[ecrea] CFP: SCMS Panel Proposal - British Film Censorship, Genre and the BBFC

Call for Abstracts

Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) 2013 Conference

Panel Proposal:

British Film Censorship, Genre and the BBFC

In the last decade, the British film censorship body, the BBFC, has 
increasingly made the factors and mechanisms that inform its decisions 
open and accountable to the British public, including allowing 
researchers to access many of its files which document decisions made on 
films in different periods. In much recent scholarship on British film 
censorship that has sought to analyse BBFC policy or audience responses 
to particular BBFC decisions, the notion of context (whether narrative, 
cultural, artistic or generic) has loomed large as a factor that has 
been seen to inform, or to complicate, the decisions the BBFC make when 
classifying or cutting particular films. Such factors and issues clearly 
fed into, for instance, debates around: the classification or banning of 
/cause celebre/ titles from the 1970s such as /Straw Dogs/ or /Monty 
Python's/ /Life of Brian/, the 1990s panic around David Cronenberg's 
/Crash/ , the establishment of the 12A category and its connection to 
action or fantasy titles such as /Spiderman/ or /The Dark Knight/, and 
the recent classification, cutting or banning of controversial European 
art cinema titles (such as /Baise Moi/, /Irreversible/ and /Antichrist/) 
as well as Asian Extreme and torture porn titles. In the BBFC's 
centenary year, this panel seeks to explore and examine how the BBFC's 
(or British audiences') perceptions about particular film genres, or 
other cinematic cultural categories, have played a role in BBFC 
classification decisions and policy in different periods. Papers that 
explore this topic either through an analysis of BBFC policy in a 
particular period, or critical or audience responses to BBFC decisions 
or policy, are welcome. We hope to create a panel that offers case 
studies associated with BBFC policy in different decades/periods, with 
each paper focusing on a different film genre/cultural category. Papers 
that explore conceptions of art cinema in relation to the BBFC, or on 
BBFC policy in relation to genres that are less frequently or obviously 
associated with explicit, adult or controversial content, are 
particularly welcome.

Please send abstracts of 250 words along with a short bio to Kate Egan 
((kte /at/ aber.ac.uk) <mailto:(kte /at/ aber.ac.uk)>) by August 13^th . Notifications 
will be made by August 15^th .

The 2013 Conference will take place in Chicago, March 6-10, 2013.