cfp.english.upenn.edu

Building on the success of the inaugural Hidden Cinema Symposium in 2011, we seek to further explore how amateur, scientific, educational, and independent films have portrayed the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico. We wish to cultivate a more comprehensive understanding of the Southwest's and Mexico’s cinematic past by showcasing and analyzing the ways the region has been imagined in “hidden” and lesser-known films produced by non-Hollywood and amateur filmmakers.

We invite interpretations of moving images that offer historical, cultural, global and critical understandings of the region. We also encourage discussions of cinema-going, exhibition, and distribution, cinema advertisement and ephemera, and the complex endeavor of filmmaking in the Borderlands and Mexico.

We define 'hidden cinema' broadly, but priority will be given to proposals that illuminate the region's hidden cinematic history and steer clear of widely distributed or well-remembered Hollywood films. We ask that presenters accepted to the program be able to provide visual components (moving images and/or photographs) to illustrate their paper presentations.
We invite scholars, archivists, filmmakers and students to submit proposals about hidden cinema in the US Southwest, Mexico, or the Borderlands. Please email your 250 to 300-word description of your proposed presentation, a brief description of the materials you wish to exhibit at the symposium, and a short biography to submit@hiddencinema.org by JULY 15, 2012. Symposium presentations will be 30-45 minutes in length.

Hidden Cinema: Southwest and Mexico is a collaboration between the University of Arizona Department of English, the Center for Creative Photography, the UA Libraries Special Collections, Northern Arizona University's School of Communication and Northern Arizona University Special Collections at Cline Library.

Symposium organizers are: Dr. Jennifer Jenkins, associate professor of English at the University of Arizona, Dr. Janna Jones, professor of Communication at Northern Arizona University and Dr. Mark Neumann, professor of Communication at Northern Arizona University