[ecrea] CFP: Harold Pinter on Film, TV and Radio

Pinter on Film, Television and Radio

A two-day international conference at the
University of Reading and the British Library, 19-20 September 2018

Call for papers

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) was an actor, director and writer whose output 
over five decades spanned theatre, film, television, radio, poetry, 
prose and politics. His writing for radio and television pushed 
aesthetic boundaries and his films contributed to the landscape and 
practices of post-war British cinema, while his stage plays have been 
part of the canon of world theatre since the 1960s. His work has enjoyed 
a place in the public imagination from the early 1960s, due to the 
combined impact of the successful stage plays The Caretaker and The 
Homecoming, augmented by the popular appeal of radio plays and 
television dramas such as The Lover, The Collection and A Night Out and 
by the esteem and box-office success of early screenplays such as The 
Servant and The Pumpkin Eater.
Pinter’s work on film, television and radio has received less 
concentrated attention than his theatre work, which has been widely 
discussed, debated and celebrated internationally. The ‘Pinter on Film, 
Television and Radio’ conference—the second of three to be held by the 
AHRC-funded ‘Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies’ research 
project—therefore invites established scholars and early career 
researchers from a range of academic disciplines, together with 
practitioners and archivists, to come together to explore all aspects of 
Pinter’s works for, and on, film, television and radio. At least one 
edited collection or journal special issue will be published from the 
papers of this two-day conference.
Possible topics

The two central questions pursued by the research project concern the 
aesthetics that have been connected with Pinter’s work and the impact 
that his work has had on the broader palette of British performance 
histories since the 1950s. With regard to this conference’s focus on 
film, television and radio, possible topics relating to this wider remit 
may include (but are not limited to):

•	Production – Pinter’s understanding, as both writer and performer, of 
aesthetic choices in production such as the spatial possibilities of 
studio and location
•	Collaborative practice – Pinter’s work with, for example, particular 
directors or producers, and the significance of his networks in 
different media contexts
•	Intermediality – his development of dramatic narratives across media, 
and transfers of dramatic conventions from one medium to another
•	Adaptation – the processes involved in realising work through the 
performance aesthetics and signifying systems of different media, such 
as Pinter's screenplays adapted from novels
•	Theatricality – the interconnections between Pinter’s work on film, 
television, and radio, on the one hand, and theatre on the other
•	British film cultures – Pinter’s role in the changing forms of British 
national cinema and its international position
•	Screenwriting – Pinter’s engagement with the specific forms and 
conventions of writing for the visual media •	Acting and performance – 
particular performance techniques used by actors of Pinter drama, and 
what the recording and mediation of performances on screen and on radio 
may tell us
•	Audiences – audience engagement and response to Pinter’s work across 
different media
•	Gender – Pinter’s film, TV and radio in relation to social 
constructions of gender
•	Politics – how radio and television amplified Pinter’s contribution to 
political discourse via his plays and other writings
•	Archives – the preservation, archiving and accessibility of Pinter’s 
work in media forms; the value of paper archives for historiography of 
Pinter’s work (e.g. BL’s Harold Pinter Archive; BBC Written Archives Centre)
•	Audio – audio traces such as Pinter’s appearances in oral histories 
held by the BL’s Theatre Archive Project, and the BL’s audio record of 
Pinter’s theatre plays
Deadline for abstracts

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words and a brief biography by 
midnight on Friday 16 February 2018 to the three conference organisers 
Professor Jonathan Bignell, Dr Billy Smart and Dr Amanda Wrigley via 
(w.r.smart /at/ reading.ac.uk). Papers must be delivered in a maximum of 20 
minutes including any extracts or illustrative material. Proposals for 
three-speaker panels are also welcome: please collate the information 
above into one document and outline briefly the rationale of the panel.

Venues: University of Reading and the British Library

This two-day conference will take place on two sites: day one in 
Reading, ‘Pinter on Screen’, will focus primarily on Pinter on film and 
television, and will be held in Minghella Studios, University of Reading 
on Wednesday 19 September 2018; the second day, ‘Pinter on Air’, will 
focus primarily on Pinter on radio and in audio archives, and will be 
held in the British Library in London on Thursday 20 September 2018. Day 
two will also be open to the public and it will showcase the Library’s 
prolific audio and manuscript holdings on Pinter as part of the BL’s 
Cultural Events programme. The two days will be separately bookable. 
Given the intermedial nature of Pinter’s work, however, we anticipate a 
great amount of correspondence between the topics and discussions of 
both days, and we are keen for academic participants to join for the 
whole conference if possible. 	Accommodation will be offered on the 
University of Reading’s Whiteknights campus, the location of the 
conference venue on day one. Delegates will travel to the British 
Library for day two independently by public transport.
Context

This conference is part of series of academic and public events 
organised by the inter-institutional research project ‘Harold Pinter: 
Histories and Legacies’, a collaboration between the universities of 
Birmingham, Leeds and Reading. The project is funded by the Arts and 
Humanities Research Council and runs from 2017 to 2019. The project will 
host three conferences: the inaugural conference, ‘Staging Pinter: 
Networks, Collaborators, Legacies’ will take place at the University of 
Birmingham in April 2018: for further information see 
https://pinterlegacies.com/events/birmingham-conference-staging-pinter. 
The ‘Pinter on Film, Television and Radio’ conference at the University 
of Reading and the British Library, September 2018, is the second event; 
and the third conference will be held at the University of Leeds in 2019 
to mark the conclusion of the project.

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