Shakespeare on screen

Here’s news of a conference on Shakespeare and film which includes silent Shakespeare in its call for papers – though you’ll have to hurry, as the deadline is 28 August. The conference takes place at the Ohio University Inn and Conference Center, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA, 22-24 October 2009:

SHAKESPEARE ON SCREEN: 1899-2009

Keynote Speakers

* Peter Holland (University of Notre Dame)
* Linda Charnes (Indiana University)
* Douglas Lanier (University of New Hampshire)

The conference organizing committee invites abstracts (200-300 words) or papers on a range of issues in film and television productions of Shakespeare from the Silents to the Age of Branagh and Baz. Papers can focus on individual films; the work of major directors; intertextual (and visual) dialogue between Shakespeare films or between stage and film Shakespeares; television Shakespeare; spin-off films and television programs; Shakespeare in cyberspace; global Shakespeare; theories of appropriation and adaptation; editions and screenplays; funding, promotion and marketing; photography and trailers; DVD material; audience; film scores; cinematography; cultural context; film clips; and teaching strategies.

Abstracts or papers are due by June 5, 2009 (early decision) or August 28, 2009 (final deadline). All inquiries should be directed to: Samuel Crowl/Department of English/Ohio University/Athens, Ohio/45701 or via email to crowl[at]ohio.edu.

All sessions of the conference except the Thursday evening keynote lecture will be held at the Ohio University Inn located just across the Hocking River from the campus of Ohio University. Special room rates will be available for conference attendees. The Friday evening conference banquet will be included in the registration fee.

On or about December 1910, human character changed

On or about December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.

So wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1924 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. What a load of old elitist rhubarb, you may think, but it’s a gem of a phrase for starting up a debate, putting together a book, or organising a conference. And it’s the latter route that the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies and the British Association of Modernist Studies have taken in organising ‘The 1910 Centenary Symposium’, to be held at the University of Glasgow, December 2010, which takes Woolf’s statement as its theme. Interestingly their concerns include film, as the pre-call for papers indicates:

We are inviting scholars from any discipline to respond to any aspect of this statement by suggesting panels and papers. A formal call for papers will follow later this year. Current panel proposals under consideration include: 1910 films; Scotland 1910; Women in 1910; and 2010: Human Character in the Age of Climate Change. Other areas that have been suggested as possible include: periodization; The Post-impressionist exhibition; 1910 from 1924; the grammar of modernism; 1910 and social/political activism.

Plenary speakers will include Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvia) and David Peters Corbett (University of York). The conference aims to bring together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, from the UK and beyond. Although the majority of participants are likely to be modernist scholars, we do not want to limit participation to those who regard themselves as modernist scholars, and are keen to include the kind of oppositional and interrogative stances that the tone of the quotation implicitly encourages.

Proposals for panels and papers and expressions of interest should be sent to conference organisers Bryony Randall and Matthew Creasy via email at snms[a]arts.gla.ac.uk

So, what was pivotal about film in 1910 (or December 1910 for that matter)? Assuming such a thing as a change in human character at this time (and I guess we’re talking about people in the Western World – those most able to go to cinemas, for example), how might film have reflected it, or have been changed by it? It’s not generally cited as a pivotal year in early cinema form, except that every year around that time reflects some form of a step forward given the rapid evolution of the medium. But it was the year in which – in the UK at least – cinema became all-conquering, in its way a powerful agent for social change because of the command it had on people’s free time, and the free rein it gave to the imagination of all who attended it. The rise of modernity, which is what Woolf is referring to (and a little playfully, to be fair), is profoundly relevant to film, bound up as it was with the city, mechanisation, speed, and the triumph of electricty. You may find it in film style, or you may find it in the cinema as social institution. There should be a good paper or two in there, somewhere.

Conference diary

Newman House, Dublin

I was recently on my travels, attending a couple of conferences and a summer school, and this is my report. The first half of July was remarkably crowded with moving image-related conferences and other such events in the UK (and environs). Because of the jam-packed schedule, sadly I had to say no to the Visual Delights conference at Sheffield, on the theme of Visual Empires. This had an intriguing selection of papers surveying assorted lost empires and the media they sought to bend to their needs, with an encouraging number of new speakers (new to me, that is). Perhaps someone could say something about how they found the conference.

