THIRD ANNUAL

SCREEN INDUSTRIES IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE CONFERENCE: INDUSTRIAL AUTHORSHIP

29 November – 1 December 2013
Palacký University
Olomouc
Czech Republic

Sponsored by the Czech Society of Film Studies, Project FIND, and Palacký University

The Third Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference (SIECE) will focus on the broadly defined subject of industrial authorship. In recent times, the concept of the author has become somewhat marginalized in screen studies discourse. Yet, John Caughie has suggested that this figure looms large “everywhere else – in publicity, in journalistic reviews, in television programmes, in film retrospectives, in the marketing of cinema”. Caughie goes on to explain that “Sometime around the point at which Film Studies began to be embarrassed by its affiliation to the author, the film industry and its subsidiaries began to discover with renewed enthusiasm the value of authorial branding for both marketing and reputation”. The prominent position that authorship occupies across the region’s audiovisual cultures demands investigation in broader, revisionist terms that offload the Romantic notion of the autonomous Auteur in favor of approaches that confront its collectivity and institutional dimensions, and that respect authorship as a phenomenon that can be subject to acts of branding, contestation, appropriation, repurposing, remixing, and so on . As Derek Johnson and Jonathan Gray recently put it: “The author is a node through which discourses of beauty, truth, meaning, and value must travel, while also being a node through which money, power, labor, and the control of culture must travel, and while frequently serving as the mediating figure standing between large organizations (such as Lucasfilm or Fox) and the audience”. Building from such a position, the 2013 SIECE Conference will broach questions about the industrial dimensions of authorship, considering how it has become part of the cultural, political, and economic fabric of East-Central Europe.

Potential topics for papers and panels include but are not limited to:

- Creative agency and industry structure
- Social and collaborative creative practice, co-creativity and participation
- Institutions as authors
- Authorship branding, marketing, and consumption
- Authorship as/vs. ownership, authority, and control
- Visible and invisible creative labor, distributed creativity
- Authorship wars: appropriated, marginalized, denied, dispossessed, censored, concealed, reclaimed authorship
- Authorship rituals: credits, awards, “narratives of the self”
- The author as archive
- Mediations of authorship: technologies and platforms
- Repurposing and remixing content, DIY everyday authorship

The conference will be preceded by the Czech Society for Film Studies’ pre-conference meeting, which will be held on 28 November in the Czech language. The pre-conference will consist of four workshops, which will be devoted to methodological issues pertaining to Czech film historiography, to biographical research (issues related to the writing person-based studies, oral history, personal archives etc ...), to presentations of ongoing research projects, and to the transformation of The Czech Film Fund.

The Third Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference investigates historical and contemporary dimensions of the region’s audiovisual media industries from all angles – local, transnational, economic, cultural, social, and political – and through a broad range of original scholarship delivered in the form of conceptual papers and empirical case-studies. A selection of the conference proceedings will be published in a special English- language issue of the Czech film studies journal Iluminace (www.iluminace.cz).

The 2013 SIECE Program Committee (consisting of the Steering Committee members of the Czech Society of Film Studies – see www. cefs.cz) invites proposals for twenty-minute conference papers and for panels of three or four speakers focusing on any topic related to authorship and East-Central European audiovisual industries. Panels of three to four papers will include a brief summarizing reflection of between five and ten minutes in length which will be delivered by an assigned respondent, and which is designed to facilitate discussion. Proposals for conference papers should include a title, an abstract of up to 150 words, and between three and five key bibliographical references, along with the presenter’s name, the presenter’s institutional affiliation, and a concise academic bio. Panel proposals should include a panel title, a short description of up to 100 words on the panel’s focus, and proposals of all of the papers to be delivered (including the information described above). Please submit all proposals no later than 30 August 2013 to [log in to unmask]

Conference attendance is free, and the conference will be conducted in the English language (except the pre-conference meeting on 28 November).

Conference Organizers: Petr Bilík, Jan Černík, and Petr Szczepanik in association with the Czech Society of Film Studies, the Project “FIND” (www.projectfind.cz), and the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies, Palacký University (www.filmadivadlo.cz/en).

Conference Management: Matěj Dostálek ([log in to unmask]; [+ 42] 775 095 485).

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