Cinema, War and a Society of Spectacle

9 June 2005, University of Cambridge, UK

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.

In light of the predominance of a binary between innocence and evil that
frequently characterizes a contemporary political vernacular and Hollywood
representation, the need for critical thought remains crucial. This
conference will interrogate the interplay between the events of war and
their representations in film and video in relation to our implication in
the construction and deconstruction of such imagery.While certain representations suppress the inherent tensions and ambiguities
contributing to a war’s emergence and its lasting devastation, several
thinkers including Virilio, Baudrillard, Zizek and others have turned a
reflexive gaze inwards upon our voyeuristic fascination. Our delight in
total visibility through film and instantaneous fragments of ‘real time’
media characterizes our time. 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; moreover, what is at stake
in our attraction? 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 ‘society of spectacle’? We invite researchers, postgraduates, artists
and those engaged with questions pertaining 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

--temporality, continuity/discontinuity or narrativization and comprehension

--relations between cinematic and other representational and performative
forms (e.g. digital media, television, literature, theatre, visual art)

--the moment and instant of death


One-page abstracts and short C.V.s should be sent to
Conference Convenor,

Nadine Boljkovac (nrb34@cam.ac.uk).

Deadline for submission: 17 March 2005