I also had to give a miss to Researching Cinema History: Perspectives and Practices, a symposium at Burlington House in London, which normally would have been right up my street, discussing as did the changes that seem to be happening to the historiography of cinema. For I was by then in Dublin, to speak to the Dublin James Joyce Summer School on Joyce and his fleeting management of the Volta cinema in Dublin in 1909 (centenary year, you see). This took place in the delightful Georgian building of Newman House, where they nervertheless managed to drum up a decent digital projector. The gathering of students looked a little bemused at times as I piled on the detail of how one went about managing (or mis-managing) a cinema in 1909, but they loved the film clips. A Cretinetti comedy (Come Cretinetti paga di debiti / An Easy Way to Pay Bills) and a scatalogical Pathé film C’est Papa qui à pris la purge, but could have been a film shown at the Volta entitled Beware of Castor Oil!, went down particularly well. The chances are now that it isn’t the film shown at the Volta, but it was certainly something like it (a man drinks his son’s castor oil medicine by mistake and gets caught short in assorted public places). In the end it was concluded that it was probably best that Joyce turned out to be such a poor cinema manager, because otherwise he’d have become a minor, prosperous businessman who never quite got round to writing that novel he’d been dreaming about, and none of them would have been there at such a summer school at all.

An uncredited Max Linder appearing in C’est Papa qui à pris la purge (1906)

And then it was off by plane to Birmingham followed by the epic train journey through Wales (anxiously following the first Test through text messages on the mobile phone) to get to the University of Aberystwyth for the Iamhist, or International Association for Media and History, conference, on the theme Social Fears and Moral Panics. Well, hard to go wrong with a theme like that, and there was a fine array of papers covering the multifarious ways in which the media acreates, reflects, perpetuates or addresses social fears – as well as being the subject of such fears itself. This was a particularly well-managed event, where for once I could find no complaint with any of the speakers that I heard (though surprisingly I encountered only one brave enough to try showing film clips) and all topics contributed usefully to the greater theme.

There wasn’t much on silent cinema, curiously enough, because the silent era had more than its fair share of moral panics – Fatty Arbuckle, Wallace Reid etc – indeed early cinema in general was ubiquitously viewed as a social threat of the first order. But for the record I heard papers on the ‘quality’ press and its adversion to commercial radio (Richard Rudin), the battles to preserve the Welsh language through film (Kate Woodward), how Limerick newspapers helped and hindered the fight against the 1832 cholera epidemic (Michelle Mangan), the very topical print history of influenza (Penelope Ironstone-Catterall), local reporting on the Ottoman bankruptcy crisis of 1875 (Gul Karagoz-Kizilca), the fears aroused by the arrival of the telephone (Gabriele Balbi), the image of Marconi operators given in the pages of Wireless World (David Hendy), the ‘Lady Chatterly’ trial and its press coverage (Nick Thomas), the use of fear in British government public information films (Linda Kaye, the speaker with the film clips) and the 1950s obscentity campaign against British seaside postcards (Nick Hiley).

In fact, the only silent cinema subjects I encountered were James Burns speaking on early cinema and moral panic in various parts of the British Empire, amusingly pointing out how different countries ended up worried about different things (in South Africa they feared racial mixing, in Southern Rhodesia it was sexuality, in the West Indies it was images that diminshed British prestige that concerned them, in India they worried about the threat of motorised crime); and me. I spoke on How Working Men Spend their Spare Time, a social survey conducted by George Esdras Bevans in New York in 1912, which I’ve written about on the Bioscope before now. You can find a copy of the talk on my personal website, should you be interested.

An impassioned moment from the debate on regulation and the media, with (L-R) Nick Cull (chair), Martin Barker, Julian Petley and Sir Quentin Thomas

There was a silent film screening, however. We were in the heart of Wales, with the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales just down the road, so it was more than appropriate that we were treated to Maurice Elvey’s The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918), previously described here in detail. The film was shown in NSSAW’s distinctively cylindrical Drwm cinema, and had Neil Brand playing the piano. A somewhat prolonged introduction over-sold the film, and it was a rather flat atmosphere that was created by an audience of worldy-wise media historians unaccustomed to adjusting their perceptions to the demands of silent film. In February when I saw the film at the British Library it was fresh and thrilling; here it seemed to drag, and its highlights seemed perfunctory. It’s the audience that makes the film, every time.

With the practice such conferences have of parallel sessions I missed many papers, while others I had to skip while putting together mine (a last-minute job, alas as usual with me). There were also plenary sessions: one on Government, Panics and Media Crisis (Virginia Berridge eloquent on AIDS, Merfyn Jones – former BBC governor – choosing his words with care but equally with feeling in recounting the fresh history of the Hutton enquiry into the Iraq war), and a thought-provoking session on Regulation and the Media, with Martin Barker on ‘disguised politics’, Julian Petley on the failure of the 1977 Williams committee which sought to change laws on obscenity, and an urbane turn from Sir Quentin Thomas of the British Board of Film Classification, who didn’t saying anything much but said it with authority.

