[ecrea] Call for Papers: "Research in Film and History: New Approaches, Debates and Projects"

Call for Papers: International Conference "Research in Film and History: 
New Approaches, Debates and Projects“

November 29-30, 2018, Bremen

Host institution: University of Bremen, ZeMKI, Centre for Media, 
Communication and Information Research
Organizer: Winfried Pauleit, Delia González de Reufels, Rasmus Greiner

The interpretation of political and contemporary historical events is 
and will increasingly continue to be carried out via audio-visual media. 
The same goes for the production of historical memory. Media communicate 
and at times even create historical knowledge while film shapes our 
notion and comprehension of history. Film furthermore not only showcases 
historical themes or sheds light on the biographies of historical 
figures, but also conveys historical understanding and consensus in 
audio-visual form. In this way, film shapes our images of the world and 
influences our perception. It also increasingly competes with and adds 
to established historiography. The Bremen Conference will explore new 
approaches, debates and projects at the intersection between the 
disciplines of film studies and history.

Film and media such as documentaries, feature films, home movies, TV 
shows and internet platforms are continuously infringing on what used to 
be foremost the field of academically trained historians: the narration 
of history. But historians’ monopoly on conveying the past seems to have 
vanished. Documentaries, feature films and home movies certainly narrate 
history in aesthetically different ways and according to their own 
established traditions and modes – while TV shows and internet platforms 
make concessions to ratings and the economic interests of big data. 
Nevertheless, films and audio-visual formats provide us with narratives 
of the past and capture the attention as much as the imagination of 
(broad) audiences. And they establish a certain consensus on what it was 
(and is) like to live in a certain period of time. Films may choose to 
focus on master narratives of national histories, or on the contrary, 
dedicate themselves to micro history, which was established in the 
1970s. Historians began to adopt a smaller scale of observation to 
concentrate on a smaller field of historical analysis: an individual, a 
social group, a village, a town or a neighbourhood. Furthermore, film 
scholars coined the term New Film History (Elsaesser 1986), indicating 
that aesthetically oriented film history could expand to include 
economics, the history of technology, sociology, contemporary history, 
and so on. These changes in historiography and film studies have laid 
the foundations for a significant approach between the academic writing 
of history, on the one hand, and the filmic narration of history, on the 
other. This conference is especially interested in the results of these 
approaches and in what films and audio-visual formats mean to the 
different ways of understanding a historical past in an actual present 
tense.
While historians and film scholars have more often than not shied away 
from specific genres such as the historical epic à la Hollywood because 
of its aesthetics and anachronistic interpretations of the past 
(Sobchack 1990), cinema itself has nevertheless been read as a site of 
historical consciousness. As such, film scholars have pointed out, film 
is able to present new historical depictions of events and to make the 
sensibilities of early periods not only accessible but palpable 
(Kappelhoff 2008). More recently, film’s ability to shape and keep alive 
cultural memory by the sedimentation, migration and recurrence of past 
events, objects and identities has also been stressed (Elsaesser 2014). 
Historians, in turn, have assessed the power of media (and in particular 
the power of images), and developed the field of “visual history,” which 
is now established as a new realm of research (Paul 2012). Furthermore, 
the discipline has begun to discuss historical films which construct a 
“world of the past on screen” as a specific “mode of historical thought” 
(Rosenstone 2013) and to consider their potential as other forms of 
history writing. This is a logical continuation of earlier works which 
have located a new form of historiography in the medium of film itself 
(Rosenstone 1995) and proposed a multimedia form of historiography. This 
represents a possible paradigm shift away from the dominance of writing 
and towards the inclusion of images and sounds, which is also the result 
of entirely new possibilities of image and audio-visual media research 
(Paul 2012). It is not surprising that comprehensive archives have been 
established which serve a double purpose: they preserve audio-visual 
material and hope to stimulate corresponding historical research. The 
Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation is a case in point and an 
impressive example of how the study of recent history profits from this 
expansion of historical research.

The Bremen Conference seeks to explore a point of intersection between 
the disciplines of film studies and history, paying particular attention 
to new approaches to this interdisciplinary field. Again, significant 
changes in historiography have produced important impulses for the 
mutual approach between film studies and history. Hayden White’s reading 
of the narrative character of history, which structures data in a 
targeted fashion (1987, 1991), and the linguistic turn have enabled a 
new understanding of film as a medium. Acknowledging the key role that 
watching and experiencing film and media images has played in the 
construction of historical events (Sobchack 1996) has led historians to 
pay careful attention for example to the filming of the Eichmann trial 
in Jerusalem (Lindeperg 2018). The conference also focuses on debates 
about how films generate history and historical knowledge visually and 
auditively and on how they model historical memory and resonate with 
personal experiences. Finally, we would also like to discuss new 
projects which address these questions either in research or film making.
Abstracts are invited on topics related, but not limited to:

	• Contemporary history and media
	• Historiography and audio-vision
	• Audio history
	• Archives and cultural memory
	• Education and outreach
	• Interactive documentary

Possible themes for panels which are related to the research interests 
note above are furthermore:
	• Liberation Footage of the camps after WWII and digital repository
	• Societal change and social movements in film
	• Latin American dictatorship and trauma in film and media

Confirmed speakers: Erica Carter (King`s College London), and Thomas 
Elsaesser (Columbia University New York) presenting his film DIE 
SONNENINSEL, D 2017

If you would like to participate with a short presentation (20 min.), 
please submit an abstract (max. 1 page in English) and a CV by May 1st 
2018 or panel of three to four contributions. Abstracts for papers and 
panels which address any of the above topics and choose an 
interdisciplinary and/ or film-theory approach are welcome. A small 
travel allowance (we pay the hotel for up to two nights) may be granted 
but funds are limited. Accepted papers will be invited for publication 
in the first issue of Research in Film and History (coming soon).

Please send your submissions to conference organizers Delia González de 
Reufels, Rasmus Greiner and Winfried Pauleit to the following address: 
film-history[at]uni-bremen.de

Accepted participants will be informed by May 11th 2018.

Download the Call for Papers here: 
http://www.zemki.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/redak_zemki/dateien/Tagungen/various/CfP_ZeMKI_2018.pdf

Conference website: 
http://www.zemki.uni-bremen.de/en/events/conferences/research-in-film-and-history-new-approaches-debates-and-projects.html



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