Blending Media: Defining Film in the Modernist Period
An International Symposium of the Framing Media Research Group (Austrian
Science Fund, Project 20349)
Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria
June 9-10, 2009
How do modern media define themselves? This is one of the central
questions that our symposium tries to trace by focusing on what has
become the largest, best-documented study of the recent past: the
emergence and establishing of film in the modernist period of the early
20th century. Inspired, in part, by new computer-based multimedia
formats and digital imaging, recent research in film and media studies
has explored film history as a paradigmatic model for the synthetic
construction of media and phenomena of media blending. Examples are
processes of media convergence and differentiation (Thomas Elsaesser),
the intermedial formation of new media (André Gaudreault), and the
anachronistic projection of cinematic metaphors onto digital moving
images (David N. Rodowick). In the history of film practice and theory,
the novel medium constantly redefines itself through recourses to
already established media and artforms (including photography, theater,
painting, sculpture, and literature). Our symposium will focus on media
blends in film and its intermedial network.
Possible areas of investigation include:
- Plurimedial configurations of film such as relations of image, sound,
and text in silent and sound films
- Multimedia formats in early film history, experimental and popular
forms of film projections on the theatrical stage and through other
media venues
- Framings of film by film and other media, such as film trailers, film
posters, newsreels, animated shorts, and literary approaches to film
- Intermedial exchanges and cross-mappings of the arts in film (e.g.
self-reflexive uses of the visual arts, drama, literature, photography,
and animation; avant-garde conceptions of film as "motion painting,"
"visual symphonies," and "visual poems")
- Evocations of genres, arts, and media in film theory
- Media blends in 'pure' and 'synthetic' theories of cinema
- Metaphors for film in popular and scientific discourses (e.g. living
pictures, photoplay, picture writing, cineplastics, animated paintings,
and architecture-in-motion)
- Similar blending phenomena in other periods or media that are
pertinent to the history of film
- Dialogic approaches to media blends in early cinema and moving images
in the digital age
- Conceptual blending theory and media studies
The conference is hosted in cooperation with the 18th International Film
Festival Innsbruck (IFFI, www.iffi.at), which will take place from June
9 to 14.
The results of the conference will be published in a volume funded by
the Austrian Science Fund. Please send abstracts (300-500 words) and
short scholarly biography by February 28, 2009, to Christian Quendler at
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