My travels should then have taken me to Colour and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive at Bristol, but weariness overcame me. A shame, because this looked like an agenda-setting conference, with a remarkable range of papers mostly focussing on the aesthetic side of things. The publication of the papers would be very welcome.

The women’s 800 metres from De Olympische Spelen, the official film of the 1928 Olympic Games (a notorious event because one competitor – according to the evidence of the film – collapsed at the end of it, leading the event to be withdrawn from the Games until 1960 because it was thought to be too strenuous for women)

Instead, a few days later, I dragged myself to Pembroke College, Cambridge, for a conference held by the Sport in Modern Europe academic network. This was a select gathering of some of the leading sports historians, and I was somewhat dazzled to be in the same room as Richard (Sport and the British) Holt, Wray (Pay up and Pay the Game) Vamplew, and Kasia (Boxing: A Cultural History) Boddy. But no matter how wise in the ways of the world sports historians are generally, they welcome a bit of guidance when it comes to film, so that was my cue to speak to them about the films of the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Games (again, as previously covered here at the Bioscope), with emphasis on the use of slow versus natural motion and whether the sports filmmakers of the silent era were more interested in athletic records or idealised athletic motion (a bit of both, really).

So there you are – a couple of weeks in the life of the roving academic, and illustration of just where film can take you because it has this marvellous facility to reflect – and illuminate – all subjects. Which is perhaps why James Joyce was drawn to it, why the workingmen of New York in 1912 preferred it far above any competing leisure attraction, and why the seemingly plain records of the Olympic Games of the 1920s grow all the more fascinating the more you try to unpick them.

Travelling time

Things are likely to be a little quiet here for the next week or so as The Bioscope hits the conference trail. It’s off to Dublin for the James Joyce Summer School, then Aberystwyth for the Iamhist conference on Social Fears and Moral Panics, then to Bristol for the Colour and the Moving Image conference. A pause for breath, then off to Cambridge to speak on Olympic films for the Sport in Modern Europe academic network. I shall report along the way where I can, and certainly on my return.

Empires on show

Visual Empires is the title of the fourth Visual Delights conference, taking place 3-5 July at the University of Sheffield, Union of Students, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TG.

A summary of the conference’s concerns is not easy to track down, but the original call for papers said that they were interested in Imperial cinema, regional patriotic shows, circus and empire, silent film and identity, topographical empires, expedition films, the magic lantern and the empire, patriotism on the stage, sport as national identity, music hall and imperial sentiment, photography and otherness, colonial postcards, world’s fairs and ethnographic display, panoramic and dioramic empires, advertising and empire and the Boer War. Which is more than enough to fill a conference, and there’s a impressive line-up of speakers covering conquerers and the conquered.

Below is the outline programme (the full programme with abstracts of all the papers can be downloaded in PDF format here):

Visual Delights IV – Visual Empires

Friday – Registration and Refreshments – 9.30 – 10.00 am

Opening Lecture (10.00 – 10.30am)
Welcome from Simon Popple & Vanessa Toulmin

Allison Griffiths – Nontheatrical Ethnographic Film: Playing Indian in the Museum Sponsored Expedition Film

Panel 1-10.30am- Noon

Regional Empires Chair Simon Popple

Jill Sullivan – ‘Overflowing houses’: Panoramas in Exeter and Bristol 1840-1870
John Plunkett – Gateway to Empire: Plymouth’s popular entertainments 1855-75
Joe Kember – ‘Pure, Elevating, Instructive Entertainment’: Travel lectures in Plymouth during the 1890s
Ros Leveridge – ‘A panorama of Eastern splendour and of Western might’: Screening the Delhi Durbars in South West coastal resorts

12.00 -1.00pm Lunch

Panel 2 (1.00pm – 3.00pm)

Locating Empire Chair Vanessa Toulmin

Teresa Castro – Imperialism and Early Cinema’s “Mapping Impulse.
Cosimo Chiarelli – In the (visual) heart of Borneo – Charles Hose in Sarawak
J. P. Short – Empire and the Working-Class Eye: A History of Bourgeois Anxiety
Louise Tythacott – Race on display: the ‘Melanian’, ‘Mongolian’ and ‘Caucasian’ galleries at Liverpool Museum, 1896-1929

3.00- 3.30pm – Refreshments

Panel 3 Friday Afternoon (3.30 – 5.30pm)

Imperial identities 1 Chair John Fullerton

Fulya Ertem – Facing the “Other”: A critical approach to the construction of identity narratives in the early photographic practice of the Ottoman Empire.
Roshini Kempadoo – Defining subjects: Photography and the Trinidad plantation worker (1860s – 1940s)
Michael Eaton – Golden Bough and Silver Nitrate.
Alessandro Pes – Ordinary People Celebrities-The Fascist mythizising of Italian settlers in East Africa

