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[ecrea] Catholics and cinema: productions, policies, power

Mon Sep 27 18:41:27 GMT 2010


 
Call for Papers – Conference
 
Catholics and cinema: productions, policies, power
 
Oxford Brookes University, 2nd and 3rd September 2011
 
Keynote speech: Professor Thomas Doherty (Brandeis U)
 
There has been a renewed interest in how film and religion interconnect and how religious characters and rituals have been popular subject matters of movies. Books such as S. Brent Plate’s Representing religion in world cinema: filmmaking, mythmaking, culture making (2003), Colleen McDannell’s Catholics in the movies (2008) and Pamela Grace’s The religious film: Christianity and the hagiopic (2009) have provided an insight into the representation of religious people, places and symbols in world cinema.
 
However, over the last hundred years, Catholic organizations around the world have tried to assess, manipulate, control and intervene in the development of cinema. This inter-disciplinary conference seeks to examine and explore issues of power in the relationship between the film industry and an external institution such as the Roman Catholic Church. In particular the conference is interested in investigating the various contexts of production, distribution, exhibition, reception, classification, censorship, which have been influenced by an organization that has nothing to do with the commercial enterprise called cinema.
 
Papers, work-in-progress, and pre-formed panels are invited on issues on the following and other themes related to Catholics, cinema and power:
 
- Vatican film policy and its effects (for example the growth of national and international Catholic film organisations such as OCIC)
- Political pressure on national film legislations coming from Catholic film organisations (for example influence on national censorship laws)
- Catholic organisations’ pressure on production, distribution, exhibition, film festivals, censorship, film criticism, technological developments,... (for example the role of the American Legion of Decency and their European counterparts in these fields)
- Forms of collaboration between Catholic Church representatives and film artists and critics (Roberto Rossellini and Felix Morlion’s long collaboration for example)
- Case studies of individual film productions whose development has been influenced by the Catholic Church or Catholic organisations (for example Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis)
- Changes in cinema-going habits and the role of the Catholic Church
- Issues of Catholic censorship which has determined the success or failure of individual films (such as Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita, Monty Python's Life of Brian or Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ)
 
 
 
Organising Chairs
Daniel Biltereyst
Centre for cinema and Media Studies, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
E-mail: (daniel.biltereyst /at/ ugent.be)
 
Daniela Treveri Gennari
Film Studies, Dept of Arts, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
E-mail: (dtreveri-gennari /at/ brookes.ac.uk)
 
 
Submissions should be:
300 word abstracts with a bibliography of 3-4 titles, should be submitted by 30th January 2011. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by 30th July 2011.
 
300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs, following this order:
 
author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) bibliography
 
E-mails should be entitled: Catholic Cinema Abstract Submission
 
Please use plain text (Arial 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in two weeks you should assume we did not receive your proposal.
 
It is our intention to publish an edited volume with articles included in the conference. More information about this will be available closer to the conference date.
 
 


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