cfp.english.upenn.edu

From its very inception the relation between cinema and masses is somewhat a concern among any scholar who takes cinema seriously. Whereas Kracauer underlines cinema's performance in fulfilling mass desires, Benjamin inaugurates the birth of a new subject who is simultaneously a critique and an actor. For Balazs and Munsterberg, the control of the production of cinema and preventing the mis-distribution of its meaning are of primary importance. Hence, from the very first moments, cinema has been conceptualized as a pharmakon even though critics have not put it in those terms explicitly. From a realist critique to a feminist one, film's relation with the perception of the masses and the desire of demos is always at stake when one considers cinema as a political apparatus. This panel asks such political attribute of cinema vis-a-vis its effect/relation to the masses. We invite submissions in the topics included but not limited to the ideological effects/ affects of cinema, feminist criticism of cinema, cinema as a discursive regime, the questions of third cinema, nationalism and cinema. How is the relation between ideology and cinema established? What is the relation between cinema and the desire of the masses? What kind of cinema is a political one and what demarcates such attribution? How is nationalism and cinema related? How is it possible of thinking of feminist cinema today in terms of its affect on the masses?please send an abstract to Elif Sendur, esendur1@binghamton.edu