Screenings: 7.00pm onwards

Nico De Klerk (Nederlands Film Archive) presents Gustav Deutsch’s Welt Spiegel Kino #2
Bryony Dixon – Curator of Silent film, BFI National Archive
Films:
Savage South Africa – Savage Attack and Repulse (1899)
The Paris and St Louis Expositions (1904)
Panorama of the Paris Exhibition No. 3 (1900)
Pan American Exposition by Night (1901)
Mitchell and Kenyon 703: Panorama of Cork Exhibition Grounds (1902)
White City – Franco British Exhibition (1908)
Brussels Exhibition (1910)
Visit to Earl’s Court (1911)
Gaumont Graphic: Festival of Empire: Their Majesties Driving in Semi State to the Opening Ceremony (1911)
Lord Grenfell lays the foundation stone of the Malta Pavilion for the British Empire Exhibition in 1924 with scenes of construction (1926)
Thrills in the Making (Topical Budget 649-2) (1924)
The Excursion to Wembley of Employees of Pullars of Perth (1924)
King Opens Empire Exhibition (Topical Budget 661-1) (1924)
White City Demobbed (1920)
Fireworks at Crystal Palace (1925)

Saturday 9.30– 10.00am Registration

Panel 1 Saturday Morning (10.00 –Noon)

Ethnography and performance Chair Alison Griffiths

Jacob Smith – The Adventures of the Lion Tamer
Christina Welch – The Popular Visual Representation of North American Indian Peoples and their Lifeways at the World’s Fairs and in the Wild West Shows
Joshua Yumibe – Abyssinian Expedition and the Field of Visual Display
Theresa Scandiffio – Welcome to the Show: Field Museum-Sponsored Expedition Films (1920s-1930s)

12.00 -1.00pm Lunch

Panel 2 Saturday Afternoon (1.00- 3.00pm)

Imperial Identities 2 Chair John Plunkett

Yvonne Zimmermann – Visual Empire of the Alps
Gunnar Iversen – Inventing the Nation – Diorama in Norway 1888-1894
Andrew May & Christina Twomey – Visual subjects and colonial sympathies: Australian responses to the 1870s Indian famine
Annamaria Motrescu – Displaced Indian identities in early colonial amateur films

3.00 – 3.30pm Refreshments

3.30 – 4.00pm – ‘Lucerna’: the Magic Lantern Web Resource
Richard Crangle, Magic Lantern Society

Panel 3 Saturday Afternoon - (4.00 – 6.00 pm)

Audiences and markets Chair Joe Kember

Amy Sargeant – Lever, Lifebuoy and Ivory
John Fullerton and Elaine King – Looking back, looking forward: colonial architecture in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century and its representation in photography and the illustrated press
Denis Condon – Receiving News from the Seat of War: Dublin Audiences Respond to Boer War Entertainments
Martin Loiperdinger – Screening the Boer War in Germany: Audience Response and Censorship

Performance: Professor Mervyn Heard’s Lantern Show 7.30 pm

Professor Heard introduces modern audiences to the weird and wonderful magic lantern entertainments once presented in public halls and private drawing rooms throughout the 19th century. Each show is different and draws on a unique collection of original 19th century mechanical moving pictures, sights, frights, moral warnings, adventures, pictorial curiosities and fascinating information. This is a specially commissioned show focusing on material related to the First World War.

Sunday

Panel 1 (9.30– 11.30am)

Cinema and the British Empire Chair Nick Hiley

Tom Rice – Presenting the Empire on Screen: The Empire Series (1925-1928)
Emma Sandon – Cinema and Empire: The Prince of Wales Tour 1925
Scott Anthony – Snowden Gamble and the films of Imperial Airways
Maurizio Cinquegrani – From Sydenham to Hyderabad: a Cinematic Map of the British Empire and its Cities

11.30 – 11. 45 am Break

11.45 – 12. 30 pm The Empire Exhibition of 1938 – The Spectator’s Perspective
Presented by Ruth Washbrook, Education and Outreach Officer, Scottish Screen Archive, National Library of Scotland
Films
Empire Exhibition Scotland 1938 (2 mins) (BW)
The King and Queen Visit the Empire Exhibition (1938) (13 mins) (BW)
Sketch Plan of the Exhibition (1938) (7 mins) (Colour)
A Visit to the Empire Exhibition (1938) (12 mins) (Colour)

12.30 – 1.30 pm Lunch

Panel 2 (1.30 – 3. 15pm)

Imperial Humour Chair Richard Crangle

Samantha Holland – The hilarious joke of miscegenation in turn-of-the-century US films and culture
Paul Maloney – St George and Ali Baba: the visual culture of pantomime in Edinburgh in 1869
Matthew L. McDowell – Newspaper cartoons and the drawing of early Scottish football, 1865-1902
Andrew Shail – ‘The Great American Kinetograph’ in Britain: Film, Fakery and The Boer War

Interval

3.30 – 5.30pm Performance: The Crazy Cinematograph and conclusion

The Crazy Cinématographe is a touring spectacle celebrating the films produced in Europe during the first decade of the twentieth century. The show celebrates the work of the European film archives by producing a prestigious and entertaining showcase for those little known wonders only known to archivists, historians and festival goers, but not to the general public.

