Dear All,

Apologies for cross-posting

The registration for 'Continuity & Innovation: Contemporary Film Form and Film Criticism' 
conference ends 19th August. 

The conference will be of particular interest to colleagues interested in recent 
developments in German Cinema, because it features a plenary session with Birgit 
Grosskopf, who will be talking about sequences from her award winning feature 
Prinzessin (2006). Prinzessin will also be screened during the conference.

More details below:

Best wishes

Dr Lisa Purse and Dr John Gibbs
Department of Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading

*


Continuity and Innovation:
Contemporary Film Form and Film Criticism

5th - 7th September 2008, University of Reading Film Conference

REGISTRATION DEADLINE: 19th August 2008


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: A longstanding member of the Movie editorial board, Douglas Pye has for 
many years been a key figure in film education, not least in the development of the BA at 
Reading, the longest-standing film course in British Higher Education. He has written a 
range of important essays on film and film analysis, including: 'Genre and Movies' (1975), 
'Max Ophuls’ Le Plaisir' (1982), 'Seeing by Glimpses: Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia' 
(1988), 'Film Noir and Suppressive Narrative: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt' (1992), and 
the influential 'Movies and Point of View' (2000). Books include The Movie Book of the 
Western (1996, co-edited with Ian Cameron) and 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, the annual series devoted to the close analysis of film and 
television, in which his 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 
Ophuls 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 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 which provide delegates with an opportunity to discuss films in detail.
Titles of films to be discussed in these workshops will be circulated to delegates 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 
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