*Prospective Conference Panel

Modernist Studies Association 13: Structures of Innovation, Buffalo, NY*

*Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2011 *

As the field of “new modernist studies” continues grappling with its
geohistorical expansions, and also its containment within definitional and
disciplinary boundaries, Susan Stanford Friedman proposes a transformative
model of “planetary modernist studies” in the September issue of
MODERNISM/MODERNITY. This approach holds fruitful possibilities for
histories and theories of modernist film aesthetics, an area that has yet to
be fully investigated through these recent methodological developments.
Friedman explains that modernist studies should avoid the familiar
polarization of aesthetics and politics, and rather “be open to different
kinds of aesthetic innovation linked to different modernities around the
world and through time.” “In this regard,” she argues, “the aesthetic is
always imbricated in the political, the historical. And vice versa” (488).

Moving beyond traditional formalist and auteurist theoretical paradigms, as
well as Euro-centric conceptions of film history and periodicity, this panel
seeks to explore the heterogeneous ways in which post-World War II art
cinema articulates the modern and breaks from the classical. Further, it
aims to situate the aesthetic innovations of different cinematic modernisms
in a global context to understand their roles within different political and
cultural modernities. How do the visual, media, and national cultures of the
postwar era encompass a range of ideological and stylistic contradictions
through cinema as much as—or maybe more than—a coherent set of underlying
modernist principles?

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

- New readings of canonical films or new perspectives on key figures and
movements (BLOW-UP, Jean-Luc Godard, film noir, etc.)
- The relationships between late modern art cinema of the 1950s/60s and the
early modern avant-garde of the 1920s/30s
- The intersections of modernist cinema with literature, architecture,
fashion, photography, music, or visual art and design
- Transnational influences: modernism and/in Hollywood
- Non-Western modernisms
- Sounds of modernism
- Experiencing modernism onscreen: affect and phenomenology
- Film performance and celebrity culture
- Film production and distribution
- Film exhibition and reception
- Archiving modernism and the circulation of cinema
- New media and technologies
- Identity politics of modernism
- Linguistic and cultural translation

Send 300 word abstract with 5 item bibliography and full academic CV (as
separate e-mail attachments) to: *Will Scheibel ([log in to unmask])*.
Please visit the MSA website for more details about the 2011 conference:
http://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa13/index.html.

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