Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference, March 17-21, 2010 The Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, Los Angeles, CA Deadline for submissions to this panel: August 9, 2009 11:59 PM CST Submissions are still welcome for a panel that considers the relationship between film reviewing and media culture. Those interested in submitting have two weeks until the deadline. Papers addressing film criticism in ways that relate to the overall conference theme (SCMS at 50: Archiving the Future/Mobilizing the Past) are particularly encouraged. Cinema scholars such as Robert Kapsis, Barbara Klinger, and Charles Maland have examined the role of reviews in discursively constructing popular genres and directorial reputations during the Classical Hollywood era. As professional film critics writing for corporate-owned print publications continue losing their jobs due to buyouts, layoffs, and reorganizations, the past three years has witnessed a flourishing of criticism online. Further, the so-called “amateur” critic has risen to prominence, evidenced by review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes, movie websites such as IMDB, and blogs dedicated to film analysis and evaluation. This panel aims to investigate not only the status of the film critic in the contemporary mediascape, but also the impact of print and Internet film reviewing in the context of global cinema culture. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following: - Film reviews as historical evidence - The future of film criticism - Canonicity, connoisseurship, and taste politics - Reviewing, academia, and cinephilia - Fans, audiences, and popular opinion - Moviegoing and the DVD market - Film criticism and film advertising - The cultural presence of the public intellectual - Print media vs. new media and the “professional” vs. the “amateur” - Coverage of international/independent films, art house retrospectives, and film festivals - Genre definitions (e.g. David Edelstein’s coinage of “torture porn”) - The cult of the director - The influence of the late Manny Farber Send 300 word abstract (including a 5 item bibliography), with full academic CV, as separate e-mail attachments to: Will Scheibel ([log in to unmask]). Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by August 15. Please visit the SCMS website for more details about the 2010 conference: http://www.cmstudies.org/ Will Scheibel Indiana University Department of Communication & Culture 800 East Third Street Bloomington, IN 47405 ---- For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives: http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html