From: Adam Hart (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Nov 30 2007 - 09:06:13 PST
CALL FOR PAPERS
(Please Circulate)
Alternate Non-Fiction: Essay Films, Hybrids, and Experimental Documentaries
Fifth annual cinema and media studies graduate-student conference
University of Chicago
Conference Date: April 5, 2008
Keynote Address: Richard Neer, University of Chicago
Deadline for Abstracts: January 1, 2008
Alternative Non-Fiction: Essay Films, Hybrids, and Experimental
Documentaries will be the fifth Graduate Cinema Conference at the University
of Chicago, a one-day event that will bring together graduate students on
cinematic theory and practice. Vaguely defined and broadly inclusive, the
term "essay film" has been used in popular and academic discourse to
describe a wide variety of alternative nonfiction films and filmmakers that
defy easy categorization. The term has been applied to practices as diverse
as Chris Marker's philosophical travelogues, Michael Moore's incisive
polemics, William E. Jones's queer archaeological ruminations, Trinh T.
Minh-ha's explorations of post-colonial embodiment, Ross McElwee's filmed
diaries, and Jean-Luc Godard's meditations on art and cinema. While
certainly alternative and innovative in form, these practices have
historically been used to address social and political issues, as well as
intensely personal visions, in ways that are not often open to conventional
filmmaking.
With the rise of documentary in both mainstream and avant-garde film and
media practices, alternative nonfiction forms have taken on an increasingly
important place in filmmaking today. These practices have served as
supplements to and refutations of traditional modes of cinematic rhetoric
and representation—bringing to the fore issues of medium specificity,
textual hybridity, and narrative conveyance. In this spirit, the conference
aims to examine the discourses that have arisen in these alternative
non-fiction practices and their implications for the wider field of cinema
studies.
We invite papers on a wide range of topics including, but not limited to:
--Conceptual frameworks for analyzing alternative nonfiction filmmaking.
--Formal and expressive possibilities afforded by alternative nonfiction.
--Filmmakers including: Vertov, Godard, Marker, Welles, Rappaport, Farocki,
Kluge, Akerman, Friedrich, Trinh, Errol Morris, Derek Jarman, Ross McElwee,
Cheryl Dunye, William E. Jones.
--Presentations and representations of minority subjectivities, including
but not limited to racial, postcolonial, sexual, and gendered minorities.
--Figurations of alternative desires (feminist, queer, postcolonial, and
otherwise).
--Politics and polemics in essay films.
--The social, political, and critical constructions of the
traditional/alternative dichotomy.
--Essayistic practices in narrative filmmaking.
--Cinematic essays in new media.
--First person documentaries and the diary film.
--Fiction and non-fiction hybrid films.
--The essay film and the underground/avant-garde traditions.
--Literary practices and essay filmmaking.
--And the larger issues raised by alternative nonfiction (originality,
public domain, aesthetic categories like romanticism and modernism,
cinematic ontology, indexicality in cinematic and digital images).
The keynote speaker will be Richard Neer, Department of Art History,
University of Chicago. Professor Neer has recently published an article in
Critical Inquiry titled "Godard Counts" on questions of cinematic evidence
in Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma. Working on the relationship between
stylistic and political history, he has published widely on classical art,
historiography, and French cinema.
There will be a screening series that takes place in conjunction with the
conference. A full schedule will be available online at
http://filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu
in January.
The deadline for abstracts (300-400) words is JANUARY 1, 2008. Please
submit all abstracts to email suppressed with "Conference Abstract" in
the subject heading.
Limited financial assistance for travel may be available for international
students.
For more information, contact Adam Hart: email suppressed; or Pamelyn
Woo: (address suppressed)
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.