reflect and engage with the diversity of contemporary aesthetic choices and
filmmaking practices. On the one hand, the conference will explore the
continuities and innovations in contemporary film style, to move towards an
account of contemporary cinema’s aesthetic practice and the ways in which
these formal elements shape the production of meaning. On the other hand,
the conference will provide an important opportunity to explore and extend
the continuities and innovations possible in contemporary film criticism.
Keynote speakers include Douglas Pye and Adrian Martin. In addition, film
practitioners will be discussing their work.
We invite papers that attempt to meet these interpretative, analytical and
critical challenges through direct engagement with contemporary films.
In addition to the familiar pattern of panel discussions and plenaries, the
conference will include workshops in which speakers will present frameworks
for analysis of the detail of a movie, as an introduction to discussion.
Titles of films to be discussed at the conference will be circulated in advance.
Proposals for three kinds of presentation are invited:
• Close readings grounded in detailed analysis (20 minute papers).
• Discussion of historical, theoretical or critical issues related to the
interpretation of contemporary film style (20 minute papers).
• Workshop introductions, designed to open up issues about a sequence (or
sequences), as a prelude to extended debate (workshops will last 90 minutes).
The deadline for proposals is 1st April 2008.
Please send us your 200-word proposal and brief biography by email to:
[log in to unmask] Enquiries should be directed to the
conference organisers Lisa Purse and John Gibbs at the same email address.
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