Filming Cities: the Modern Metropolis and Visual Media

Description

Conference sponsored by:
The British Academy
CRASSH
The Tiarks Fund – Department of German, University of Cambridge
The Judith E. Wilson Fund – Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
Trinity College

The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to explore the interactions between film technologies and the modern metropolis. Its main historical focus will be divided between the formative decades of the film medium in relation to the Modernist city and the contemporary diversification of technologies of filming in relation to the postmodern city. Its geographical focus will encompass European, US, and World Cinemas, and ask questions about the national, international, and global reach of film cultures as evidenced by city-based genres. The city as the dominant organising structure of modern culture has become a key place of interest for a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, focusing on issues such as control, mapping, transportation, memory, inclusion and exclusion. Different disciplines have developed their own methods of orientation in the study of the city, but it has also become a meeting-place, a site of encounter and exchange between disciplinary perspectives. Similarly, film is increasingly used as a material focus for different modes of social and cultural study, and here too methodological challenges and dialogues have emerged. The primary aim of this conference is to bring together, with a view to dialogue and debate, three distinct constituencies: film-makers with a pronounced theoretical and archival interest; scholars, both emerging and established, in film and media studies; and scholars, both emerging and established, in disciplines other than film and media studies. It will have succeeded if the three constituencies are less distinct at the end of it than they were at the beginning.
Conveners:

Emma Wilson (French, Cambridge)
Andrew Webber (German, Cambridge)
David Trotter (English, Cambridge)
François Penz (CU Moving Image Studio, Cambridge)
William Uricchio (Comparative Media Studies, MIT)