Announcement of Filmmaking Guest and Extended Call for Papers Deadline:
Cine-Excess XI International Film Festival and Conference
Dear MeCCSA Colleagues, sorry for cross posting the following information. We are delighted to announce that the first filmmaking guest for the Cine-Excess XI International Film Festival and Conference is the cult Italian director Sergio Martino (Torso, All the Colours of the Dark, The Violent Professionals). With the confirmation of Sergio Martino’s attendance at Cine-Excess XI, we are now extending the current call for papers deadline until Friday 22nd September to invite presentations on the director’s work. In addition, we would also like to commission a new panel on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to coincide with the announcement that we will be hosting the UK theatrical premiere of the new Kim Henkel/Brian Huberman documentary Beset by Demons on the life and murder of Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 actor, Lou Perrymen.
Full details of the updated call for papers and extended deadline are presented below:
Extended Call for Papers Deadline:
The 11th International Conference and Festival on Global Cult Film Traditions
Birmingham City University Presents:
Cine Excess XI
Fear and the Unfamiliar: Wrong Time, Wrong Place, Wrong Crowd
Birmingham City University (and related screening venues)
9th-11th November 2017
www.cine-excess.co.uk
Guest of Honour: Sergio Martino (Torso, All the Colours of the Dark, Violent Professionals)
Keynote: Professor Mark Jancovich (UEA)
Over the last 11 years, the Cine-Excess International Film Conference and Festival has brought together leading scholars and critics with global cult filmmakers for an event comprising a themed academic conference with plenary talks, filmmaker interviews and UK theatrical premieres of up and coming film releases.
Cine-Excess XI is hosted by the Birmingham School of Media at Birmingham City University, and will feature a three day academic conference alongside filmmaking guests, industry panels and a season of related UK premieres and retrospectives taking place at screening venues across the region.
We are delighted to announce that our first filmmaking guest of honour for 2017 is Italian cult director Sergio Martino. Having worked in a variety of genres and capacities, Martino (along with his producer/brother Luciano) came to public prominence in the 1970s, with a series of productions which reflected the contemporary European fears: from the traumas of urban violence and metropolitan crime, to more longstanding fears of the rural other. For instance, between 1970 and 1974,Sergio Martino created a series of influential and often controversial titles including The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971), All the Colours of the Dark (1972), and Torso (1973), each of which fused psychosexual dynamics within wider examinations of the generational conflicts between the countercultural and conservative forces dominant in the era. With later cop thrillers such as The Violent Professionals (1973) and Gambling City (1975) Martino’s cinema perfectly captured wider social and political anxieties that related to a decade of terrorism which swept across Europe. Throughout his career, Sergio Martino’s films were marked by a strong sense of cinematography, editing and experimental colour techniques, which have proven influential to recent generations of cult directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth.
Alongside the attendance of Sergio Martino at this year’s event, Cine Excess is also delighted to welcome Professor Mark Jancovich as keynote speaker. As well as being one of the world’s leading experts on horror and cult film, Professor Jancovich also writes on media and cultural theory, genre, audience and reception studies and contemporary popular television. Apart from numerous journal articles, his many books include: The Screen’s Number One and Number Two Bogeymen: The Critical Reception of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and 1940s (with Shane Brown) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Film and Comic Books, edited with Ian Gordon and Matthew McAllister (University of Mississippi Press, 2007); The Shifting Definitions of Genre, edited with Lincoln Geraghty (McFarland, 2008); Film Histories; An Introduction and Reader, edited with Paul Grainge and Sharon Monteith, (University of Toronto Press, 2007); and Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, edited with Antonio Lazaro, Julian Stringer, and Andrew Willis (MUP, 2003).
