Preliminary Note:
James Welsh is the Editor Emeritus of _The Literature/Film Quarterly_ and
has taken a few moments out of a busy retirement to reflect on the recent
Film&History conference on War in Film, TV, and History. The following blog
by Welsh evokes the droll wit of a senior scholar enjoying his
retirement.......
The next Film & History event will be as part of the SW/TX PCA meeting
in February;
those interested in participating in the F&H Area should contact Peter
Rollins instanter. (Deadline for proposals is 15 December!)
Peter Rollins, Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and TV
Studies
[log in to unmask] (mailto:[log in to unmask]) and
_www.filmandhistory.org_ (http://www.filmandhistory.org)
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Sweetness & Light, History, Literature & Film, War & Conflict near Dallas
By Jim Welsh, Founding Editor LFQ
Before going to the joint conferences of the Literature/Film Association and
the Film and History League, my wife and I had been spoiled by a week north
of Venice in Pordenone in a 4-star hotel while attending the Cinema Muto
silent film festival of 2004. The American Airlines Dolce Conference Center near
the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport fell a bit short of that elegance.
Our room was comfortable, but cramped. “I feel like we’re in a foreign
country,” my wife said upon first seeing the room, “a bad one!” But after a
week it didn’t seem so bad. Though the closets were absurd, the bed was
comfortable and the plumbing worked really well, even though the hot water
seemed to be turned off about noon. How Eastern European!
“Raw Turkey” Leads the Way…
Isolation was the watchword, even though the conference center was
reasonably close to a railway station that could transport conferees either to Dallas
or to Fort Worth. Problem was, one had to get over the Interstate to get to
the station. This didn’t stop our British friend Laurence Raw, who currently
is teaching in Turkey. Laurence certainly had the most distinctive name tag
of the conference. It read: “RAW, TURKEY.” Laurence assured us that
getting over the Interstate was no worse than negotiating traffic in Istanbul. “
Raw, Turkey” not only got to shopping centers in Dallas but also to a Rodeo and
even to a production of an Oscar Wilde play, something I had not thought to
look for in that part of Texas. But for people less adventuresome than
Laurence, who worked for the British Council all through the Balkans before
settling in Turkey, the Dolce location probably helped to capture audiences for the
conference proceedings.
Sic transit [guts &] gloria mundi…
Plenary speakers invited to the conference included Larry Suid, celebrating
the latest oversized incarnation of his UP Kentucky book, Guts and Glory, as
he had also done at the national PCA conference held in San Antonio last
spring. The plenary speaker invited by the Literature/Film Association was Frank
Thompson, author of no fewer than five books on the Alamo, including Alamo
Movies, the Newmarket Press movie tie-in book for John Lee Hancock’s film The
Alamo, released in April of 2004, and the novelization of the screenplay (in
English, German, or Polish, take your pick). Frank’s theme was historical
accuracy in “remembering the Alamo” (or exploiting it) and part of his
presentation involved a montage of clips from all of the Alamo movies representing
the massacre. Although Frank once worked for the outrageous “reality” TV
show “Blind Date,” he brought no thought bubbles, though he did give a
thoughtful, entertaining insider’s glimpse into The Alamo.
The plenary headliner for the Film and History League, however, was Adrian
Cronauer, who totally explained to us why he was not Robin Williams, who once
played a character named “Adrian Cronauer” in the Barry Levinson film, Good
Morning, Vietnam! (1987). Turns out the “real” Adrian Cronauer shares a
vision of Viet Nam with conference organizer Peter C. Rollins. Both of them
served in Southeast Asia in 1965-1966. Salisbury University Professor Donald M.
Whaley provided a rather different perspective on the attitude of veterans
towards Viet Nam in his paper “Lifers, Juicers, White Morons, and Heads: Oliver
Stone, Vietnam Veterans, Film Historians, and the Contest over the Meaning of
Vietnam.” For Don Whaley, veterans who served after 1968 fought a very
different war than those who had served earlier on. He was careful to
stipulate, however, that the experience of the earlier troops was in no way nullified
by the alienated short-timers who found themselves in Viet Nam during the
1970s.
