CFP: Flickering Landscapes: Cinematic Representations of the West (3/15/07; 5/21/07-5/23/07)

full name / name of organization: 
Bruce Janz
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Flickering Landscapes: Cinematic Representations of the West

This conference will be focused on the question of how landscape, place,
and location become a rich, problematic, contradictory subject in the
cinematic Western, both in the "golden age" of the Western and since.
The Western landscape has both iconic significance and daily meaning for
many people, and has come to represent America as strongly as any set of
images can. Our task will be to both identify and explore the existing
narratives and meanings that the landscape in the cinematic Western has,
and also to ask how those narratives and meanings might be altered or
even subverted while the Western is retained as a genre.

Cinematic visual representations of the West have been influenced by
painting, sculpture, photography and literature, and have in turn
influenced all of these. These intertextual exchanges have been played
out on the literal landscape, the places where homes are built,
threatened, lost, and recovered, where political relationships are
negotiated and inscribed on the land, where borders define self and
other, friend and foe, and where physical location comes to stand in for
myth, character, and identity. It is a truism that the camera's gaze
both records and creates, but in the case of the Western, the land
itself has become such a romantic stereotype that it is difficult to ask
new questions about it. In this conference, we nevertheless want to
examine some of these questions:

• How does the landscape of the Western become meaningful, and how can
it become newly meaningful?
• How do cinematic techniques and choices make some senses of the land
available, while obscuring others?
• How does cinema draw on related art forms such as landscape painting,
earthworks sculpture, and writing? How, for example, do painting terms
such as the frame, the picturesque and the sublime, and the horizon
enable our cinematic sense of the landscape? And, how does cinema take
these intertextual conventions in new directions?
• How does the landscape of the West (particularly the desert) become
inscribed as a place of personal and social hope and transformation?
• How do the representations of the West encode narratives, including
those of being American, being male or female, being civilized, having a
home, or encountering wilderness (or other forms of the "other").
• What social, moral, political, or religious narratives or values are
implicit in the Western landscape? How do these become encoded?
• How do the representations of cinematic place change in the digital
age? Does the landscape of the Western change in an age when places
themselves have become virtual and interchangeable?
• How might cinematic depictions of Western landscape use the complex
representations in other media, as well as recent theoretical approaches
to place, to re-invigorate Westerns?

This conference is intended to bring academics together with film-makers
as well as people living in the historic filming locations in Nevada,
Utah, and Arizona. Papers that not only address academic issues of the
representation of landscape, but also the implementation of those
representations in film and in public interpretation are especially
welcome.

The academic keynote speaker for the conference is Stuart Aitken,
Professor of Geography at UCSD. Other speakers will be announced on the
website.

The conference will be held in Moab Utah, shooting location for many
Westerns and other films. The conference is presented by the University
of Central Florida's Department of Film, Department of Philosophy, and
Humanities Center Initiative, and the College of Arts and Humanities. It
is supported by University of Utah, Utah State University, and others,
as well as the City of Moab, the township of Kanab, the Navajo Film Office.

There is limited space at this conference. Please submit an abstract of
200 words by March 15, 2007 to the conference email address,
moabconf_at_mail.ucf.edu. You will be notified within a week of the closing
date as to whether your paper has been accepted.

Conference Dates: Monday afternoon, May 21-Wednesday morning, May 23, 2007.

Bruce Janz
Dept. of Philosophy
University of Central Florida
4000 Central Florida Blvd.
Orlando, FL 32816
TEL: 407-823-2273
Conference email: moabconf_at_mail.ucf.edu

--Bruce B. JanzAssociate Professor of HumanitiesDepartment of Philosophy411E Colbourn HallUniversity of Central Florida4000 Central Florida Blvd.Orlando, FL 32816-1352TEL: 407-823-5408DEPT: 407-823-2273FAX: 407-823-6658email: janzb_at_mail.ucf.edu or bbjanz_at_gmail.comWWW: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb ========================================================== From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List CFP_at_english.upenn.edu Full Information at http://cfp.english.upenn.edu or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu ==========================================================Received on Sat Feb 24 2007 - 13:13:24 EST

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