For its 11th annual addition, the conference Fear and the Unfamiliar: Wrong Time, Wrong Place, Wrong Crowd considers the ways in which cult media exploits the boundaries of self and other in order to address horror and unease across a range of key genres. Specifically, it revisits and reconsiders Robin Wood’s (1986) taxonomy of otherness, which positioned categories such as women, the working class, ethnicity, alternative ideologies, and deviations from the ideological sexual norm as triggers for the evolution of the horror film and related transgressive genres.
Although Wood’s original return of the repressed hypothesis generated a range of critical readings around disreputable film genres, the parameters of his analysis have become invested with new and politicised resonances in recent years. Here, acts of extremism, and the making strange of the familiar in the contemporary milieu of Trump’s travel ban, a proposed wall to separate Mexico from the US, and generalised calls for greater immigration control all serve to resituate ‘other people’, ‘other cultures’ and ‘other places’ as sources of fear and revulsion. In short, awareness of individual, national and international difference has once more become culturally and politically foregrounded as threatening, thereby situating the other as being at the axes of Wrong Time, Wrong Place, Wrong Crowd.
Cine-Excess XI invites papers that either look back to Wood’s original premise, or assess more contemporaneous works/influences to consider such boundary awareness through the articulation of the other in cult media, film and television. This might involve the making strange of the familiar person/self, either in appearance or behaviour, perhaps through the mirror image or the doppelganger, or the rendering of places and spaces as uncanny, different or ideologically/physically remote, such as in the Gothic ruin, the rural backwater, or the isolated cabin in the woods. Proposals might also examine how shifts in time likewise cause ordinary contemporary on-screen places to become peculiar, excessive and cult.
Proposals are now invited for papers on a wide range of cult media case-studies, including film, television, literature, comics and digital media. However, we would particularly welcome contributions focusing on:
• All the colours of the dark – Sergio Martino’s European cinema of excess
• The return of the rural repressed – a special panel on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• Legacy of the living dead – Social realism and apocalyptic satire in the cinema of George A. Romero
• Migrant trauma – Fears of the immigrant in classical and contemporary media
• Bloody kids – Infants and infantile fears in cult media traditions
• The return of the repressed redux – New readings of the concept of the other
• The savage lens – Colonial visions of the unfamiliar
• The gothic other – Terrors old and new
• Wicker men and stone children – British tradition, folklore and cross-generational conflicts in UK cult film cultures
• “Colonised by bourgeois ideology” – Robin Wood and the fear of the working class
• Picket fences and domestic perversions – Unwholesome portrayals of the nuclear family in cult film and television
• Invasion USA – Alternative ideologies and fears of national infiltration
• Deadlier than the male – Case-studies of the transgressive female on screen
• Film and the unfamiliar – Global visions, transnational variants and genres out of place
• Don’t go into the woods tonight – Urban fears in cinema’s forgotten rural spaces
• Lost boys and girls – Gang culture tropes across cult film and TV
• Cult on cults – Representations of religious and political extremists
• Sexuality and the unfamiliar – Queer bodies and threats to heteronormativity
• The other within – Outcasts , radicals and vengeful veterans
• Fear of the once familiar – Mainstream icons reborn as cult performers
• The Cultification of the Uncanny – Theoretical perspectives on the concept of the unfamiliar
• Fear of the all too familiar – Doubles and doppelgangers in cult film and TV
Please send a 300-word abstract and a short (one page) C.V. by
Friday 22nd September 2017 to:
Fran Pheasant-Kelly
University of Wolverhampton
[log in to unmask]
Xavier Mendik
Birmingham City University
[log in to unmask]
A final listing of accepted presentations will be released on Friday 28th September 2017. A selection of conference papers from the event are scheduled to be published in the Cine-Excess e-Journal.
Delegate fees for Cine-Excess XI are £130 (standard) /£60 (concessions) for the three days, or £50 (standard) and £25 (concessions) per day. This fee includes entrance to the conference and related Cine-Excess screenings and industry panels. For further information and regular updates on the event (including information on filmmaking guests, keynotes and screenings) please visit www.cine-excess.co.uk
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