Keynote Speakers:

Pip Piper (director/producer) and Neil Hillman (sound mixer)

Pip and Neil will be discussing the production of their latest film, Last Shop Standing. The documentary charts the rise, fall and rebirth of the independent record shop in Britain and includes interviews with, among others, Paul Weller, Johnny Marr, Norman Cook and Richard Hawley. Their presentation will include an account of how the film was financed through the crowd-funding website, Indiegogo, and will be followed by a screening of the film and a Q & A session.

Call for Papers:

The Department of Theatre, Film and Television is currently inviting applications for papers to be given at the above symposium.

This event seeks to encourage a wide array of research interests and to incorporate interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of theatre, film and television. We are interested in receiving submissions from postgraduate students researching any and all aspects of the three disciplines and are open to presentations incorporating less traditional research methods, including demonstrations of practical and creative work.

Please see the TFTV Call for Papers  for application details.

for further information and to register to the conference you can follow this link.

Book by March 1st and get a £20 discount from your full fee of £200

Postgraduates save £80 on the full conference fee

There are also daily and session rates available and you can book your accommodation with Lincoln on the website too (accommodation is not part of the fee). If you want to bring a guest to tour Lincoln will you talk all things visual, we also have a conference dinner only option.

The programme will be available at the beginning of March but we have speakers on a wide variety of topics and from across the world as well as our very special guests and an event just for research students run by the BFI and BUFVC. If you would like more information about the programme before it goes live, please email Anna Claydon at eac14@le.ac.uk

BAFTSS 1st Annual Conference 2013 (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies) University of Lincoln, April 19-21 2013

Critics & Criticism: Writing on Audiovisual Media

Submissions are invited for the first annual BAFTSS conference at the University of Lincoln, 19-21 April 2013. The theme of the conference is “Critics and Criticism: Writing on Audiovisual Media”. The unrelenting expansion of digital cultures, including social networking and blogging, forces us to revise the role of the critic, including the academic, the journalist and the amateur. In particular, political pressures on Humanities research and calls for open-access research publication will affect the place and style of academic writing. Within this context, further investigation is needed into the histories and likely developments of audiovisual criticism and critical schools.

As well as papers addressing this theme, the conference will consider relevant proposals on any area of film, television and screen studies, including their learning and teaching, from A-levels to Higher Education, and any other developments pertaining these disciplines.

Pre-constituted Panel proposals are preferred, but proposals can be made for individual papers, workshops or master classes. If proposing a panel or workshop, please indicate a panel title in your proposal. If proposing a workshop, please include details of your workshop aims and your target audience. We also encourage proposals from media professionals, postgraduate students as well as academics and independent scholars.

The conference will include BAFTSS General Meeting, presentations by the first BAFTSS book and essay prize winners (awarded in September 2012), conference dinner and publishers’ stands.

A Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented during the conference to Professor Laura Mulvey.

Keynote speakers will be announced in due course.

Proposals for individual papers (with or without a panel proposal) should be 250 words long, plus a brief biography (100 words) including affiliation details. Proposals should be submitted to the conference committee (at eac14@le.ac.uk, j.m.andrew@keele.ac.uk and BWinston@lincoln.ac.uk) by Monday, 4 February 2013. Proposers will be notified by 1 February 2013. There will be an “early bird” discount when booking before 15 February but our aim is to make an affordable conference experience for all participants. If you are not a member of BAFTSS, attending the conference will activate your membership.

Hannah Mowat (Cambridge): ‘Nature versus architecture: Navigating the Threshold in Alain Resnais’s  L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Jessica Hausner’s Hotel’

Steve Presence (University of the West of England): ‘Spectacle and the Melodramatic Rhetoric in Nil by Mouth’

John Trafton (St. Andrews): ‘Things that almost killed me’: Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker, and the Influence of 19th Century Spectacle Art’

Winner: Steve Presence: ‘An investigation of affect in the cinema: Spectacle and the Melodramatic Rhetoric in Nil By Mouth’

Reason for award:
This is a mature and insightful discussion of affect, spectacle
and melodrama in relation to Nil By Mouth. The awards committee was
impressed by the essay’s breath in terms of demonstrating a bold
intellectual grasp of the intertwined and complex critical, theoretical
and textual issues relating to the power of the cinema to ‘move’
audiences. As a study of the power of melodramatic rhetoric, the essay
demonstrates a sophisticated approach to understanding the viewing
experience.

Runner Up (in alphabetic order):

Hannah Mowat : ‘Nature versus architecture: Navigating the threshold in Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Jessica Hausser’s Hotel’
Reason for Nomination:
The Awards Committee was impressed by the care to textual detail that nimbly negotiated the films’ various configurations of the hotel space as constituting ‘meditations on collective memory’.

John Trafton: ‘Things that almost killed me’: Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker, and the influence of 19th Century Spectacle Art’
Reason for Nomination:
The Awards Committee was impressed by the author’s deft deployment of the notion of the ‘phantasmagorial war film’, with reference to some seminal examples. The essay is extremely well-illustrated, demonstrating some convincing historic links between media, encompassed within the notion of the ‘panoramic aesthetic’.

Melanie Bell (Newcastle University): ‘Film Criticism as Women’s Work: The Gendered Economy of Film Criticism in Britain 1945-1965’ (Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 31:2, 2011, pp. 191-209)

Annabelle Honess Roe (University of Surrey): ‘Absence, Excess and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of Animated Documentary’ (Animation: An International Journal, 6:3, 2011, pp. 215-230)

Joshua Yumibe (University of St. Andrews): ‘Visual Diplomacy: Projections of Power from the Field in Ethiopia’ (Early Popular Visual Culture 9:4, 2011, pp. 309-323)

Winner: Melanie Bell: ‘Film Criticism as Women’s Work: The Gendered Economy of Film Criticism in Britain 1945-1965’ 

Reason for award:
A very well researched, original and innovative historical study of the role of British women film critics in film historiography (and production). The article maps the field of women film critics in Britain and demonstrates and accounts for the ebbs and flows of female input in the field. The article looks at film criticism as a form of women’s work and approaches it as a role for women in the ‘film industry’, understood here in its broadest sense to include production, distribution, exhibition and the myriad forums through which film circulates in the public domain. The article thus opens up a range of possibilities for film history to go beyond authorship models.

Runner Up (in alphabetic order):

Bella Honess Roe, ‘Absence, Excess and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of Animated Documentary’
Reason for Nomination:
This is a well-researched and original article that contributes to a deeper and more nuanced examination of animated documentary by exploring the theoretical foundations and framework for such work.

Joshua Yumibe: ‘Visual Diplomacy: Projections of Power from the field in Ethiopia’
Reason for Nomination:
This is a very well-researched and sophisticated study of the ethnographic film in the context of salvage anthropology and colonial politics.

Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary, University of London): Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex): Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (Columbia University Press 2011)

Andrew Higson (University of York): Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s (I.B. Tauris, 2011)

David Martin-Jones (University of St. Andrews): Deleuze and World Cinemas (Continuum, 2011)

Peter Stanfield (University of Kent): Maximum Movies: Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson (Rutgers University Press 2011)