[ecrea] A History of Cinema without Names - CfP

A History of Cinema without Names – Call for Proposals

University of Udine (Italy)
March 18-20, 2015

Deadline extended - December 31, 2014

The Udine International Film Studies Conference is promoting a research 
project called “A History of Cinema without Names” which is still opened 
to proposals coming from scholars who might be interested in contributing.

In several occasions the Udine Conference has focused on the 
problematisation of the notion of “author” and on a redefinition of the 
notion of “style” (separating this notion from any property related to 
individual poetics and from any anthropometrically conceived principle 
of textual construction). In this perspective, it is indeed possible to 
articulate modes aimed at understanding authorial poetics as the 
momentary unification of features that exceed them. On another level, 
genre as well could be simply seen as spaces in which elements of the 
same kind aggregate.

One of the purposes of this project is the creation of a new 
“topography” of the basic stylistic elements that, while common to both 
authors and genres, can also find indipendent and diverse mode of 
connection. These levels of aggregation (styles, genres, authors) are 
not separated; rather, they mutually intersect, integrate each other, 
and coexist. Outwardly, they might seem grounded on essentialist 
principles (like the figure of the “creative personality”; or the 
morphologies of discourse, e.g. comic, crime, melodrama, etc.). Instead, 
they are “systems” whose physiognomy is shaped by the relationships that 
occur at a given moment between their constitutive units. Of course, it 
is possible to continue to employ this customary topography based on 
“auteur” politics and “genres”; but we shall acknowledge that the 
figures we shape are ephemeral and ostensible, devoid of reasons or of 
really decisive connections.

The status of contemporary mediascape, dominated by serialisation and 
“formats”, should encourage such research trend. Instead, we are 
witnessing a curious paradox: the more audiovisual narratives exceed 
traditional notions of style and auteur politics, the more we stick to 
these categories (for instance, trying to apply them to screenwriters, 
producers, or even “formats”), as if they were principles guaranteeing 
to safe us from chaos and the unknown.

On this ground, the Udine Conference launches the project of a history 
of cinema without names, in the same vein as Wöllflin and Valéry 
imagined respectively a history of art and of literature without names.

The first step of such research project, which will continue with 
several events and meetings, will be hosted by the University of Udine 
on March 18-20, 2015. The event has been thought not as a canonical 
conference, in which every scholar presents the results of his or her 
research activity, but as a laboratory where methodological aspects of 
the project will be discussed in length. For this reason, we warmly 
encourage proposals aimed at fostering debates and further elaborations 
by starting from the question of how a history of cinema without names 
would be (hopefully) possible.


500-word proposals are due by December 31, 2014.
Please submit your proposal to (cinemawithoutnames /at/ gmail.com) and make 
sure to attach a short CV.


Leonardo Quaresima
Giuseppe Fidotta, Andrea Mariani (Organisation)

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