Booking form and accommodation details are available from the National Fairground site.

Beyond the screen

Theodore Brown, mid-1920s, demonstrating his invention of the Spirograph, designed to show ‘films’ on an acetate disc to educational audiences

A call for papers has just been issued for the next DOMITOR conference. DOMITOR (why do they capitalise it? It’s not an acronym) is the international body for early film studies, and it holds a biannual conference. The next conference will take place 13-17 June 2010 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and the theme is Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema. Essentially they are looking at early cinema beyond the confines of the cinema – films with a special social purpose (usally educational or instructional in some form) which had to be taken to where the audience was, rather than the other way around.

Here’s the full call:

The vanguard of recent film scholarship has shown that institutions and social networks established a variety of sites, contexts, and ways for viewing early cinema, not always as “harmless entertainment” or as a “business, pure and simple,” as the U.S. Supreme Court defined it in 1915. The DOMITOR 2010 Conference seeks to develop this line of inquiry by demonstrating how early cinema’s cultural function and social uses were shaped by a range of institutions, both commercial and noncommercial: How was cinema used in the domains of science, technology, education, and social uplift, and how did these applications influence its development and shape the public’s perception of the medium? What decisions and powers led to the marginalisation of alternatives to the “entertainment” model championed by the Supreme Court and pursued by a maturing industry? Which organisations and groups helped preserve and archive early cinema and its culture? How were the production practices of early film companies affected by their alliance with institutions outside the confines of the film industry? DOMITOR 2010 will be a forum to present new research into extra-filmic contexts that broaden our understanding of the institutional basis for cinema during its formative years. To that end, we invite papers that explore the following areas, among others:

• Extra-theatrical venues and publics for cinema exhibition: churches, settlement houses, social organisations such as libraries and museums, commercial settings such as department stores, and other marginal sites and marginalised audiences

• Purposes of cinema beyond entertainment: using cinema for education, uplift, religion, advertising, scientific exploration, politics, and journalism

• Networks of promotion and regulation of cinema: newspapers, the trade press, fan magazines, but also censor boards, organised labour, and court rooms

• Institutional relationships between film companies and other media and social institutions: film producers’ dealings with charities, corporations, civic and political groups, and film production by such groups

• Perpetuating early cinema through preservation and appreciation: the work in subsequent decades of archives, criticism, buying and collecting, and the study of film history itself

Although we imagine the general time frame for the period covered by papers in the conference to be the late 1890s through to 1915, we do realise that cinema developed unevenly across the global stage. For that reason, papers treating cinema after 1915 in countries where early cinema practices postdate the proposed time frame will be given full consideration. Similarly, papers that examine the history and current status of early cinema’s place in the archive and museum are also welcomed.

Proposal Submission Process
Those wishing to submit a proposal should do so no later than 31 October 2009 to: domitor2010@gmail.com Proposals for pre-constituted panels of 3 or 4 participants will also be considered; such proposals should be submitted by the panel chair and consist of the collected individual paper proposals in addition to a brief rationale for the pre-constituted panel. Proposals for individual papers should be no longer than 500 words and be written in either English or French. Only a paper written in one of those two languages can be presented at the conference. Papers prepared for conference delivery should stay within a word limit of 2500 words and be able to fit within a 20-minute presentation format (including any audiovisual material used to supplement the paper). We request that all papers be submitted by 30 April 2010 to allow for simultaneous translation. While membership in DOMITOR is not required to submit a proposal, anyone presenting a paper at the conference must be a member.

There is as yet no further information on the DOMITOR site, but you can find out more there about past conferences and some of the organisation’s activities. And top marks to the conference organisers for not simply stipulating a time limit but a word limit as well. Too few to attend academic conferences seem to know how many words it takes to fill a 20-minute presentation. 2,500 is the answer (3,000 for me, but then I talk too fast).

