CFP: "Emergent Encounters in Film Theory: Intersections Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy," King’s College, London, March 21, 2009.

Keynote Speakers: Parveen Adams (Fellow of the London Consortium) Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University) Interdisciplinary approaches to the theoretical discussion of the cinematic medium have often engaged with philosophical or psychoanalytic perspectives. While philosophy and psychoanalysis are by no means opposed schools of thought, the potential to develop new ways of understanding film remains an opportunity to be explored. In seeking out further lines of enquiry, the study of intersections between cinema/philosophy/psychoanalysis, seems most pertinent to our generation of ‘film thinking,’ to invoke Daniel Frampton’s concept of the ‘film mind.’ whose future still stands, to some extent, in the shadow of psychoanalysis. Recent philosophical models of thought offered by film theorists such as Frampton and D. N. Rodowick embrace a new ontological grasp of the cinema, but what then are the implications of this shift for psychoanalysis? The question, therefore, remains whether philosophy and psychoanalysis are indeed irreconcilable, or if the specific philosophical turn sets up boundaries that unjustly seal off the possibility of dialogue between the two methodologies. We invite proposals of 200 words for papers of 20 minutes on areas including: -Films as philosophical and/or psychoanalytical form of representation -Questions of realism and illusion, from documentary cinema to the fantasy genre -Ethical responses to, and within, cinema -The family, sociality, fraternity and sorority -Changes and developments within spectatorship -The impact of, and approaches to, new technologies -Responses and approaches to film aesthetics/film art -Corporeal subjectivity, embodiment and the senses -Temporality, memory and amnesia in the cinema -Depictions of criminality, revenge and guilt Please send abstracts by 14th November 2008 to encounters@kcl.ac.uk; Enquiries may also be sent to davina.quinlivan@kcl.ac.uk. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.film-philosophy.com/announcements/files/4bc500ad11bded82abd928884ba760f1-74.php#unique-entry-id-74.

CFP: "Transmission: Cinema/Psychoanalysis," CRASSH, University of Cambridge, September 16-18, 2008.

The conference will focus around the theme of transmission in its exploration of relationships between cinema and psychoanalysis. This will contribute to discussions of cultural transmission relating to the CRASSH 2007-9 theme. Various possible modes of Transmission will be explored:

• The transmission of psychoanalytic discourse into film theory (re-visiting and re-assessing 1970s theory, Screen group, Metz, Mulvey etc., evaluating current relations between psychoanalysis and film theory)
• The transmission of psychoanalytic scenarios into filmmaking (e.g. Hitchcock, Lang; can we uncover what was lost in translation? what is the cultural/historical significance of such transmission?)
• Cinema as psychoanalysis: image, scene, time, speech, body, sound (how might cinema transmit psychoanalytically? Can cinema be conceived as a psychoanalytic mode of thought?)

In exploring these forms of transmission, the conference will seek to revisit the history of film theory and look forward to its future, asking whether psychoanalysis still has something to offer film theorists. In addition, the parallel histories (to use the term from the title of Janet Bergstrom's edited volume Endless Night) of cinema and psychoanalysis will be re-examined to shed new light on their past entanglement and possible future collaboration. Finally, through the investigation of scenarios and film form and their (mis)translations and mirrorings of psychoanalytic discourse and thought, approaches to film analysis will be explored.

Keynote Speakers:

• Professor Mieke Bal (University van Amsterdam)
• Professor Kaja Silverman (University of California Berkeley)

Further information is here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/162/.