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

Call for Papers – Conference
 
Catholics and cinema: productions, policies, power
 
Oxford Brookes University, 2^nd and 3^rd 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.