CALL FOR PAPERS

Talking Heads
Paper abstracts sought for proposed panel on 
documentary media and the talking head

Visible Evidence Conference XII, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada
August 22-25, 2005

Despite being one of the most commonly used 
devices in documentary media, the talking head 
has seldom been subject to sustained theorization 
or historicization within documentary studies. 
The talking head  facilitates a wide range of 
speech acts (e.g. confession, testimony, 
interview, lecture, monologue), which often 
coexist within a single scene.  Since this device 
functions as a fulcrum for many of the most 
significant dynamics in play within documentary 
representation (authenticity, truth, authority, 
intersubjectivity, performance), it has also 
become the focus of critical interrogation and 
self-reflexive experimentation by documentary 
filmmakers, including Trinh T. Minha (Surname 
Viet, Given Name Nam), Mark Achbar (The 
Corporation), Marlon Riggs (Tongues Untied) and, 
of course, Errol Morris.  Furthermore, new media 
forms like video art, home video, webcams and 
digital installations have remediated the 
documentary conventions of the talking head into 
techniques and aesthetics which have subsequently 
influenced documentary film and television.  This 
panel seeks to investigate the theoretical and 
historical complexity of the documentary talking 
head by bringing together a range of 
methodologies and approaches, including film 
studies, art history, performance studies, 
rhetoric, communications and cultural studies. 
Contributions from documentary makers also 
strongly welcomed.

Email a 150-word paper abstract, brief 
bibliography/filmography and a short biographical 
statement to Roger Hallas ([log in to unmask]) by 
January 15, 2005.

Visible Evidence is a peripatetic international 
and interdisciplinary conference on the role of 
film, video and other media as witness and voice 
of social reality, which encompasses a wide range 
of cultural, political, social, historical, 
ethnographic and pedagogical questions and 
perspectives from fields such as film studies, 
communication studies, anthropology, 
architecture, art history, ethnic studies, queer 
studies, history, journalism, law, medicine, 
political science, sociology, urban studies and 
women's studies.

For general information on the conference:
http://artsandscience.concordia.ca/comm/visibleevidence.html

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