CFP: Forgotten Popular Culture: Asian Cinema and Film History (An online international conference)
Forgotten Popular Culture: Asian Cinema and Film History
An online international conference
CFP
Popular cinema is closely associated with a wide range of social and cultural issues, such as audiences’ taste, collective memory, creative economy, cultural history, and social-political systems. Yet, often associated with low-brow entertainment, it could also be neglected by film critics or in official discourses for reasons such as censorship, cultural hegemony, cultural goods embargo, intellectual elitism, linguicism, and sexism. Whereas such oversight leads to amnesia of film history, it also reinforces the hierarchy of cultural criticism.
Supported by University of Leicester’s School of Arts Research Fund, “Forgotten Popular Culture: Asian Cinema and Film History” is an online conference that aims to rediscover popular Asian films, filmmakers and industrial and market practices that are either overlooked in film history or had been critically deemed ‘unworthy’ at the time. The conference organiser therefore invites papers based on either theoretical research or on case studies to address any of following themes:
- Popular films and cultural memory
- Women filmmakers and their contribution to popular filmmaking
- Media governance and its impact on the discourse of film history
- Cult films and stardom/personalities
- B-movies and their circulation
- Below-the-line creative labour and workforce
- Aesthetics and narrative of Asian genre films
- Critical reviews of film history scholarship
- Early film technicians and their contribution to film technology
- Transnational circulation and reception of Asian films
- Cultural capital and industrial practice of less-known film industries
- (Cold-)war and circulation of Asian films
- ASEAN cinema
- Asian film festivals and their role in circulating popular films
- The distribution and exhibition of lesser-known non-Asian films in Asian regions
- The inter-regional flow of cultural, labour, and financial capital
- Subtitling and dubbing practices
- Dialect films and their dissemination
- Asian films and filmmakers’ impact on Hollywood, European and other film industries either in historical or contemporary contexts
- Asian popular film preservation and archive
- Popular film curation, programming, and exhibition
- This is an unexhausted list. You are welcome to submit a proposal outside of this list as long as the topic broadly fits the conference theme.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor Kate E Taylor-Jones (Professor of East Asian Cinema, University of Sheffield)
Dr Xiaoning Lu (Reader in Modern Chinese Culture and Language, SOAS)
This online conference will take place on 23-24 May 2022. It intends to bring both established and emerging scholars together to examine these overlooked and understudied areas of Asian popular cinema and the ’forgotten’ creative talents behind the popular cinema. Through probing the official and mainstream discourse, this conference encourages scholarly challenge to the established discourse of (world) film history.
Please submit your proposal (maximum 300 words), together with a short biography (maximum 100 words) and affiliation information to Dr. Lin Feng at lf176@le.ac.uk by 10 February 2022.
To encourage the development of research network and support ECR and PhD development, the organiser also plans to host a digital research poster exhibition on its dedicated website. If you are interested in also submitting a research poster or only wish to participate in the digital exhibition, please indicate your intension clearly in your proposal.