cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call For Papers

Small Cinemas in Transition: Small, Smaller, Smallest.

September 16-18, 2011.

State University of New York, Oswego

The second annual international conference, Small Cinemas in Transition, brings together film scholars and students to discuss the emergences and disappearances, stabilizations and transformations, of “small cinemas” worldwide. The conference organizers understand the notion of “small cinemas” to be fluid and plural, linking discursively and politically: the cinemas of small nation-states to the “postage stamp” cinemas of mobile devices (or Edison’s nickelodeon); the cinemas of ethnic and religious minorities to the cinemas of minors and so-called “minor” cinemas; the cinemas of closed communities to the cinemas of international struggle and resistance. In short, “small cinemas” names the ongoing exigency of thinking the aesthetic, economic, ethical and political assertions of various and variable collectives under the conditions of global capitalism. And not unambiguously, “small cinemas” names one of the crucial fronts in the ongoing assertions and expositions of, and struggles for, common being and being in common.
www.oswego.edu/smallcinemas

Organizers:

Prof. Rodica Ieta (English and Creative Writing)
Prof. Lenuta Giukin (Modern Languages)
Prof. Bennet Schaber (Cinema and Screen Studies)

Plenary Speakers:

TBA

Presentations are invited on any aspect of “small cinemas,” to be arranged under the following headings:

Theorizing Small Cinemas
• Globalization and Miniaturization
• Centers and Peripheries
• Majorities and Minorities
• Sedentary and Migratory
• Communal, Regional, National, Supra-national
• Racial, Ethnic, Universal

Aesthetics of Small Cinemas
• New Waves
• New Auteurisms
• New Technologies
• Image, Sound, Silence
• Language and Writing
• Interactivity and Functionality
• Archives and Ephemera

Economies and Scales
• Forces, Means and Relations of Production
• Distribution, Transmission, Diffusion
• Festivals and Financing
• Formatting
• Property, Propriety and Impropriety
• Memory, Forgetting, Storage

Send by April 1st 2011 abstract (no more than 350 words) and short bio for paper proposals (no more than 20 minutes) or panels (three presentations) as attached PDF or Word document to:

lenuta.giukin@oswego.edu
rodica.ieta@gmail.com
bennet.schaber@oswego.edu