EUROPE ON DISPLAY

11th Annual Conference of the European Cinemas Research Forum, in conjunction with the Project on European Cinemas, Montreal, September 22-24, 2011. Location: Quebec, Canada. Call for Papers Date: 2010-12-15. Date Submitted: 2010-10-12. Project on European Cinemas, McGill University, Montreal, QC.

For its 11th annual conference, the European Cinema Research Forum (ECRF), in conjunction with the Montreal Project on European Cinemas (PEC), will explore the imbrications between European cinema and practices of display. As recent research in early cinema has shown, the very emergence of motion pictures was bound up with modern practices of display, from the fairground to the museum and the scientific lecture, and one can hardly understand the history of film and filmic movements without taking into account the contexts of audiences and display practices in which films have found their meanings. Recently, the reemergence of 'attractions' in mainstream film, as well as the adoption of the museum space by avant-garde filmmakers, have helped to place questions of display at the forefront of cinematic experience and scholarship. This conference will ask how this focus on display can help to understand the history of European cinema in particular. How has the cinema, as a key display practice of the 20th century, helped to generate and contest notions of ‘Europeanness’? What sorts of dialogues have moving images maintained with other forms of display and with broader dispositifs of visual knowledge and power central to the articulation of ‘European’ identity? Not least of all, what are the limits of the display paradigm, with its emphasis on the visual, for understanding European film? We welcome papers exploring any aspect of the relation between European cinema(s) and display from the 19th century to the present. Please send abstracts (max 200 words) accompanied by a short bio-bibliography to europeondisplay2011@gmail.com. Deadline: December 15th, 2010. Papers in English or French are welcome. Some suggested topics: 1) production and reception, 2) discourses, paradigms, contexts, 3) aesthetics, themes.