Author Archives: tlepro

SCMS 2018: “I Want My New Music Television”:Emerging Field of Popular Music and Television

deadline for submissions:
August 11, 2017
full name / name of organization:
Kristen Galvin
contact email:
kgalvin@scad.edu

I Want My New Music Television: The Emerging Field of Popular Music and Television

CFP, Society for Cinema and Media Studies: Toronto, March 14-18, 2018

From Empire (2015–), to Vinyl (2016), to Lip Sync Battle (2015), to Grease Live! (2016), television in the United States seems preoccupied with remaking, reperforming and reimagining the histories and myths of popular music. This panel seeks to survey the recent landscape of popular music-centric programming on television, across network, cable, and online platforms, and outside of considerations of the music video or soundtrack. This varied field encompasses multiple genres, such as comedy, melodrama, period drama, documentary, musical, and reality singing competitions. Like intersections of film and popular music, these post-network era programs often bank on the star power of established celebrities in the music industry, big-budgets, and/or Oscar-winning directors.

This panel is particularly interested in interrogating how popular music on television is especially productive for examining representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and industry. A secondary goal is to examine how televisual narratives negotiate and play with music genres and histories, in ways that operate as nostalgically pleasing, but conversely, may also be off-putting to their built-in audience of music fans. Collectively, this panel aims to answer how and in what ways does such programming reinforce and/or criticize the conventions and codes of the popular music genres, and the texts and tropes that they depict.

Suggested programs and specials (but not limited to):

Network Musicals (Hairspray Live!, Grease Live!, The Wiz Live!, The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again)

Remakes (Dirty Dancing)

Period drama (The Get Down, Vinyl, Sun Records)

Melodrama (Empire, Star, Nashville)

Comedies (Glee, Roadies, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll)

Reality Television (The Voice, American Idol, Lip Sync Battle)

Documentary (Defiant Ones, Hip-Hop Evolution)

Proposals must include an abstract (2500 characters/250-300 words); 3-5 bibliographic sources; and a brief biography (500 characters/50-100 words).  Please email your proposal to Kristen Galvin by August 11, 2017 (kgalvin@scad.edu). A response will be sent to all submissions by August 15, 2017. Selected submissions and contributors will also be considered for inclusion in an anthology.

“Breath: Image and Sound,” a special issue

deadline for submissions:
September 15, 2017
full name / name of organization:
New Review of Film and Television Studies
contact email:
tremblay@uchicago.edu

New Review of Film and Television Studies seeks contributions for a special issue on “Breath: Image and Sound.” Contributors are encouraged to consider, among other topics, the interplay between breath and particular media; phenomenologies or phenomenalities of breath and air; and breathing in different affective modes and genres. Possible research questions include, but are not limited to:

  • What role has breath played in the development of screen technologies?
  • How have the narrative and world-building properties of breath transformed across screen cultures? And how is breath conventionalized in various genres—be it Linda Williams’ “body genres” (melodrama, pornography, and horror) or other, perhaps emerging, genres?
  • How does breath operate as a locus of viscerality in situations of intimacy, radical freedom, or violence?
  • How does breath mediate race, gender, sexual orientation, dis/ability, and citizenship?
  • How does breath render environments, from confined to expansive, from toxic to pastoral?
  • How is breath mobilized to convey (or withhold) emotion? How does breath induce mimetic or nonmimetic reactions on the part of the spectators?
  • How does breath produce continuity in or disrupt dialogue, gestures and actions, and diegetic or extradiegetic sound?

Please send a brief abstract (and direct all inquiries) to guest editor Jean-Thomas Tremblay (tremblay@uchicago.edu) by September15th, 2017. Full essays (below 9,000 words, including references), should they be commissioned, will be due on February 1st, 2018.

Pixerécourt’s melodrama La Forteresse du Danube (1805)

On Friday 25th August there will be a one-off community performance of Pixerécourt’s melodrama La Forteresse du Danube (1805) in translation at the Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond, North Yorkshire. It will have a professional director, Sarah Wynne Kordas, and orchestra, led by musicologist and violinist Dr Diane Tisdall, with Dr Sarah Burdett as dramaturge. We will be using the original score to the Lille performances of the play. The performance takes place during Richmond’s Georgian festival and is a great opportunity to experience a Napoleonic melodrama in Britain’s oldest working theatre.

Tickets are on sale for £9 at http://georgiantheatreroyal.savoysystems.co.uk/GeorgianTheatreRoyal.dll/TSelectItems.waSelectItemsPrompt.TcsWebMenuItem_1352.TcsWebTab_1353

The performance is the culmination of an AHRC-funded project on staging Napoleonic theatre and we hope you’ll be able to join us for a great night out.
Follow us on Twitter @actingmelodrama
More details about the project can be found here:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/research/french/currentprojects/napoleonictheatre/staging/

Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial

Author: Scott Higgins
Published: February 2016

Description

Long before Batman, Flash Gordon, or the Lone Ranger were the stars of their own TV shows, they had dedicated audiences watching their adventures each week. The difference was that this action took place on the big screen, in short adventure Printserials whose exciting cliffhangers compelled the young audience to return to the theater every seven days.

