* Apologies for cross-posting *
CALL FOR PAPERS
WERNER HERZOG'S CINEMA: BETWEEN THE VISIONARY AND THE DOCUMENTARY
16 – 18 September 2005, at the Goethe-Institut, London
Organised by the University of Kent and the Goethe-Institut
Keynote Speakers:
Timothy Corrigan (University of Pennsylvania)
Alan Singer (Temple University)
Erica Carter (Warwick University)
Thomas Elsaesser (University of Amsterdam)
This conference considers the films of Werner Herzog in the light of
his more recent documentary output. It will provide a forum for the
discussion of this work and Herzog’s documentary manifesto The
Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema (1999) with
its polemic against observational documentary. Whereas his fiction
films have frequently been described as having a ‘documentary quality’,
his documentaries seem to want to contest the category of documentary
filmmaking. In fact, the filmmaker himself has emphasized that the
latter are not documentaries, due to the stagings they contain. From
_Land of Silence and Darkness_ (1971) to _Wheel of Time_ (2003) his
documentaries have explored the gap between documentary objectivity and
spiritual or embodied experience, problematising the notion of
documentary subjectivity. We invite contributions on the documentary in
Herzog’s films, and the questions for documentary practice and theory
that his films raise. Topics might include but need not be confined to:
• The relationship between creation or authorship and documentation
• Herzog’s treatment of the traditional subject/object division in
documentary
• A reassessment of the notions of fiction and non-fiction
• Issues of staging and ‘truth’
• Uses of re-enactment and stylization
• Herzog’s concept of ‘athletic cinema’
• Aspects of the spiritual and the meta-physical
• Aesthetic concepts such as the sublime and Romanticism in the
interpretation of Herzog’s documentaries
• The reception of Herzog and his work inside and outside of Germany
• Re-evaluations and re-contextualizations of the ideological
connotations in Herzog’s films
The conference will be accompanied by screenings of Herzog’s
documentary work. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words for
papers of 20 minutes to ‘[log in to unmask]’ or by mail to: Silke
Panse, Film Studies, School of Drama, Film and the Visual Arts,
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, United Kingdom.
Conference website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/kiash/herzog.htm
Deadline for abstracts: 30 March 2005
Conference Organiser:
Silke Panse (University of Kent)
Advisory Board and Organising Committee:
Silke Panse (University of Kent), Elizabeth Cowie (University of Kent),
Julian Preece (University of Kent), Catherine Grant (University of
Kent), Michael Renov (University of Southern California)
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