[D-G] Reminder (Cinema and War; Cambridge, UK; 9 June)

[Nadine Boljkovac]

**Deadline for submission: 17 March 2005**

Forthcoming Conference: Cinema, War and a Society of Spectacle
9 June 2005, University of Cambridge
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2004-5/cinemawar.html

The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
(CRASSH), in association with the Cambridge University Film Seminar, invites
submissions for a one-day conference on cinema and war.

This conference will interrogate the interplay between the events of war and
their representations in film and video. While certain representations
suppress the tensions and ambiguities contributing to a war¹s emergence, and
its devastation, thinkers such as Virilio, Baudrillard, Zizek and others
have turned a reflexive gaze upon our voyeuristic fascination with war. A
search for total visibility through film and attention to instantaneous
fragments of Œreal time¹ characterize current representations of war in
screen media. But the thoroughness of our cultural saturation provokes
questions concerning the dangers of such image assimilation. To what extent
is our gaze aligned with insidious modes and bodies of power that
participate in games of surveillance and paranoid rationalisations? How and
why do images of destruction, which are disseminated at the speed with which
weapons are engaged, enthral and mesmerize? How are these images a means to
identity creation, at the cost of certain exclusions and inclusions? What is
at stake in the expansion of a Œsociety of spectacle¹?

We invite researchers, postgraduates, artists and those engaged with
questions relating to war and its representations in film and video to
forward abstracts for 20-minute papers/presentations. Interdisciplinary
approaches, ranging across media, and theorizations of war in relation to
philosophical, literary, cultural, political, historical, sociological,
anthropological, architectural and other branches of thought are expressly
encouraged.

Themes might include:
--propaganda, spectacle, truth
--constructions of ethnicity, gender, race, class or nation and the
aestheticization of war
--surveillance, paranoia, voyeurism or imprisonment
--visibility/invisibility
--the moment of death and its media representation
--temporality, continuity/discontinuity or narrativization and comprehension
--relations between cinematic and other representational and performative
forms (digital media, television, literature, theatre, visual arts)


One-page abstracts and short C.V.s should be sent to Conference Convenor,
Nadine Boljkovac (nrb34 at cam.ac.uk).

Deadline for submission: 17 March 2005