Matinee Melodrama is the first book about the adventure serial as a distinct artform, one that uniquely encouraged audience participation and imaginative play. Media scholar Scott Higgins proposes that the serial’s incoherent plotting and reliance on formula, far from being faults, should be understood as some of its most appealing attributes, helping to spawn an active fan culture. Further, he suggests these serials laid the groundwork not only for modern-day cinematic blockbusters like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but also for all kinds of interactive media that combine spectacle, storytelling, and play.

As it identifies key elements of the serial form—from stock characters to cliffhangers—Matinee Melodrama delves deeply into questions about the nature of suspense, the aesthetics of action, and the potentials of formulaic narrative. Yet it also provides readers with a loving look at everything from Zorro’s Fighting Legion to Daredevils of the Red Circle, conveying exactly why these films continue to thrill and enthrall their fans.

About the Author:

SCOTT HIGGINS is a professor and chair of the College of Film and the Moving Image at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. He is the author of Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s and Arnheim for Film and Media Studies.

July 2017

improving passions

Improving Passions: Sentimental Aesthetics and American Film

by Charles Burnetts

Reveals a fascinating history of aesthetic debate concerning the emotional and moral functions of art

When did the sentimental start to mean ‘awful’? Why are so many popular mainstream films dismissed for their sentimentality, and are there any meaningful differences between the sentimental and the melodramatic? These are some of the questions addressed in Charles Burnetts’ illuminating genealogy of the concept as both a literary genre and an aesthetic philosophy, a tradition that prefigures the advent of film yet serves as a vital framework for understanding its emotional and ethical appeal. Examining eighteenth century ‘moral sense’ philosophy as a neglected but still important intellectual area for film theory, and drawing on case studies of film sentimentality during the early, classical and post-classical eras of US cinema, Improving Passions is an innovative exploration of the sentimental tradition as both theatrical genre and cultural logic.

 

Imperial Affects: Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema

by: Jonna Eagle

Published July 2017

Description

Imperial Affects is the first sustained account of American action-based cinema as melodrama. From the earliest war films through the Hollywood Western and the
imperial affectslate-century action cinema, imperialist violence and mobility have been produced as sites of both visceral pleasure and moral virtue. Suffering and omnipotence operate as twinned affects in this context, inviting identification with an American national subject constituted as both victimized and invincible—a powerful and persistent conjunction traced here across a century of cinema.

About the Author/Editor:

JONNA EAGLE is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

Rethinking Film Bodies: Beyond Gender, Genre, and Excess

deadline for submissions:
August 10, 2017
full name / name of organization:
SCMS, Toronto–March 14-18, 2018
contact email:
dewmusante@gmail.com

Over a quarter of a century ago, Linda Williams’ groundbreaking “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” was published in Film Quarterly. Her seminal article not only brought together distinct areas of film studies (genre criticism, spectatorial response, taste cultures, gender and sexuality, emotion and sensation in cinema) that are still highly relevant today, but also theoretical frameworks that have traditionally been kept separate. Although grounded in a psychoanalytic model for understanding structures of desire, fantasy, and identification, Williams’ essay at the same time marked a turning point towards a corpus of scholarship that is more attuned to and engaged with the embodied film-viewing experience.

We propose returning to “Film Bodies” in light of the exponentially growing scholarly thought on and through horror, pornography, and melodrama in the past twenty years, as well as a renewed interest in the problematics of materiality, perception, feeling and sensation in the wake of the affective turn. We want to explore the ways Williams’ essay still influences current theoretical debates while taking into account more recent perspectives on these—and other—body genres and advances in a number of approaches (cognitivist, phenomenological, affective, and psychoanalytic). As these schools of thought become increasingly polarized, if not antagonistic, we ask if there is a way to combine their insights into a more encompassing critical methodology to open up new avenues of inquiry for film theory.

Proposal topics could include but are not limited to:

Critical work in horror, porn, and melodrama in conversation with Williams
Or additional “body” genres that she doesn’t discuss
The problem of “grossness” or sensationalism and/as excess
In excess of what? Should we see emotion and sensation as gratuitous?
The materiality of the bodily reactions, secretions, and fluids as a basis for genre criticism
Affective and embodied viewing practices that highlight the role of our and the films’ “bodies”
Spectatorial identification and fantasy along/across/against (?) strictly gender lines
Masochistic or sadistic viewing pleasures
Moving beyond a psychoanalytic model for desire and fantasy
Feminist film theory in the wake of Williams’ insights
Should we also rethink her models of gender difference and desire as political acts?
Distinctions (or lack thereof) between high and low genres and their capacity for political action/criticism
Hybrid theoretical approaches—combining genre theory, psychoanalysis, affect studies or other methodologies

Please send abstract (ca. 300 words) plus bibliography (3–5 entries) and author bio (50–100 words) to Dewey Musante and Ella Tucan at dewmusante@gmail.com. Deadline is August 10, 2017; those chosen will hear back by August 14. Proposal forms due to panel organizers by August 21 if chosen.