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CALL FOR PAPERS



“Memory in/of English-speaking Cinema”

15th International SERCIA Conference

University of Franche-Comté, Besançon (birth place of the Lumière  
brothers) France

Wednesday 8, Thursday 9, Friday 10 September 2010



For some years, the idea of cinema as a carrier of memory has  
interested film specialists. How does cinema work to create and  
express individual and collective memory? What are its various  
strategies in making spectators believe in such memories? Recent  
works dealing with the crucial link between memory and cinema include  
books by Pam Cook, Annette Kuhn and Marcia Landy.

 From the time of its first appearance, cinema has acted as the  
carrier of a lived tradition it has perpetuated through more and more  
sophisticated techniques. In Britain, early cinematographers such as  
Mitchell and Kenyon gave spectators a view of the rituals and  
traditions of their world – their films now survive to remember a way  
of life that has long ago disappeared. The same could be said of  
early films shot in Los Angeles and its surroundings in the 1910s and  
20s.

The cinema has also played a crucial role in the construction of  
shared cultures. The memories it creates nourish the imagination of  
spectators, encouraging the development of a common network of  
references and representations to create an almost-universal language.

Some of the techniques developed or used by cinema, including the  
flash-back, voice-off and the employment of music, have been of  
particular importance in encouraging its ability to prompt or to  
simulate memories, whether used in war or gangster films, film noir  
or musicals.

Papers are invited on any aspect of the link between cinema and  
memory. They may be related to one or more of the following  
suggestions, but the suggestions themselves are by no means intended  
to be exclusive. Other ideas, proposals and suggestions will be  
considered as well.

n    Cinema as the creator/reflector of immediate memories reflecting  
time and place (early Charlie Chaplin; American musical comedies of  
the 1930s; the New York of Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese; the work  
of  Mira Nair)

n    Cinema as reporter/historian/archivist/opponent of forgetfulness  
(the films of D. W. Griffith, Stanley Kubrick, and Steven Spielberg;  
war films; gangster films; westerns; documentaries; bio-pics)

n    Cinema as story-teller (Disney and the fairy-story, films noirs,  
the world of Tim Burton)

n    Cinema as therapy (Terence Davies, John Boorman, Woody Allen)

n    Memory revisited/reworked (remakes, the films of Quentin Tarantino)

n    Memory suppressed or repressed (François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit  
451; John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate; Deepa Mehta’s Earth)

n    Fabricated memory (science fiction cinema: James Cameron, Ridley  
Scott)

n    Memory about memory (the “American” films of Sergio Leone)

n    Cinema’s own memory/Cinema’s self-reflexive memory: for example,  
Martin Scorsese and the “memory” of American cinema

n    The manufacture of mythic characters (the cowboy, the gangster,  
the femme fatale)

n    Constructing a “usable” past (British Second World War films);  
films dealing with horrific events (the Holocaust, genocide in Africa  
or Eastern Europe)

n    Perpetuating memory (new technologies mobilised in the creation  
of memory, e.g. remastered films or rehabilitated film-makers, such  
as the cinema of John Cassavetes by Gérard Depardieu,  Hitchcock by  
Truffaut)

n    The techniques used by cinema to promote or create memory

n    Memory of cinema-going as a social experience (how spectators  
recalled their own involvement in and engagement with the cinema)



Paper proposals (250/300 words) including a brief biography/cv should  
be sent as an attached document in Word or Rich Text Format no later  
than Friday 5th February 2010 to both conference organisers: Zeenat  
Saleh at  [log in to unmask] and Melvyn Stokes (president of  
SERCIA) at [log in to unmask]



References:

-       Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema  
(2005),
-       Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory  
(2002)
-       Marcia Landy, ed., The Historical Film: History and Meaning  
in Media (2000)


David Roche, Université de Bourgogne
4, rue Georges Lavier
21000 Dijon
FRANCE
[log in to unmask]
+33 (0)3.45.34.79.02