[ecrea] CFP - Third International Conference on Balkan Cinema

Please find attached the call for papers for the Third International 
Conference on Balkan Cinema organised by the “G.Oprescu” Institute of 
Art History, Bucharest.

Third International Conference on Balkan Cinema

The Great War(s): Our Story

Bucharest, Romania: 8 – 10 May, 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS

Following on the second International Conference on Balkan Cinema that 
took place in Belgrade in 2017, The Great War(s): Our Story aims to 
explore how the Great War and other conflicts in the region have been 
narrated through cinema. The 3rd International Conference on Balkan 
cinema will focus on moving images made by filmmakers both from within 
and outside the Balkans in order to highlight the connections and 
differences between these war narratives that have at times coalesced 
into “our story”. The term “our” can refer self-reflexively to a view 
from the Balkans as both a unified but also more dispersed space, but 
also to a range of identities: victims or perpetrators, civilians or 
soldiers, women and children in devastated cities and in the wasteland 
of the countryside, or men on the front, the generations of participants 
or the post-generations. These war narratives told from different 
perspectives of the involved parties eventually challenge History or 
work with it, or bring together diverse and often confronting and 
competing national histories.
The “G. Oprescu” Institute of Art History in Bucharest hosts the event 
in commemoration of 1914-18 War, but also as the opportunity to analyse 
and map out the rich range of insights offered by cinematic images of 
war and recounted through multiple narratives of wars in the region – 
from the Balkan Wars to the breakup of former Yugoslavia. War has been 
one of those perennially rich topics since the beginning of cinema, 
narrated through a wide range of genre guises, from documentaries to 
fiction films, war spectacles, historical films, melodramas, musicals 
etc. For instance, documentary war footage is a key component in 
historiography, while fictional portrayals of war are source of 
entertainment and pleasure, as well as material for the recognition of 
trauma, suffering, and victimisation. Nowadays, popular archival 
documentaries or docufictions have transformed films on history into 
“memory making films”, by showing that cinematic narratives of the past 
and present wars are important factors in the politics of remembering 
and forgetting, and constituents of collective/individual/national 
memory and identity.

Being part of a series, the conference aims to further develop 
transnational scholarship, transcend Balkanism and exoticism, and offer 
critical explorations of historical and contemporary manifestations of 
South Eastern European cinemas. It also helps the building of the 
transnational community of scholars working on the cinemas of the 
Balkans, South/Eastern Europe, the borders and neighbouring regions such 
as Central Europe or Near East, works of diaspora or communities in 
exile, spanning from early cinema on nitrate stock to contemporary 
digital cinema; and dealing with a range of themes set in the present or 
the past.

A range of possible themes for conference papers includes, but is not 
limited to:

The First and Second World Wars as the cornerstones of cinema in the Balkans
War and conflict - a typical Balkan topic?
Representation and Self-representation of the Balkans
War and archives
Changing concepts of war, changing narratives of war.
History and memory in cinematic war narratives
Intertextuality and transmediality of the past, present and future
Representing/deconstructing “the nation” on screen
Cultural memory and Balkan cinema
Reading and re-writing film (hi)stories
History, Military and Film Archives
Multidirectional memory in cinema
Special event. Public lecture

Prof. Dr Dina Iordanova (Film Studies Department, University of St.Andrews)
Keynote speakers

Prof. Dr Nevena Daković (Faculty of Dramatic Arts, University of Arts, 
Belgrade)

Prof. Dr Dominique Nasta (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
   Please send 250 words and a short CV (Abstract proposals, names, 
affiliations and short CVs should be sent as ONE Word document) to the 
conference committee at: (balkanfilmconference /at/ gmail.com) by February 25th 
2018.


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