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October 2010, Week 1

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Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:40:38 -0500
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Call for Papers Transgressive/Trash/Exploitation/Art Cinema

PCA/ACA & Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations
Joint Conference
April 20-23, 2011
San Antonio, TX
http://www.swtxpca.org
Proposal submission deadline: December 15, 2010
Conference hotel: Marriott Rivercenter San Antonio
101 Bowie Street
San Antonio, Texas 78205 USA
Phone:  1-210-223-1000

The area chairs are pleased to be seeking submissions for paper presentations on "Transgressive Cinema" for our fifth year at the SW/TX PCA/ACA conference, and our first as part of the national PCA/ACA conference.  We encourage submissions on any aspect of "transgressive" film, whether they be in the realm of horror films, experimental/art cinema, or classic and contemporary exploitation movies, among others.  We especially encourage papers that engage with the theoretical concept of "transgression" in their presentations.  This area at PCA/ACA has expanded a great deal since our first panel five years ago, and we hope to continue to use this conference as a forum for scholarly discussion of this often-neglected area of film studies.

In addition, this year we will also be continuing our well-received pairing of a film screening followed by a roundtable discussion panel.  Last year, we looked at Herbert Biberman's 1954 Salt of the Earth, with a focus on how ideas about social justice that are today considered normative were in the past taboo-breaking.  This year, we will be screening Dwain Esper's 1934 film, Maniac and S.F. Brownrigg's Don't' Look in the Basement (1973), with an eye towards how portrayals of mental illness have been used in both art and exploitation film to explore societal boundaries.  If you are interested in being a part of this roundtable, please contact us.  (We'd also love to see individual papers dealing with the general topic of mental illness in film.)

The limits of what can and cannot be said, done, or shown in a society are prone to change.  Consequently, the risqué nickelodeon films of the early 20th century seem quaint, with their images of bare female legs long having lost the ability to induce gasping titillation.  Nonetheless, taboos regarding violence, sexuality, race, and political beliefs (among others) persist even in this age of post-everything.  We are looking for papers that examine films from the past and the present, from "stag movies" shown at American Legion "smokers" in the '50s to today's multiplex down the street.  And we're looking for papers that take up the question of how such filmmaking helped redefine societal limits, for better or worse.  The list of films that could fall under this category is very large, from the mass of low-budget horror films to rare experimental shorts.  We also encourage submissions that come from a wide variety of disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, from classical Freudianism to Critical Legal Theory.

Here's some topics that might help give you an idea of what we're looking for:

*Mondo films, especially ones that "exploit" a culture for the sake of spectacle (we might even think of Flaherty's Nanook of the North in this regard)

*Pornography, including anything that crosses racial or class boundaries (the persistent popularity of, say, Lexington Steele in this "post-racial" era, for instance)

*Films that fall to the extreme political right or left wing, including films whose message has been assimilated into today's political mainstream (anti-Communist propaganda, "hygiene" films depicting the homosexuality, sympathetic portrayals of minorities, etc.)

*Extreme violence in cinema (documentary footage of death, controversial scenes of sexual violence on film, the "realism" of blood and gore on screen, etc.)


These are just some general ideas; we eagerly anticipate discovering what you have to say about this surprisingly broad and complicated set of topics.


Please send us title and 250-word abstract by December 15th, 2010

Co-chairs:

Rob Weiner
Humanities Librarian Texas Tech University Library
Box 40002
18th and Boston
Lubbock Texas
79409

[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

John Cline
2200 S. Pleasant Valley Rd. Apt 808
Austin, TX 78741
[log in to unmask]<[log in to unmask]" target="_blank">http:[log in to unmask]>

http://www.swtxpca.org



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