[ecrea] CfP 'World Cinema and the Essay Film' Conference, 30th April - 2nd May 2015

Call for Papers
Conference: 'World Cinema and the Essay Film'
Venue: Minghella Building
       Department of Film, Theatre and Television
       University of Reading
Date:  30th April - 2nd May 2015

The essay film became a widespread practice in Europe with the rise of the
New Waves in the 1950s. The digital revolution in the 1990s gave it a
further boost. But it is only recently that it has deserved proper
scholarly attention. Laura Rascaroli (2009) has defined it as a form of
"subjective cinema" in which embodied authors perform themselves in the
first person mode. Timothy Corrigan (2011), in turn, has divided what he
calls the "mode of essayistic expression" into a set of subcategories.
Similarly, in Kramer's and Tode's edited volume on the subject (2011) film
scholars address various "modulations" of the essayistic practice on film.
Honouring its different appearances and protean nature, most authors agree
that the essay film is not a genre and that it, in fact, contradicts the
very notion of generic predictability given its elusive borders.

Despite its strong ties to French (film) culture - from Michel de Montaigne
to Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard - the essay film has, according to
Timothy Corrigan, always been a truly "transnational practice". Yet,
existing scholarship has largely focused on defining the essay film's
formal aspects within European conceptual and aesthetic traditions. This
conference will situate the essay film as a world cinema practice as a
means to expand its reach and encompass a variety of productions which have
so far escaped the radar of essay film specialists. The concept of world
cinema has been increasingly oriented towards the interrelatedness of
regional productions on a global scale, while simultaneously decentring its
traditional Euro- and Hollywoodcentric bias. In combining both concepts,
this conference will be allowing the essay film to benefit from its
relation with the global breadth of world cinema, whilst pushing world
cinema itself out of the fenced-in realm of fiction and into a world where
documentary, fiction and theoretical thought combine.

Indeed, a closer look reveals that at least since the 1960s, with the
emergence of movements such as "Third Cinema" and films such as The Hour of
the Furnaces (Getino and Solanas, 1968), essayistic film practices can be
identified both South and North of the Equator, especially in those
filmmakers who, like Getino and Solanas, wanted to convey a political
message in their films. In recent and contemporary world cinema a
distinctive trend of essayistic films continues to tackle pressing
political issues in a rapidly globalizing world. Films like The Hungarian
Passport (Sandra Kogut, 2001), Grandmother's Flower (Jeong-Hyun Mun, 2007)
or Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border (Rodrigo Reyes, 2013)
provide very personal as well as highly innovative perspectives on topics
such as forced migration and national identity. Such films tackle the
personal-political while literally transgressing national borders,
resulting in transnational essayistic journeys and quests. Other films
predominantly use and re-use the rich pool of images and sounds from
private and public archives to address similar issues, such as That's My
Face (Thomas Allen Harris, 2004), Fotografías (Andres di Tella, 2007),
Beyond the Mountains (Aya Koretzky, 2011) or The Stuart Hall Project (John
Akomfrah, 2013). Well-known festival auteurs from Russia (Aleksandr
Sokurov) to Thailand (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) explore the aesthetic
possibilities and qualities of the essayistic format, while testing the
ever-crumbling boundaries between experimental, fiction and non-fiction
filmmaking. This conference will address this fascinating production as
well as more general topics that are related to the notion of the essay
film, in the hope of resituating and amplifying some of the most important
concepts in film studies.

Possible Topics
<    The essay in world cinema
<    The essay in "Third Cinema"
<    The politics of the essay film
<    Transnationalism and the essay film
<    Identity quest and the essay film
<    Intermediality and the essay film
<    "Accented essay films", or the issue of migration and displacement
        in the essay film
<    First-person narration
<    Essay vs. non-fiction film
<    Essay vs. fiction film
<    The essay as a literary and philosophical tradition
<    The essay (film) and the postmodern condition

Confirmed Keynote Speakers Timothy Corrigan (Professor of Cinema Studies,
University of Pennsylvania) Thomas Elsaesser (Professor Emeritus at the
Department of Media and Culture,
                  University of Amsterdam)

Proposal Submissions
Please submit a title and an abstract of between 200 - 300 words for your
presentation, as well as a biography of c. 150 words to Dr Igor Krstic

(cfac /at/ reading.ac.uk)

The submission deadline is 15th December 2014

The conference is organised by CFAC - Centre for Film Aesthetics and
Cultures http://www.reading.ac.uk/cfac/


--
Dr. des. Igor Krstic
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Film, Theatre and Television
University of Reading
Minghella Building
Shinfield Road, Reading RG6 6BT
Tel:  +44 (0) 118 378 4079
Mobile: +44 (0) 790 3510 336
URL: http://www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/about/staff/IgorKrsticprofilepage.aspx



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