CALL FOR PAPERS
For a panel at the 2001 Society for Cinema Studies Conference
May 24-27 2001
Washington, DC
(Marriott At Metro Center)
"TRASH"
The category of trash has always been fraught with issues of time and
history, with questions of taste and distaste. Trash implies something of
the present, something that we would like to make past or place in the
past, wilfully forgotten and without function or use. Trash's definitional
failure is precisely in its topical nature, in its sense of the disposable
present. Yet it gains a secondary value in its retrospective
reclamation. The application of trash to a mode of film practice and
particularly the self-designation of trash cinema finds numerous
historical examples ranging from the expulsive yet mannered work of John
Waters, to the camp culture exemplified by the Andy Warhol/ Paul Morrissey
collaborations, to the exploitation endeavours of productions companies
like Troma, to the exigencies of Brazilian garbage cinema. Trash cinema
takes a position in relation to what has cinematic value, and we can
safely say that the reflexes that the trash culture of the 1960s and
1970s invoked in its often unwitting audience don't have the same sense of
immediacy or shock today. A recent film such as Cecil B. Demented brings
our attention rather nostalgically to the changing tide
of cultural distinction. Trash, in a somewhat trite maneuver, "is not what
it once used to be;" the high culture/low culture debates have notably
shifted, and "cultural capital" is no longer so fixed to a specifically
classed object of consumption.
Therefore this panel will address the process and historicity of the
production of cultural distinction. It will explore the role of a
self-designated "trash cinema" - past and present - in foregrounding the
philosophical and political import of cultural value, ephemerality, dirt
and distaste. If "trash cinema" named itself, and flourished at a
specific historical moment, how can Trash still be conceived as a useful
strategy, category or attitude for contemporary filmmaking and viewing
practices? All explorations of "cinematic detritus" shall be considered
(found footage films, fan/ collector cultures, sexploitation,
pornography, blaxploitation, B-films, camp, industrial films,
"obsolete" film technologies) and we welcome historical, sociological,
philosphical and/or theoretical approaches.
*Please email 250-500 word abstracts, including name, address and
affiliation by September 20 to:
Ara Osterweil <araost@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
and
Elena Gorfinkel <eg266@is7.nyu.edu>
*Please Note: You must be a member of Society for Cinema Studies to
present work at the conference. Please consult the SCS website
<www.cinemastudies.org> for membership and conference information.
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