CFP: Framing the Sixties: Retrospective Constructions of the 1960s Society for Cinema and Media Studies March 6-9, 2008 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA http://www.cmstudies.org This is a CFP for a pre-constituted panel at next year's SCMS conference (this information is also posted on the SCMS bulletin board). If interested, please email 200-250-word abstracts and a brief bio by August 15th to Barry Langford at [log in to unmask] Summary: With baby boomer candidates once again to the fore, the 2008 Presidential race will doubtless provide another demonstration that the legacy and the unfinished social, cultural and political business of the 1960s remain dynamic and volatile presences in contemporary American society. 40 years after the televised violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention crystallised the frenzy of this talismanic and traumatic decade as an indissociably mediated experience (“the whole world is watching”), this panel aims to explore the ways in which American screens since 1970 have helped fashion the cultural meanings and collective memory of “the Sixties”. Against a backdrop of intensely partisan historiographical controversies, literally dozens of film and television dramas and documentaries have proved key agents in writing and rewriting the narrative of the 1960s, and have consistently and strikingly illuminated how history is the subject to/of ongoing ideological interpellation. Papers are sought on any aspect of the retrospective construction of the 1960s in US film and television. Topics might include: biopics and dramatic reconstructions of historical events from Camelot to Kent State; fictional and documentary portraits of the era; “dramas of retrospection” (Flashback, The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Field of Dreams, etc.); “the Sixties” as trope; sexing the Sixties; etc. ---- Learn to speak like a film/TV professor! Listen to the ScreenLex podcast: http://www.screenlex.org