Summary:
Organised by Dr Kate Ince and Dr Michele Aaron of the University of Birmingham, the conference will welcome delegates from the Middle East, India and Australia as well as all parts of the UK.
Telephone:
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: CINEMA BEYOND THE NATION-STATE
Partly funded by Collaborative Research Network in Heritage, Cultural Production and Interpretation
The mac Centre, Birmingham27-28 April 2007
Midlands Arts Centre, Edgbaston, Birmingham
For directions see the mac website.
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, the conference will welcome delegates from the Middle East, India and Australia as well as all parts of the UK.
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
Online Registration is now available.