Shout Outs! Fall Term Conferences

So many conferences coming up this term, and so many of our own are presenting! Here’s a rundown of all the MHSoC representatives that will be talking about their work at upcoming conferences.

14th Annual SFSU Film Conference – Cinema in Crisis

San Franciso State University, October 17-19, 2012

Georgia Cowan – “The Pessimistic Film Factory: Perestroika and the New Film Revolution”

In her presentation, Georgia is elaborating on how Perestroika-era films reflected the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Rachel Jekanowski – “AIR on the Moon? The Crisis of the Material Film Artifact in the Digital Age”

Rachel’s paper looks at the divisions within contemporary film restoration due to the recent shift towards digital restoration of film and away from preservation of the cinematic artifact.

Viviane Saglier – “A New Palestinian National Narrative: the DC Palestinian Film and Art Festival (DC-PFAF) and the Aesthetic of Subjectivity”

In this paper, Viviane looks at a new trend rising in Palestinian cinema which the DC-PFAF highlights: the foregrounding of the individual as opposed to the focus on the land issue. This speaks to a new national discourse around Palestinian national cinema that enables to include the diasporic populations in its definition.

Eric Whedbee – “Crisis in Film Theory- Hitchcock and the Limits of Visuality”

Eric will argue that Hitchcock’s films in particular highlight the limits of the visual which in turn puts into crisis our understanding of Hitchcock’s project and the theories that follow from them. For instance, what does the negation or limit of the visual mean for the larger body of theoretical scholarship based upon visuality? As models of visuality break down we confront an expanding crisis in film theory.

4th FLOW Conference

University of Texas at Austin, November 1-3, 2012

 

Current MA Georgia Cowan and recent MA graduate Eric Whedbee will be participating in the panel entitled “Tweens, Teens, and In Betweens: The Legacy of the WB”. Georgia will be talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Vampire Diaries. Eric is tackling Bunheads and Gilmore Girls.

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez will take part in the panel “Micro Politics in a Digital World”, and will focus on the #YoSoy132 movement in the recent Mexican presidential elections.

Check out the full program here!

3rd FSGSO Conference – Cinephilia / Cinephobia: New Mediations of Desire and Disgust

University of Pittsburgh, November 9-11, 2012

Dominic Leppla – “Cinephilia and Amatuerism – The Amateur within Film Studies and without”

In his paper, Dominic argues for the concept of the amateur within the field of Film and Media Studies, using close readings of scenes from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1979 film Amator. If the word ‘amateur’ more commonly connotes a lack (of professionalism, of seriousness), the restlessness of today’s film lover to fill it has the negative potential to be politically productive. This force at play (and work), which binds us to our loved object and helped to instantiate our field, we know as cinephilia. As cinephilia becomes somewhat institutionalized as “New Cinephilia,” we should remember and insist upon its boundary-crashing potential in a networked world to overturn specialization and recognized authority and connect us to a wider societal critique made possible by the original mass art. This critical capacity of the cinephile-as-amateur approach equally allows us to counteract the more deleterious effects of the digital age, and return us access to our everyday experience.

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez – “Narcocinema, or the Effects of State-Sanctioned Cinephobia in Mexico”

Juan will use the case of narcocinema to trace the impact of state regulations in the formation of a specific reactionary type of cinema. Beginning with the defunding of Mexican national cinema in the late 1970s and ending with the modified Article 208 of the Federal Penal Code in 2011, these instances of institutional cinephobia reveal a state-sanctioned project to regulate taste, particularly along class lines. Given that narco movies are produced and consumed primarily by the lower classes, that they eschew highbrow notions of taste, and that they are economically and legally forced to circulate through informal means, the prevalence of narcocinema stands a reactionary form of popular, and populist, cinephilia. The study of narcocinema elucidates the state’s role in institutionalizing cinephobia, and the ways new cinemas form in response to it.

Matthias Mushinski – “’Are You Guys Closing?’ Video Stores as Transition from Celluloid to the Internet”

Matthias’ paper seeks to designate video stores as an arena of definitive transition from celluloid to the internet, by connecting testimonies from academically and historically recognized cinéphiles with those of “unqualified” cinéphiles (customers that may lack a high-degree of film literacy or an active engagement with academic discourses surrounding cinema) he has encountered in his own research at La Boite Noire. His goal is to evaluate the inevitable take-over of online viewing as a threat to a particular form of film spectatorship that, while less concerned with cinema as a source of academic study, nonetheless succeeds in proposing questions regarding changing reception contexts, nostalgia, connoisseurship and the illegitimate notion that “everything is available”.

Check out the full program here!