The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee invites proposals for papers and presentations for our Ends of Cinema conference, to be held May 3-5, 2018.
Are we now in an age of “post-cinema?” Has the massive global wave of digital production, distribution, and exhibition finally eradicated cinema as we’ve known it? Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, and Peter Greenaway seem to think so, as well as academics from Paolo Cherchi Usai to Alexander Zahlten.
Whatever the object “cinema” was, it seems to have been summarily executed in the digital era. But whose cinema is ending? If “cinema” implies a universal canon built on default ideologies, has its “death” been a response, in part, to deeper investigations into diversities made possible by increased access to the means of production? Are cinema’s many deaths, then, bound to another kind of end: what we understand to be the goal of cinema, whether political, aesthetic, representational, theoretical, or technological?
Over visual media’s long century, the emergence of new technologies, both filmic and otherwise, have repeatedly elegized cinema’s ruin and celebrated its rejuvenation. The end of cinema, it seems, is fissiparous and cyclical; it has happened, it hasn’t happened, it has happened in fits and starts, and it will happen again. If no one death can be attributed to cinema, perhaps the answer is to consider its multiple endings—and subsequent new beginnings.
A complete CFP can be found on our Ends of Cinema conference website.
Please send your abstract (up to 250 words) and a brief CV by Monday, January 9, 2018, to Richard Grusin, Director, Center for 21st Century Studies, c21@uwm.edu.