Post-Election “Blues”
The conference ended with a huge, ungovernable panel that was organized to “
debate” the meaning or the importance or the political impact of Michael Moore
’s groundbreaking, record-breaking “documentary,” Fahrenheit 9/11. Turns
out not everyone in the “Flagship” Auditorium liked Moore’s film, but the “
debate” turned out to be something of an albatross that never really took off,
really, though some of us tried to flap our wings and talk like Fibber
McGee. Perhaps this was a result of post-election depression for die-hard
Blue-depressed Democrats, strangers in a strange Red land. Adrian Cronauer
buttonholed me afterwards, wanting to know why colleges are teaching youngsters how to
think. Good open-ended question, that. Maybe television in general or
the Fox News Network in particular has had a psychologically subversive effect
that has ultimately impeded natural thought processes? Maybe timid educators
are afraid to ask hard, alienating, probing questions? Maybe Bill O’Reilly
and Chris Matthews and other cathode bloviators have permanently damaged
thoughtful discourse, and not only on television? Maybe even historians have
forgot how to think? Maybe Morris Berman got it right in his book The Twilight
of American Culture (W.W. Norton, 2000), which suggested that religious
superstition is replacing rationalism and that we are slowly drifting into a new “
Dark Age”? When Adrian put this question to me, I was standing in the Men’
s Room at a urinal, and all I could think to say was, “Gee, I dunno; I guess I
’m just pissing around here.” Let’s say there was not an entirely
successful meeting of minds here (or there). I wish I had followed my original
instinct and proposed a paper keyed to Saving Pvt. Ryan following the
interpretation of Curtis White in his book The Middle Mind (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003),
which bears the subtitle: “Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves.” The
point I’m trying to make here is that maybe Adrian was on to something.
In a way this was a breakthrough conference for the Film and History League
because David Culbert and other IAMHIST members opted to participate this
time around. IAMHIST (The Internationl Association for Media and History) is a
long-established organization of historians, archivists, filmmakers, and
television producers that meets every other year, most frequently in Europe.
Their meetings I have attended figure among the best conferences I have ever
experienced. David Culbert, who edits the IAMHIST journal, The Historical
Journal of Radio, Television, and Film and Roger Smither, Keeper of the Imperial
War Museum Film and Photograph Archives in London, were in the forefront of
the IAMHIST delegation in Dallas.
LFA papers were limited to 20-minute presentations so as to allow time for
discussion; Film and History papers were given 30 minutes. In general, time
limits were observed. The conference was frustrating, however, because we too
often had to choose between parallel sections including friends we only get
to see once a year. “Raw, Turkey” was not so happy, for example, that I
somehow missed his paper discussing “Turkish and British Views of T.E. Lawrence
on Screen,” but my friend and fellow amanuensis John Tibbetts was there to
witness and write up the session. I might add that Laurence Raw has become a
regular at out Lit/Film conferences and that I have recommended that he be
appointed our European delegate for the Literature/Film Association. But such
oversights were unavoidable, not at all intentional. I will say, however,
that almost all of the papers I heard were well structured and seemed to make
sense and were also well presented, by and large. Rumor had it that something
like 400 people had registered for the conference. Perhaps a special
citation should go out to Susan Rollins for her amazing efforts to organize this
ambitious conference. On the Lit/Film side, David Kranz of Dickinson College
in Pennsylvania was particularly effective as well. In other words, the
conference was well organized and well administered. We were fated to be sated
with what the youngsters call “discourse.”
Soup, Soup, Beautiful Soups!
Of course we were also fated to be feted. The banquet food at the conference
center was also quite good, especially the nicely prepared soups, the
tortilla soup, the creamed sweet potato soup, and the salmon bisque. We were
reminded of the lyrics from Carousel at the conference: “The vittles we et, wuz
good, you bet, and we all had a wonderful time!” As Jackie Gleason might have
said of the Dolce Conference Destination, “How sweet it was!”
Next year the Literature/Film Association will meet at Dickinson College in
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Film and History League will hibernate,
freeing up members to attend The XXI Conference of the International Association
for Media and History in Cincinnati, Ohio, 20-24 July 2005, sponsored by the
University of Cincinnati and The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American
Jewish Archives and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion..
Send abstracts to Dr. Frederic Krome by 15 January 2005 ([log in to unmask]
(mailto:[log in to unmask]) ) ; the topic will be “Projections of Race and Ethnicity.”
It’s another conference to look forward to.
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For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives:
http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html
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