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Please circulate to your colleagues and post-graduate students.
Continuity and Innovation:
Contemporary Film Form and Film Criticism
5th – 7th September 2008, University of Reading Film Conference
REGISTRATION EXTENDED UNTIL 15th August 2008
We are delighted to announce that we have been able to make allowances for
the disruptions of the holiday season and have managed to re-negotiate
arrangements with the conference provider in order to extend the
registration deadline by a couple of weeks.
There is now a draft schedule for the conference available on our website,
along with the registration form, at:
http://www.rdg.ac.uk/ftt/research/ftt-continuityandinnovation.asp
Details of the conference are given below. We hope you can join us for what
promises to be an exciting and intellectually stimulating conference.
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. 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. The conference will provide an
important opportunity to explore and extend the continuities and innovations
possible in contemporary film criticism.
Keynote speakers:
Professor Gilberto Perez: B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. M.A.,
Princeton University. Author of The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium;
film critic for The Yale Review and writer of numerous articles for such
journals as the London Review of Books, Raritan, The New York Times, The
Nation, The Hudson Review, Artforum, Cineaste, and Sight and Sound;
recipient of a Noble fellowship for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at
the Museum of Modern Art, a Mellon Faculty fellowship at Harvard University,
the Weiner Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities at the University
of Missouri, and Hewlett-Mellon and Bogert grants for released time at Sarah
Lawrence College. Head of Film department, Sarah Lawrence College.
Douglas Pye: One of the key members of the Movie editorial board from its
inception in the 1960s, Douglas Pye has been teaching film at the University
of Reading for many years. Recently retired from his post as Senior Lecturer
he remains closely involved with the Department. He has written a range of
important essays on film and film analysis, including ‘Seeing by Glimpses:
Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia’ (1988), ‘Film Noir and Suppressive
Narrative: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt’ (1992), ‘In and Around The Paradine
Case: Control, Confession and the Claims of Marriage’ (2004), and the
influential ‘Movies and Point of View’ (2000). His books include: The Movie
Book of the Western (1996, co-edited with Ian Cameron), Style and Meaning:
Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (2005, co-edited with John Gibbs).
He is series co-editor (with John Gibbs) of Close-Up, an innovative and
accessible new annual series devoted to the close analysis of film and
television, in which his own groundbreaking study ‘Movies and Tone’ was
published in 2007.
Dr. Adrian Martin: Since 1979, Dr. Adrian Martin has combined work as a
professional writer and film critic with a university career. He was film
reviewer for The Age between 1995 and 2006. For his numerous books, essays
and public lectures he has won the Byron Kennedy Award (Australian Film
Institute) and the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, and his PhD on film
style won the Mollie Holman Award. He is the author of four books and
hundreds of essays on film, art, television, literature, music, popular and
avant-garde culture. His books include: Phantasms: The Dreams and Desires at
the Heart of our Popular Culture (1993); BFI Modern Classics: Once Upon a
Time in America (1998); Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World
Cinephilia (2003, co-edited with Jonathan Rosenbaum); Australian Screen
Classics: The Mad Max Movies (2003)
Film practitioner: Award-winning German director Birgit Grosskopf. Her
feature film Prinzessin (2006) has won various prizes including: German
Independence Award at the Oldenburg Film Festival (2006), the Saarland
Minister President’s Award at the Max Ophüls Film Festival (2006), Edinburgh
Film Festival First Steps Award for best German debut feature (2006). She
has also several short films: Babies in Pockets (1999), The Pilot (2000),
Live Boys (2001), Tabula Rasa (2003). Further details of other practitioners
discussing their work will follow.
Film Screenings: There will be a screening of Birgit Grosskopf’s debut
feature film Prinzessin which is currently unavailable in this country.
During the conference weekend there will also be other screenings of films
to be discussed at the conference. Details of these will be announced
nearer the event.
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 in these workshops will be circulated in
advance.
Registration forms can be downloaded from the conference website:
http://www.rdg.ac.uk/ftt/research/ftt-continuityandinnovation.asp
Enquiries should be directed to the conference organisers Lisa Purse and
John Gibbs at [log in to unmask]
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