Due to a last minute drop-out, we are looking for another presenter for our panel at Visible Evidence in Lincoln this August. You can find the proposal below, and we are open to wide interpretations of the panel topic. Feel free to email me ([log in to unmask]) and/or my co- panelist Patrick Sjoberg ([log in to unmask]) with any questions or to discuss paper ideas. Due to this being somewhat last-minute, we are looking to receive proposals as soon as possible - ideally by 31st May at the latest. You can find more information about the Visible Evidence conference here: http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/conferences/visibleevidence/index.htm Abstraction Absence Animation: Documentary and the Limits of the Figurative Chair: Patrik Sjöberg, PhD, Karlstad University Throughout the history of documentary film, directors have been coping and compensating for a lack of material, visual as well as acoustic. This has not only lead to a wide range of conventions for dealing with this substantive absence, (for example, all the ways in which compilation film uses archive material to compensate for the lack of original filmed material, or the way identities are hidden in interview sequences), but is has furthermore functioned as a creative obstacle for documentarists to push the boundaries of what is representable within the framework of documentary media (think of Errol Morris’ Thin Blue Line (1988), Jill Godmilow’s Far From Poland (1984) or the Channel 4 series Animated Minds (2003)). This panel wishes to discuss the ways in which documentary media negotiates this tension - between the need to represent and the inability to properly do so. This not only includes the lack of footage from an event, but also the difficulties involved in the representation of statistics and complex processes, emotional states of individuals, general tendencies within a culture, the passage of time, or philosophical and political assertions. ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.ScreenSite.org