Charlie in the Heartland

The 120-year-old Charlie Chaplin (as of two days ago) is the subject of a conference taking place 28-30 October 2010 at Ohio University Zanesville, Zanesville, Ohio. Charlie in the Heartland: An International Charlie Chaplin Conference is inevitably at the early planning stage, but confirmed speakers include keynote speaker and honoree Charles J. Maland, professor and head of the University of Tennessee English Department and author of Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image; David Robinson, author of Chaplin: His Life and Art; Kate Guyonvarch, director of Roy Export S.A.S. and the Association Chaplin office, Paris; Cecilia Cenciarelli, archivist and head of Progetto Chaplin, Cineteca di Bologna, Bologna, Italy; and Frank Scheide, Professor of Communications at the University of Arkansas and co-editor of The Chaplin Review.

The call for papers reads as follows:

In keeping with the theme of the conference, “Charlie in the Heartland,” which was chosen to commemorate Chaplin’s first trip to the United States with Fred Karno’s comedians in October, 1910, we are seeking papers in a wide range of areas, all to do with Chaplin, his relationship with, influence on, or evocation of America, either during or after his long residence here.

The following topics are meant to generate ideas for presentations, not limit creativity or exclude participation:

• Maland’s Chaplin and American Culture 30 Years later
• Reconsidering “Chaplinitis”
• From Karno to Keystone: eliding the music hall stage and the silent screen
• American vaudeville audiences of the 1910s – a herald of silent film popularity?
• Chaplin’s company: who were Charlie’s character actors and what were their influences?
• Vulgar film comedy as high art
• Chaplin and public appearance: a reconsideration of the Liberty Bond tour
• The Chaplin imitator phenomenon
• Film audience reception in the Heartland
• The Heartland rebels: Chaplin and the American Legion
• Brother Sydney Chaplin: what was the magnitude of his impact?
• The representation of America or Americans in the films of Charlie Chaplin
• Chaplin’s little tramp and the Beat Generation in America

Individual papers or full panels are welcome to submit proposals.

Please send a 500-word abstract, a short bio and your contact information to Lisa Stein, Assistant Professor of English, OU-Zanesville, 1425 Newark Road, Zanesville, OH 43701 or via email by February 1, 2010. Graduate and undergraduate students are welcome to submit.

N.B. We have tried to make this an accessible conference for young scholars by offering several low-cost housing options, as well as a reduced registration rate. We will also have a student travel grant available for applicants. Check back in early 2010.

Attendees are also promised a Chaplin feature film plus shorts, outtakes and oddities; a Chaplin film parody competition; a Chaplin lookalike contest (is it to held among the attendees? This sounds to be a highly promising development for academic conferences); and a ‘juried art show: “America in 1910″.

More details are promised on the conference website in due course.

Early sounds

The programme for the Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain conference has been announced. Organised by the Institute of Musical Research, the conference takes places 7-9 June 2009 at Senate House and the Barbican Centre, London. The conference is intended to complement the British Silent Film Festival, which is taking place at the Barbican 4-6 June and has the theme of music and British silent film.

This is the provisional programme for the conference:

PROGRAMME

Sunday 7 June 2009: Barbican Centre, Cinema 1

3–3.15 Introduction to conference: Julie Brown
Introduction to D.W.Griffith and Way Down East: Professor David Mayer

3.15–6.15 Way Down East: original score by William Frederick Peters and Horace Silvers, reconstructed and conducted by Gillian Anderson (prog. includes short interval)

6.30–7 Gillian Anderson in conversation with Professor Ian Christie

7pm Depart for dinner

Monday 8 June 2009: Institute of Musicological Research

9am Registration

9.15 Welcome

9.30–10.45 Film Lecturers

• Film Lecturers in the UK, pre-1907, Dr Joe Kember, University of Exeter
• ‘Sound’ and silent cinema in Scotland, Dr Trevor Griffiths, University of Edinburgh

Coffee

11.15–1 Early musical practices

• ’Motivated Music’: the evidence for accompaniment practice in London cinemas, 1896–1913, Prof Ian Christie, Birkbeck College, University of London
• Music in Mitchell and Kenyon shows, Dr Vanessa Toulmin, National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield
• Music for A Trip to the Moon? A Probable English Film Score for a French Film Fantasy, Prof Martin Miller Marks, Mass. Institute of Technology

Lunch

2–3.45 The 1910s: UK and US practices

• Entertainment licensing in the UK during the ‘silent’ film era, Dr Jon Burrows, University of Warwick
• The Sound of the City: Music, The Show, and the Picture Palace, Dr Jim Buhler, University of Texas at Austin
• “The efforts of the wretched pianist”: Fiction as Historical Resource, Prof Andrew Higson, University of York

Coffee

4.15–5.15 Resources 1: Film and Documents
Dr Phil Wickham, The Bill Douglas Centre, University of Exeter
Luke McKernan, Curator, Moving Image, British Library
Bryony Dixon, Curator, Silent Film, British Film Institute
Prof David Sanjek, University of Salford

End of day discussion, followed by Buffet (at IMR)

8pm Barbican Centre, Cinema 1
The Flag Lieutenant: original score by Albert Cazabon. Arranged and performed by Philip Carli (pno.) with Gunter Buchwald (vln.) and Paul Clarvis (perc.)

