Our coverage of the 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference held in Montreal QC, March 25-29th.
No stranger to the works of Walter Benjamin, Catherine Russell continued her extensive research into the philosopher’s writings in her presentation “Walter Benjamin, Archiveology, and Critical Film Practice”. Through a close analysis of the structure and content of Morgan Fisher’s…
Closing SCMS 2015 was the well-received panel “Politics and Poetics of Platforms, Interfaces, and Transmedia Storytelling,” chaired by Concordia professor Marc Steinberg. The first to present was A.C. Deger (SUNY, University at Stony Brook) with her paper “Jumping Puzzles: Bringing…
On Saturday afternoon, Mel Hoppenheim PhD candidate, Meredith Slifkin chaired the panel titled “Global Melodrama: Theories, Histories, Methods.” She introduced the panel by explaining that the aim of the three papers were to explore the notion of melodrama as a…
The Panel R9 “Theorizing Special Effects in Film History” served both as a continuation of the conference on special effects held last year in Montreal, as well as a precursor to the book on this subject that is currently being…
At the 11 AM panel on the very last day of SCMS, attendees settled in to the Fairmont’s Bersimis room, luggage in hand, ready to dash off to the airport after catching a final panel or two. At the “Ethics…
Before beginning his presentation this morning, Concordia’s Martin Lefebvre drolly thanked all in attendance for making it to the 9 AM panel on the 22nd day of SCMS. Indeed, it has been somewhat of a marathon of scholarly rigour by…
On Friday afternoon, the Silent Cinema Cultures SIG sponsored a panel titled “Digital Film Historiography: Archives, Techniques, Epistemology,” chaired by Mel Hoppenheim PhD candidate Philipp Dominik Keidl and co-chaired by Christian Gosvig Olesen (University of Amsterdam). Though the panel was…
Tucked away in the Batiscan conference room on Mezzanine level of the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, four scholars reintroduced forgotten filmmakers during the panel titled “Revisiting the City Symphony Phenomenon – Overlooked and Forgotten City Symphonies.” The chair of the panel,…
As we start the last day of SCMS 2015, you might like to sit down and catch up on certain presentations. While we will have many more write-ups to come in the following days, you can get started today with…
Panel L21 “Volatile Cinema and the Lure of Stability” included talks by scholars that are equally film historians and theoreticians. The purpose of their presentations, assembled as they were, was to discuss the nature of cinema as a fluid and…
While the title of Masha Salazkina’s presentation may have been “The Geography of Third World Cinema at International Film Festivals in the 1960s”, much of her concentration focused on one particular Festival during the panel “Geopolitics of Global Film Circulation:…
At first glance, PhD candidate Papagena Robbins was the odd woman out in panel B7 “Canadian Media Institutions: Negotiating the Local and the National” on Wednesday. While her fellow panelists—Mark Hayward (York University) and Peter Urquhart (Wilfred Laurier University)—may have…