MCLC: Visions of Scale--cfp

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Zhang Ling <ling1 at uchicago.edu>
Subject: Visions of Scale--cfp
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Visions of Scale: Magnification, Duration, Perspective, Projection
University of Chicago: Department of Cinema and Media Studies
Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference
Conference Date: April 5-6, 2013
Keynote Speaker: Mary Ann Doane (Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media
Studies, University of California, Berkeley)

Visions of Scale will be the ninth Graduate Cinema Conference at the
University of Chicago, a two-day event that will bring together new work
being done by scholars on cinema and media history, theory, and
historiography.

Current dichotomies in the size of moving image exhibition, with IMAX on
one side and iPod on the other, call to mind the myriad ways in which the
cinema has been the medium of scale par excellence. Far from being a
specifically contemporary phenomenon, however, this ³schizophrenia of
scale,² as film scholar Mary Ann Doane recently called it, took many forms
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At least since the
mid-nineteenth century, for instance, moving images have been available in
formats ranging from the massive, such as the moving panorama, to the
handheld, such as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope. Whereas the former
supplied overwhelming views of far-flung and exotic locales, offering
bourgeois audiences a more accessible and affordable touristic experience,
handheld moving image devices inhabited the world of the parlor and were
conceived of as playthings or philosophical toys. To take scale as the
subject of a cinema conference is, therefore, to think about the cinema
not simply in terms of how it represents the world aesthetically, through
the expressive juxtaposition of images of varying proximity to their
objects (close-ups, long shots, etc.). It also entails accounting for the
cinema¹s place within the circulation of images and the aesthetic
experience of the viewer as it oscillates between public and private, the
mass and the intimate, art and toys. The cinema itself, as Walter Benjamin
most insightfully observed, calls for a re-thinking of the exhibition and
reception of art on a massive scale, reflecting the desire of the masses
to ³¹get closer¹ to things...to get hold of an object at close range in an
image.²

Perhaps in a more fundamental sense, has cinema toppled the very topology
of these realms and categories and our relationship to them? In fact, not
limited to a consideration of the physical size of the moving image, the
question of scale posed by the moving image has been conducive to our
consideration and critical engagement with our increasingly mediated
existence by introducing new possibilities of framing and measuring the
magnitude of our experiences.In this regard, to conceive of the cinema as
a medium of scale is to critically reflect on and assess the ways in which
cinema renders complex global systems on a human scale, bringing the
outside world to bear on the sphere of personal experience and interaction
and enabling the dynamic production and mediation of values. By providing
a context for the renewal and reconsideration of the questions that cinema
as a medium of scale continues to raise, this conference will encourage
young scholars in a wide variety of disciplines not only to share their
research but also to actively engage and challenge the very
conceptualization of scale in our production of knowledge.

To this end, our conference will solicit and welcome contributions from
Graduate students whose search for ³the very possibility of
conceptualizing experience,² to borrow Miriam Hansen¹s words, not only
hinge on the question of scale posed by cinema and other media, but also
respond to those media¹s call for a dynamic engagement with time and space
in an endeavor to chart a historical and epistemological transformation.
We will also welcome papers on the aesthetics of scale and the history of
its conception and rendering in proto-cinematic, cinematic, and
post-cinematic valences, including:

-Formal analysis or aesthetic critique of the use of shot scale in cinema
(close-up, long shot, etc.)
-Temporality of scale and scale of time‹slow and fast motion, editing
practices (long takes vs. ³intensified continuity²) rendering the time of
the private, the public, the political, the historical, the geological
-Comparing historical aesthetics of scale in moving image media, including
panorama, handheld optical devices, kinetoscope, the projected image,
CinemaScope and other widescreen theatrical exhibitions, television,
big-screen TV, IMAX, iPod
-Various sensorial registers of scale, affect and politics of shock,
absorption, or distraction as they relate to technology (e.g., Dolby
sound), genre, institutional and sociohistorical contexts
-Ideological issues of the representation of size and scale as they relate
to age, gender, race, ethnicity, and class
-Productions of scale, scale of production and circulation‹big budget vs.
independent cinema, the role of digital special effects in rendering
scenes of overwhelming magnitude
-Narrative scale‹from the micro-narratives found in Twitter and YouTube,
to the re-emergence of long-form, serial storytelling on television and in
multi-film, multi-platform movie franchises
-Scale in video games‹dichotomies of the casual, ³plug-and-play² games and
the ³massively multiplayer online² games (from Angry Birds to World of
Warcraft)

Unique to the conference this year, we have invited alumni of the Cinema
and Media Studies Doctoral Program at the University of Chicago whose work
relates to the topic of the conference, including Lee Carruthers, Oliver
Gaycken, Caitlin McGrath, Inga Pollmann, Ariel Rogers, Charles Tepperman,
and Allison Whitney. While this conference is entirely a student-organized
event and its central goal is to provide graduate students with an
opportunity to develop their own academic voices as well as to generate
new relationships across universities, the organizers of the conference
hope that this part of the conference will be a welcome addition for all
parties involved.

The deadline for abstract (300-400 words) is JANUARY 15, 2013. Please
email all abstracts with ³Conference Abstract² in the subject heading to:

scale.uchicago at gmail.com

 <mailto:scale.uchicago at gmail.com>Submissions should include a title,
institutional affiliation, a description of your project, and contact
information. Presentations will be in 15-20 minutes in length and grouped
in panels of 3-4.

Limited financial assistance for travel may be available for international
Students.

For more information, contact Matt Hauske: hauske at uchicago.edu; Junko
Yamazaki: junko1 at uchicago.edu.