Tuesday 9 June 2009: Institute of Musicological Research

9.30 -10.45 Music and/as transition practice

• Another mystery from the pen of Mr. Edgar Wallace? The case of the vanishing part-talkie, The Crimson Circle (British Talking Pictures, 1929), Fiona Ford, University of Nottingham
• Live music and the transition to sound in Britain, Dr Julie Brown, Royal Holloway, University of London

Coffee

11.15-12.30 Retrospective Research: Early Sound Films and Silent Practice

• Scores in early sound film as sources for silent film accompaniment practices, Dr Ian Gardiner, Goldsmiths College, University of London
• The Development of Dialogue Underscoring in Sound Films in the Early 1930s, Prof David Neumeyer, University of Texas at Austin

Lunch

1.30-2.45 Resources 2: Technology and Ephemera
Phil Wickham, Curator, The Bill Douglas Centre, University of Exeter
Dr Mike Allen, Birkbeck College, University of London
Len Rawle, Cinema Organ Society
Other panel members tbc.

Coffee

3.15 – 4.30 Musical Performance on Film

• Silent Mancunians: Overcoming Silence in Silent Operas, Dr Chris P. Lee, University of Salford
• Variety Performance as Captured in Early Film, Prof Derek B Scott, University of Leeds

The conference closes at 5.30 pm after a short open forum.

The Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain research network is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, under their Beyond Text programme. The research team is Dr Julie Brown (Royal Holloway, University of London), Principal Investigator, and Dr Annette Davison (University of Edinburgh), Co-investigator. They describe the conference aims thus:

The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to bring together researchers from widely divergent fields to share perspectives on the sonic practices associated with early film exhibition, particularly in Britain. The first decades of film exhibition in the UK were characterized by flux and experimentation. Musical and sonic practices were often improvisatory, but always contingent upon the resources available, their stage of technological development, and the exhibition venue itself, which might have been a music hall, fairground, theatre, or purpose-built venue. Elements of performativity and contingency continued well into the sound era; live musical performance long remained a key part of film exhibition in many cinemas. This conference is the first of four events organised by the AHRC-Funded Beyond Text Network “The Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain” to enable, encourage, and consolidate research and practical activity in this field, and is particularly concerned with the nature, limitations and potentialities of the sources available for studying these practices.

Programme and booking form can be found on the Institute of Musical Research site. Information on the British Silent Film Festival can be sound at http://britishsilent.wordpress.com.

Monstrosities

www.monstrous-media.com

Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects is the enticing title of the Ninth Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association. The conference takes place 21-24 July 2009 at Lancaster University, and it touches pre-cinema and early cinema themes, with much else besides, as the conference description explains:

Gothic forms and figures have long been bound up with different media, from the machinery of Walpole’s modern romance to Robertson’s phantasmagorical shows in the eighteenth century; from uncanny automata to ghostly photographs and monstrous kinetograms in the nineteenth; from cinematic shocks to digital disembodiments in the twentieth. More than merely exploiting new technical developments in cultural production and consumption, the Gothic mode, in adopting and adapting new media, engages with excitements and anxieties attendant on social and technological change.

Examining conjunctions of literary, visual, spatial and digital texts in relation to spectral and visceral effects and affects, the conference aims to stimulate discussions of the relationship between the Gothic novel and other cultural forms, media and technologies. Doubling the monstrous with the spectral, it sets out to explore the cultural production and consumption of monsters and ghosts from the eighteenth century to the present.

Topics expected to feature in the conference include:

• Early visual technologies (phantasmagoria/ magic lantern shows/spirit photography)
• Gothic embodiments (staging, smoke and mirrors, automata and mechanical curiosities)
• Gothic on screen
• Digital Gothic (web, video games, hypertext)
• Visualising Gothic narrative (graphic novels, comics and illustration)
• Monstrosities (subjects, texts, bodies, forms)
• Media monsters
• Spectralities (subjects, spaces, environments, images)
• Transgeneric crossings (cyborgs, science, fictions)

The call for papers has passed, and they report an overwhelming response which is making the selection of papers take longer than expected, so no programme as yet. However, the plenary speakers will be Elisabeth Bronfen, Tanya Krzywinska, Marina Warner and Christoph Grunenberg.

More information now, and later, from the conference website.

