The New Extremism: Contemporary European Cinema
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, 24th-25th of April 2009
Keynote Speakers: Dr Martine Beugnet, Edinburgh University
Professor Martin Barker, University of Aberystwyth
In recent years, the term 'new extremism' has been used to describe (and
often to decry) a growing body of films featuring extreme and graphic
representations of sexuality and violence, seemingly designed with the
chief aim in mind of shocking or provoking spectators. The list of
filmmakers frequently assembled under this rubric is quite diverse, but
often includes Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke, Bruno
Dumont, Fatih Akin, Claire Denis, Philippe Grandrieux, Lukas Moodysson,
Marina de Van, François Ozon and Lars Von Trier, to name a few.
Although the films of the new extremism have been decried as reactionary
and ostentatious, the recent upsurge of rigorous scholarly attention
devoted to this body of work challenges reductive assertions, and
confirms the relevance of such provocative and polemical filmmaking.
Beyond mere shock tactics, what do these brutal and uncompromising films
bring to understandings of cinema today? How do these films solicit, and
help to shape, new modes of spectatorship and new ways of relating to
cinema?
The aim of this conference is to explore and theorize the paradigm of the
new extremism in contemporary European cinema. What new challenges do
these filmmakers bring to our understanding of issues of embodiment and
intimacy, violation and volition? How do such uncompromising images
respond to, or seek to intervene into a set of socio-political and
economic realities? In what ways do these films move beyond binaries of
passivity and activity, voyeurism and masochism?
With these and other relevant questions in mind, we invite papers that
critically examine the 'new extremism' in contemporary European cinema.
Possible topics may also include (but are by no means restricted to) the
following:
-Issues of spectatorship
-The ethics of extremism and the 'ethical turn' in critical and cultural
theory
-Feminist and psychoanalytic approaches
-Questions of trauma (psychological, corporeal, national, historical)
-Debates about cinematic realism, materiality and the Real
-Theories of sensation and affect
-New approaches to sexuality and violence
-Temporal/spatial formations in the new extremism
-Issues of political agency and social exclusion
-Influences on the new extremism: mainstream and avant-garde traditions
-Reception studies
-Questions of authorship
Proposals (up to 500 word abstracts) should be sent by November 21st,
2008 to:
Tanya Horeck (Tanya.Horeck_at_anglia.ac.uk)
Tina Kendall (Tina.Kendall_at_anglia.ac.uk)
Sarah Barrow (Sarah.Barrow_at_anglia.ac.uk)
--
Iain Robert Smith
Institute of Film and Television
School of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
NG7 2RD
Head of Communications,
MeCCSA Post-Graduate Network
website: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/pgn/
Articles Editor,
Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies
website: http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/
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