Summary:
Birmingham's first cross-School and international film conference will be taking place on 27-28 April 2007, at the Midlands Arts Centre in the city's Cannon Hill Park.
Author:
Kate Ince
Telephone:
Kate Ince - 0121 414 5972
Email:
k (dot) l (dot) ince (at) bham (dot) ac (dot) uk
More Information:
http://www.europe.bham.ac.uk/disunitednations
'Disunited Nations' Film Conference
27-28 April 2007, at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham's Cannon Hill Park
Birmingham's first cross-School and International Film Conference will be taking place on 27-28 April 2007, at the Midlands Arts Centre in the city's Cannon Hill Park.
Entitled 'Disunited Nations: cinema beyond the nation-state', the conference is being organised by Dr Kate Ince of the Centre for European Languages and Cultures and Dr Michele Aaron of the Department of American and Canadian Studies, and funded by the University's Collaborative Research Network in Heritage and Cultural Interpretation.
The organisers already have a provisional programme for the conference, which will be attended by delegates from the UK, the US, India and Australia (among other places). Keynote speakers are Professor Tim Bergfelder from the University of Southampton and Dr Shohini Chaudhuri from the University of Essex. By mid-February a programme, full information and a booking facility for the conference will be available at europe.bham.ac.uk/disunitednations
Over the last few years a number of terms have been employed to conceptualise cinema beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, such as transnational cinema, accented cinema and transvergent cinema.
Such terms respond both to the emergence within international cinema of a considerable body of work in which questions of migration and passage are uppermost, and to the increasing internationalisation of film production itself, as co-financing across national borders becomes the norm, and film producers are ever more reliant on global companies and media conglomerates to get films funded. As these trends have developed, the entrenched national identities of cinematic tradition have begun to dissolve, giving way to alternative criteria for discerning and inscribing identity as well as more uncertain geographies.
Films have often focused on situations of conflict and the conflicting cultural identities produced by immigration or by characters in transit or on disputed and border territories. Where such conflict previously served to enhance discussion of the national, ethnic, regional, religious, generational and even gender differences have now overtaken issues of national identity as the dominant tensions that film narratives are called upon to dramatise or work through even, or especially, as they comment on the nation-state.
Possible related topics include:
• the shift away from traditional frameworks of national identity in cinema and film studies
• film and tensions and differences both within and between nation states
• postcolonial and/or globalised cinema
• film and foreign policy and/or contemporary international politics
europe.bham.ac.uk/disunitednations/