Faded glory

Oscar Micheaux directing (possibly Within Our Gates), from the magazine film Screen Snapshots (1920), held by the BFI National Archive

News, a little late in the day, of a conference taking place 6-7 February 2009 on the key African-American filmmaker of the silent era, Oscar Micheaux. Faded Glory: Oscar Micheaux and the Pre-War Black Independent Cinema is being presented by the Columbia University School of the Arts Film Programme and Film Society of Lincoln Center. It is, they say, fifteen years since the last conference took place on Micheaux’s work, and undoubtedly a great deal of work on Micheaux has appeared since then, as well as re-discovered film titles.

The conference site gives this useful background information on the rise in Micheaux studies, showing how important it is for film studies in any period to have films to study (not always the option when it comes to silent cinema – but what survives generally determines what is understood, and written about):

In 1991, American film history was radically transformed when the U.S. Library of Congress acquired a 35mm print of a silent film titled La Negra (1920) from the Filmoteca in Madrid in a swap for a print of Dracula (1932). La Negra, as historian of African American history, Thomas Cripps, discovered, was the lost film, Within Our Gates (1920), one of twelve silent era films produced, directed, and written by African American director Oscar Micheaux. Soon after, the Museum of Modern Art acquired a print of Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), this time from the Cinémathèque Royale in Brussels, with intertitles still in Flemish and French. Suddenly, these two films opened up a radical new angle on the prolific filmmaker who had been known primarily through his controversial sound films. Paired with Body and Soul (1924), in which Paul Robeson plays a double role, the three silent Micheaux films became a trilogy that brought scholars of African American culture into silent era film history (1895 – 1929). The teaching of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) was transformed as now it could be countered with Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920), the film that grew from opposition to Griffith and Thomas W. Dixon’s offensive epic.

More importantly, the Micheaux silent trilogy allowed teachers and scholars to raise sensitive cultural issues because of the filmmaker’s bold approach to the question of what it meant to be a black American. It is not only that Within Our Gates contains a sequence in which a black man and woman are lynched and white Southerners gleefully cheer. In Symbol of the Unconquered, a black man passing as white rides with the Ku Klux Klan against a black oil prospector, and in Body and Soul, a black preacher rapes a loyal churchgoer’s daughter. From the position of Micheaux’s films, 1918 – 1948, which take the political pulse of the pre-civil rights era, one is led to ask about voting rights, property ownership, educational inequity, black entrepreneurialism, urbanization and black-white intermarriage.

It has been nearly fifteen years since the first serious Micheaux conference. Held at the Yale University Whitney Humanities Center in January of 1995, “Oscar Micheaux and His Circle,” was structured as the second generation of Micheaux scholarship, a reconsideration of the definitive 1970s Black Film as Genre by Thomas Cripps. The films screened at Yale had an immediate second life on the program of the Giornate del Cinema Muto international festival in Pordenone, Italy, in October, 2001, and a collection, Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, edited by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser followed. Soon, a number of other scholarly works on race theory, black audiences, black musicals, and early African American cinema appeared. In 2007, the first comprehensive biography, Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only by Patrick McGilligan was published.

The consensus among Micheaux scholars is that a third generation of scholarship is now emerging, fueled by the fact that Micheaux remains a mystery and therefore a high priority research challenge. Some scholars have attempted to fit him into the Harlem Renaissance, others have argued that black literary Harlem was elite and Micheaux was a popularizer; some have defined him as a conservative, others as a radical, but Oscar Micheaux as an historical figure still remains elusive. Micheaux, however, is symbolic of the historical difficulty of retrieving the consciousness of another era. The fact that some of his motion pictures have survived him, however, makes the challenge of understanding his moment all the more alluring. Thus a defining feature of this conference weekend will be the Lincoln Center public exhibition of Micheaux films never screened together.

Now, in 2008, there are additional motion picture titles, some newly restored, that fill out the cultural territory of what was then called the “race movie” circuit. Both fragmentary footage and still images from the “lost” titles and the public 35mm and 16mm film exhibition of relatively complete work will bring to life the productions of these companies: The Richard Norman Company (Florida), the Lincoln Motion Picture Company (Los Angeles and Omaha, Nebraska), the Ebony Company, Richard Maurice Film Company (Detroit); other directors: Spencer Williams (Blood of Jesus, Dirty Gertie from Harlem, Juke Joint), and important actors: Paul Robeson, Bert Williams, Charles S. Gilpin, Evelyn Preer, Noble Johnson, and black film genres: (Harlem, western, detective, comedy).

Further information, including a full conference schedule, is available from the conference site. For background information on Micheaux, as well as the books cited above, see the Micheaux Society website and the Oscar Micheaux Home Page.