Apologies for cross-posting this information,
which may be of interest to researchers working on Italian cult/horror/exploitation film.
This is a reminder that the Call for Papers
deadline for this year's Cine-Excess International film festival and
conference is Wednesday 3rd September. This year's event considers global representations
of the rural excess within cult cinema. Full details of the event and Call for
Papers topic areas are included below.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Cine-Excess
VIII: Are You Ready for the Country: Cult Cinema and Rural Excess
The
University of Brighton, UK
14-16 November 2014
Over the last 7 years, the Cine-Excess International Film Conference and
Festival has brought together leading scholars and critics with global cult
filmmakers. Cine-Excess comprises of a 3 day conference alongside
plenary talks, filmmaker interviews and 5-7 UK theatrical premieres of up and
coming cult releases.
Previous guests to the annual Cine-Excess event have included Catherine
Breillat (Romance, Sex is Comedy), John Landis (An
American Werewolf in London, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places),
Roger Corman (The Masque of the Red Death, The Little Shop of
Horrors, The Intruder, The Wild Angels, Bloody Mama), Stuart
Gordon (Re-Animator, King of the Ants, Stuck),
Brian Yuzna (Society, Beyond Re-Animator, The Dentist),
Dario Argento (Deep Red, Suspiria, Inferno) Joe
Dante (The Howling, Gremlins, The Hole), Franco
Nero (Django, Keoma, Die Hard II), Vanessa Redgrave
(Blow Up, The Devils, Julia), Ruggero Deodato (Last
Cannibal World, Cannibal Holocaust, House on the Edge of the Park)
Enzo G. Castellari (Keoma, The Inglorious Bast***s) and Sergio
Martino (Torso, All the
Colours of the Dark).
With the 2012 relocation of Cine-Excess to the School of Art, Design and
Media at the University of Brighton, new developments connected to the event
have included the recent 2013 launch of the peer-reviewed Cine-Excess
E-Journal (www.cine-excess.co.uk), which
publishes a selection of papers from the event.
Cine-Excess VIII is a collaboration between the School of Art, Design
and Media and the C21: Centre for research in twenty-first century writings at
the University of Brighton. To coincide with the 40th anniversary of Tobe
Hooper and Kim Henkel’s ground breaking backwoods classic The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, Cine-Excess VIII considers cult representations of the
rural space and its inhabitants, analyzing the extent to which depictions of
the countryside often reveal fascinating issues of class, sexuality, race and
regional distinction.
From early moonshine movies depicting ribald rural rule breaking, to survival
splatter epics such as Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre (1974), Southern Comfort (1981), The Devil’s Rejects
(2005) and beyond, the American countryside and its inhabitants come to evoke
longstanding traditions of humour, horror and morbid fascination within a range
of cult film genres. Beyond this established Stateside preoccupation with the
South, Europe has also used cult imagery to acknowledge its own regional splits
and divisions, which have fed into a range of representations, myths and
case-studies that extended from eugenic case-study to exploitation cinema. In
addition to these territories, other global cultures frequently figure the
rural space as a site of either erotic emancipation or fearful foreboding in
range of unsettling and iconic genres that warrant further investigation.
In order to explore these themes further, Cine-Excess VIII will consider
the wide variety of representations of the cult countryside from a range of
differing theoretical and methodological perspectives, while also considering
larger national notions of the rural space within film, television, literature,
comics and digital media. A number of iconic international filmmakers
associated with rural cult cinema classics will be in attendance at Cine-Excess
VIII to discuss their work and interact with academic speakers. Proposals
are now invited for papers on any aspect of rural excess. However, we would
particularly welcome contributions focusing on:
*‘White Trash’ Auteurs: From Tobe Hooper to Rob Zombie and beyond From
*Deliverance to Dukes of Hazard and Beyond: genres of cult
country folk
*White Trash Terror: the American countryside in literature and film From
*Eugenics to Exploitation: historical case-studies of Southern ‘deviance’
*The Return of the Rural: a special panel on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
and its sequels
*Yuppies in Peril: class, culture and the politics of hatred
*Moonshine Madness: comic cycles and the country trickster
*From Southern Belles to Savage Sisters: female vendettas in the rural space
*Backwoods But British: the rural space in British film and literature
*Revenge
of Nature: animal revolts in the cult countryside
*The
Queer Countryside: sexuality and the rural space
*Small Screen
Southerners: TV representations of the countryside
*Europe’s Others:
transnational representations of the rural
*Sounds of the South: the
role of music and soundtrack in the rural movie
*Cult on Cults:
Southern saviours and preachers of hate
*Bucks, Cucks and
Harlots: eroticism and rural desire
*‘Hicksploitation’, ‘Blaxsploitation’
and race conflict within cult cinema
*Deep River Savages:
Italian cult cinema and the cruel countryside
*Outback Outrages: the
rural space in Australian cinema
*White Trash in Tech:
rural rule breaking in online and video game formats
We welcome individual
paper submissions, panels and roundtable proposals related to a range of
international traditions of rural excess.
Please send a 300-word
abstract and a short (one page) C.V. by 3rd September 2014 to:
Dr Xavier Mendik
Director
of the Cine-Excess Film Festival
Dr Katy
Shaw
Director
of C21: Centre for research in twenty-first century writings
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A final
listing of accepted presentations will be released on 17th September 2014.
A selection of conference papers from the event will be published in the Cine-Excess
E-Journal in 2015.
For further information and regular updates on the event (including information
on guests, keynotes and screenings) please visit www.cine-excess.co.uk