[Commlist] Unmade, Unseen, Unreleased Film and Television Conference - Call for Papers

*Shadow Screens: Unmade, Unseen, Unreleased Film and Television*

Two-day international conference, 23^rd to 24^th May 2022 to be held in 
person at Sheffield Hallam University and online

*Keynotes: *To be confirmed

*Convenors: *

Dr James Fenwick ((j.fenwick /at/ shu.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(j.fenwick /at/ shu.ac.uk)>Sheffield Hallam University)

Dr Kieran Foster ((Kieran.foster /at/ nottingham.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(Kieran.foster /at/ nottingham.ac.uk)>University of Nottingham)

Unmade, unseen, and unreleased films and TV programmes are a burgeoning 
area of academic study, allowing for the excavation of hidden and lost 
histories, new insights and perspectives on structural barriers and 
inequalities in the media industries, and the reframing of the 
understanding of how the media industries operate. The film and 
television industries are built on a labour force that has largely 
worked on projects that were never, and will never, be made, whilst 
substantial amounts of investment and resource goes towards these unmade 
projects. The reasons contributing to the unmade are myriad and the 
industrial scale of these lost projects is staggering. The availability 
of new archival sources, alongside academic and popular interest, are 
driving this field of inquiry, which presents opportunities for 
rethinking film and television history and for the development of 
counter histories. At the same time, the appeal of ‘lost’ films is 
furthered by the discovery of unproduced screenplays. As well as books 
on Kubrick’s /Napoleon /and /The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See/, 
recent years have seen documentary films on ‘lost projects’ such as 
/Lost in La Mancha /(2002) and /Jodorowsky’s Dune/ (2013), radio 
adaptations of unmade films like Welles’s /Heart of Darkness/, and stage 
readings of unproduced Hammer horrors such as /Vampirella/. There are 
also archives filled with audio-visual footage of outtakes, cuts, and 
unseen material of films that might have been. Even more tantalising are 
those archives containing films and television that have been unseen for 
many decades, lost to time and that have gone unrecorded in official 
histories.

Building on recent works on this topic, including the collection /Shadow 
Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Film /(2020) 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/shadow-cinema-9781501351594/>, this 
conference proposes to examine the unmade, unseen, and unreleased across 
the full spectrum of film, television, and other screen industries. How 
can we make sense of the unmade, unseen, and unreleased? How does it 
impact on current histories of film and television? What are the counter 
histories that can be constructed? And what does it reveal about the way 
the film and television industries operate?

We invite papers for submission on any aspect of unmade, unseen, and 
unreleased film, television, and other screen media. Suggested topics 
include, but are by no means limited to:

  * Gender / racial inequalities and unmade projects
  * Structural barriers and the unmade
  * The screenplay process: agents, script readers etc
  * The unmade as alternative media history
  * Archival approaches to the study of the unmade, unseen, and unreleased
  * Case studies of unrealised screenplays
  * Development hell
  * Methodologies for using unmade screenplays as a resource for
    scholarly research
  * Realisations of unmade projects
  * Outtakes and unused footage
  * Forgotten and unseen films
  * Fandom and unmade projects
  * The literary status of unproduced screenplays
  * Industrial perspectives
  * Creative failure
  * Other unmade screen industry projects i.e. videogames

Proposals for twenty-minute presentations to be emailed to Dr James 
Fenwick: (j.fenwick /at/ shu.ac.uk) <mailto:(j.fenwick /at/ shu.ac.uk)>and Dr Kieran 
Foster ((kieran.foster /at/ nottingham.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(kieran.foster /at/ nottingham.ac.uk)>) with a submission deadline of 
31^st January 2022. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words and 
include a 100-word biography.

Convenor biographies:

**

*Dr Kieran Foster, *is a teaching associate in film and television at 
the University of Nottingham. He is the author of the forthcoming 
monograph /Hammer Goes to Hell: The House of Horrors Unmade Films / and 
co-editor of /Shadow Cinema /(2020) and /Studying the Unmade, Unseen, 
Unreleased: Theories, Methods, Histories /(forthcoming, Intellect).

*Dr James Fenwick*, senior lecturer in Department of Media Arts and 
Communication at Sheffield Hallam University. Author of /Stanley Kubrick 
Produces /(2020) and /Unproduction Studies and the American Film 
Industry /(2021) and co-editor of /Shadow Cinema /(2020) and /Studying 
the Unmade, Unseen, Unreleased: Theories, Methods, Histories 
/(forthcoming, Intellect).

There will be a small delegate fee for attendees.

Standard delegate fee: £35

Postgraduate colleagues: £15

Dr. James Fenwick

Senior Lecturer

Department of Media Arts and Communication

Sheffield Hallam University

*Twitter:*@JamesFenwick87 <https://twitter.com/JamesFenwick87>


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