Border Crossings: Rethinking Early Cinema

And another conference coming up. Border Crossings: Rethinking Early Cinema is taking place 9 February 2008 at the Film Studies department, University of California, Berkeley. There isn’t a conference web page that I can find, but here’s the details of the call for papers – deadline 1 October:

This conference attempts to map cultural travel in silent film. We invite papers on topics which address the mobile nature of silent film. Panels will draw attention to cinematic forms or practices fueled by different forms of international exchange. To this end, papers that approach the specific co-ordinates of silent film – its new forms of visual address, display, and narrative form from a comparative perspective will be given preference.

The attempt will be to track the exportation and intake of a single moving image technology, the cinema, across nations. We seek to open up a critical space to observe the particular ways in which cinema, conceived as a “traveling technology”, understands pleasure, self, world, nation and collectivity. The conference asks but is not limited to the following questions: how did popular silent film proliferate? Which legal systems encouraged the spread of silent cinema? How might the relationship between nation and silent film be characterized? Is “nation” more easily imagined in sound cinema? Which cultural forms, stars, or cinematic genres traveled easily, and which not?

Pleae send a 500 word abstract and a brief vita to rethinking.early.cinema_at_gmail.com. The deadline for sending proposals is Oct 1, 2007.

Conference Organizers:
Anupama Kapse and Laura Horak
Film Studies, University of California, Berkeley
7408 Dwinelle Hall #2670
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2670

Lots of deep questions that you probably hadn’t ever thought of asking.

Women and the Silent Screen V

The year wanes, darkness falls earlier, 2008 diaries are in the shops, and academics are looking to a new year and coming up with conferences. And so we have first news of the Fifth International Women and the Silent Screen Conference, to be held at Stockholm University, Sweden, 11–13 June 2008. Previously held at Utrecht, Santa Cruz, Montreal and Guadalajara, the conference promises a combination of archival screenings, keynote addresses and scholarly panels, on the theme of women and cinema during the first four decades of film history; that is, women as directors, screenwriters, producers, actors and filmgoers.

There’s a call for papers, which asks for abstracts of 200–300 words, together with a paper title and a two-line biographical statement, to be submitted by 15 December 2007, to wss@mail.film.su.se. More details (in English as well as Swedish) on the conference website.