Call for Papers: Spectator Journal of Film and Television Criticism  (Fall 1999)
Special Issue: Screening the Past: Discourses of History on Film and Television
Editor: Steve Anderson <[log in to unmask]>

In recent years, a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to the
role of film and television in the writing of history.  However, most
examinations of filmic history focus on issues of accuracy and
responsibility as defined within the discipline of academic history.  While
debates over good and bad historiography proliferate, questions about the
fundamental relationship between motion pictures, popular memory, and
historical epistemology remain critically neglected.  This issue of
Spectator expands the debate over film and history to include voices which
ask not merely what we know of history but how we come to experience,
remember and participate in constructing the past.  The goal is to redefine
the boundaries of historiography to include both marginal media practices
and voices which have been excluded from official historical discourse.

The Fall 1999 issue of Spectator will explore such questions as:

-What has been left out of popular and academic discourses of film and
history?
-Have mass media histories simply eradicated the possibility of popular
memory or has a more entangled relationship developed between them?
-Can film and television contribute productively to the reciprocal
relationship between remembering and forgetting?
-How do film and television further the erosion of boundaries between
history and memory; mythology and historiography?
-Is television adequately described as a medium that produces only amnesia
and the erasure of history?

Possible topics include:

- Postmodern history and the role of nostalgia
- Alternative or radical historiography in avant-garde film and video
- Historical "mockumentaries"
- Science fiction/time travel/fantasy narratives as history
- Historical trauma and documentary filmmaking
- TV as historian/archivist
- Copyright protection and access to historical imagery
- TV re-runs as historical evidence
- Found footage films and the recontextualization of historical images
- Home movies as historical documents
- Digital media technologies and the transformation of historical evidence
- Paranoid culture and the proliferation of alternative or counterfactual
histories

Please submit 12-25 page, double-spaced manuscripts in Chicago endnote style to:
Steve Anderson/Spectator
School of Cinema-Television
Division of Critical Studies
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211

Spectator is a bi-annual journal of film and television criticism published
by the University of Southern California.

Deadline for submissions is October 1st, 1999

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