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October 2007, Week 5

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Subject:
From:
Cynthia Miller <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:57:45 -0400
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Call for Papers

RE-ENACTMENTS Area

2008 Film & History Conference

"Film & Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond"

October 30-November 2, 2008

Chicago, Illinois

www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory

Second-Round Deadline: May 1, 2008

 

AREA: Re-enactments

 

For centuries, re-enactments-in the absence of camera footage or technology-have been used to visualize aspects of science and history. While they provide an answer to the question of what to show, re-enactments do more than just fill in for "real" documentation. They offer an opportunity to dramatize scientific concepts or the discovery of them, to demonstrate theories and applications, to interpret cultural turning points or other decisive historical events, and to explain, in general, the who, why, and how of science.

 

Re-enactments are made through both live action and animation. Errol Morris's A Brief History of Time uses chickens and eggs to raise questions about Stephen Hawkings's theories. Episodes of PBS's NOVA series use actors, costumes, sets, and other aspects of what normally is considered fiction filmmaking to recreate historical and scientific moments. Animation provides another avenue through which to render abstract concepts into more comprehensible explanations. One sophisticated online example is Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension, which walks through 10 theoretical dimensions of time, at least according to Bryanton's theories.

 

This area investigates the roles of re-enactments in scientific media. Presentations may examine recreations through their techniques, their purposes, their interpretations, and their explanatory potential and powers, just to name a few approaches. Presentations may evaluate re-enactments within particular texts, compare similar re-enactments across various texts and media, align re-enactments with other documentation of historical events, and situate re-enactments in cultural and social contexts. Many presentations will focus on subgenres within documentary, such as scientific, propaganda, nature, newsreel, instructional, biographical, compilation, ethnographic and anthropological, and even mockumentary media. However, presentations also may examine how fiction media represent the same events, such as Oliver's Stone's re-enactments of the Zapruder film for JFK.

 

Please send your 200-word proposal by May 1, 2008, to the area chair:

 

Heather McIntosh, Chair of the Re-enactments Area

College of Communications

The Pennsylvania State University

115 Carnegie Building

University Park PA 16801

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

 

Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal. Deadline for second-round proposals: May 1, 2008

 

This area, comprising multiple panels, is a part of the 2008 biennial Film & History Conference, sponsored by The Center for the Study of Film and History. Speakers will include founder John O'Connor and editor Peter C. Rollins (in a ceremony to celebrate the transfer to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh); Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of Visions of the Apocalypse, Disaster and Memory, and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood; Sidney Perkowitz, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University and author of Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, & the End of the World; and special-effects legend Stan Winston, our Keynote Speaker.  For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory <http://www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory> ).

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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org

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