CFP (SCMS Panel): Utopia and Dystopia in Film Dear Colleagues, I am assembling a panel in consideration for the upcoming Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Los Angeles—March 17 through March 21—and soliciting proposals to compliment my own paper on issues surrounding utopia and dystopia in film. If you could forward this message to any students (graduate level and above) and scholars, I would be much obliged. Regards, James Crawford, Ph.D. Student Critical Studies Program, School of Cinematic Arts University of Southern California [log in to unmask] CFP: Utopia and Dystopia in Film Scholarship on utopia and the media tends to structure itself along two major trajectories: in “Entertainment and Utopia,” Richard Dyer establishes a paradigm of wish fulfilment, exploring how a utopic drive permeates popular musicals and seeks to redress social inadequacies; digital utopianism, as critiqued by Vincent Mosco’s *The Digital Sublime*, is where advancements in telecommunications promise to improve all material circumstances, regardless of demographics. Whether textual or infrastructural, Dyer and Mosco both gloss utopia’s ameliorative connotation, eu-topos or good-place. Rendered transiently through light and sound, cinema evokes utopia’s other meaning as an ephemeral non-space; appropriately, the medium has lent itself to many enactments of utopia and its inverse, dystopia. Like their literary counterparts, the utopic and dystopic in film have often been used as satirical vehicles—to express misgivings of current social-political climates by extrapolating and articulating particular, usually pessimistic, visions of the future. However, though the literary tradition has been subject to many different theoretical frameworks, there still remains a space to expand utopian studies with respect to the moving image. This panel seeks to incorporate and move beyond well-established intellectual modes to open up utopia/dystopia to broader discursive enquiry within cinema and media studies. These potential fields include: utopia as genre with its own syntactical and semantic particulars; the politics of adaptation (*1984*, *V for Vendetta*) or remake (*La Jetée* into *12 Monkeys *); performed in the contemporary moment or as an act of historical nostalgia and longing; as a visual rhetoric (art direction, architecture, etc.) or performance style; as a reflexive interrogation of the cinema; as treatments of gender and sexuality; as imbricated with the human body (* Gattaca*, *THX 1138*, *Logan’s Run*, *The Island*, etc.); and many more. We will complicate and negotiate how these most elusive and paradoxical concepts, utopia and dystopia, manifest themselves in cinema and television texts and practice. Please send abstracts, approximately 300 words in length, by August 15th—consult the SCMS website for guidance with format. Please include major proposed texts and/or references, and I will respond by August 20th at the latest. Because every panel ought to be collaborative, we will then alter our proposal so as to reflect the papers to be delivered. ---- For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives: http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html