Ancora
una segnalazione per una conferenza che si preannuncia molto interessante!
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Italian Horror Cinema: an International Film Conference
The
University of Bedfordshire, Luton, Friday 9th – Saturday 10th May 2014
In
association with the second annual ‘Spaghetti Cinema’ Film Festival @spaghetticinema
Keynote speaker: Professor Peter Hutchings (Northumbria University).
Italian
Film Studies increasingly situates its subject matter within discourses that
complicate merely ‘national’ orientations, as is evident in scholarship
surrounding the country’s wide array of horror films from the 1950s onwards. It
has become common practice to examine in these films and their various cycles a
tension between a culturally specific register pertaining to ‘Italian’ outlooks
on the one hand, and cosmopolitan, transnational or ‘translocal’ flows of
influence on the other. Spanning a period of traumatic socio-political
upheaval, an ever-increasing importation of American fashions and styles, and lucrative
international co-production models, Italian cinema’s various vampires, witches,
zombies, cannibals and serial killers document the complexities of cultural
moments finely perched between the local and the global.
This
conference will offer delegates the opportunity to bring together diverse
perspectives on the historical and political coordinates of Italian horror
cinema. Encompassing the broad and porous cycles of gothic horror, gialli,
zombie and cannibal films (among many others), the event will reconsider the
heterogeneous strands of influence that feed into and out of these films, to
examine negotiated, transitional and mobile Italian identities.
Likely
topics include:
▪ Cinematic /
literary antecedents to Italian horror films.
▪ Studies of
Italian horror cinema’s political / historical contexts.
▪ Transnational
/ transcultural routes of influence and cultural significance.
▪ Industrial
histories (eg co-production funding structures, key production companies).
▪ Studies of
domestic or international distribution patterns / reception.
▪ Considerations
of individual films / trends.
▪ Translation
studies / cultural translation.
▪ Italian horror
auteurs / directors.
▪ The on-going
global legacies of Italian horror.
▪ Italian horror
cinema today.
We
seek proposals for 20-minute papers, or for pre-constituted panels of three or
four papers, that engage with any aspects of the above topic. Abstracts of no
more than 300 words, along with a short biographical note, should be submitted
for peer-review to spaghetticinema@beds.ac.uk by
Friday January 17th 2014.
The
Department of Media Arts and Production, University of Bedfordshire, Park
Square, Luton, Bedfordshire, LU1 3JU, UK.
