CFP: Deaths of Cinema (grad) (1/5/07; 3/23/07-3/24/07)

Deaths of Cinema
First Annual Critical Studies Graduate Student Conference
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
March 23-24, 2007, Los Angeles, CA

Keynote Speaker: Hamid Naficy, Department of Radio/Film/Television, Northwestern University
Filmmaker: Screening and Discussion with experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold
Conference Dates: March 23-24, 2007
Submission Deadline: January 5, 2007

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The graduate students of the Critical Studies Department at the University of Southern California School of 
Cinematic Arts seek submissions from graduate students addressing the "deaths of cinema."
We are pleased to welcome our keynote speakers, Professor Hamid Naficy (Department of Radio/Film/Television, Northwestern University) and experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold.
This graduate conference seeks diverse explorations and concerns on the topic of the enigmatic, yet recurring, death of cinema. What does it mean to announce a death of cinema?  What are some ways to interpret, react to, or predict such a declaration? We propose a broad interpretation of “death” in and of cinema, and invite submissions for 20-minute papers that consider the question from diverse methodological and disciplinary approaches.
Topics may include, but are not restricted to: 
- medium specificity and materiality
- relationships between cinematic, analog, and digital technologies
- the roles of art and industry (political economies and authorship)
- changing exhibition and distribution practices
- historical approaches to cinema’s many “deaths”
- archival questions (preservations and disintegrations)
- the “death” of national cinemas in relation to the transnational or global
- the state of film scholarship as a discipline or methodology as it relates to developments in cultural, media, and visual studies
- the anthropomorphizing of these issues into the trope of mortality - human or otherwise
Selected papers will be included in a special conference-themed issue of Spectator, the University of Southern California’s Journal of Film and Television Criticism.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words and a brief  biographical statement to the conference coordinators at uscsymposium_at_gmail.com by January 5, 2007.
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