[ecrea] CFP The Body in Eastern European and Russian Cinema

The Body in Eastern European and Russian Cinema
A conference at the University of Greenwich, 21-22 June 2013


Dr Matilda Mroz, University of Greenwich, and Professor Ewa Mazierska, University of Central Lancashire.

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: 31 January 2013 (max. 250 words)

In recent decades, much attention has been paid to theories revolving around the body, the senses, and affect in cultural studies in general, and film studies in particular. After what Brian Massumi has referred to as the ‘waning of grand narratives’, and the loss of confidence in previously established categories of inquiry, there has been a growing feeling in media and film theory that the body and the senses are central to an understanding of our culture. Ideas around the body, affect and sensation do not, however, provide theorists with a new stability; rather, these aspects are configured as fluctuating entities and unfinished projects.

While much research has been conducted within film studies into the representation of the body in Western European cinema, much less attention has been paid to bodies, affects and sensations in Eastern European and Russian film. Eastern European and Russian cinema provides exceptionally fertile ground for research into the body, due to its preoccupation with topics such as war trauma, the Holocaust, migration, exploitation, sex work, rape, abortion, memory, as well as the ideal Soviet bodies propagated under the regions’ Communist regimes and the dissident bodies and affects that challenged them. The purpose of this conference is to showcase and exchange views on the role of body, the senses and affect in Eastern European and Russian cinema, both in its specificity and in its similarity to the types of bodies and affects found in other international film cultures.

We invite papers on subjects such as:

- Bodies in social-realist, and other Soviet-era, films

- The body and film genres

- The senses and texture

- The sensory appeal of music and sound

- The body and affect in Holocaust and war cinema

- Body and memory

- Postcolonial/postcommunist bodies

- The bodies of stars, actors and actresses

- Bodily exchanges: sex work and migration

- The relevance of Western theories of the body, sensation and affect, such as those by Foucault, Bourdieu, Agamben, Massumi, and Deleuze, to bodies, sensations and affects in Eastern European and Russian cinema

- Any of the above themes as represented in Eastern European and Russian documentary and moving image art, such as video installation.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Dr Emma Widdis, Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge, UK

Nebojsa Jovanovic, Freelance Researcher, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Please email abstracts to:

Dr Matilda Mroz:(mm26 /at/ gre.ac.uk)

Or

Prof. Ewa (MazierskaEHMazierska /at/ uclan.ac.uk)


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