[ Veranstaltungen - Conferences ]

The 4th International Women and the Silent Screen Conference will be held at the University of Guadalajara in the colonial city of Guadalajara, Mexico from June 7 to June 10, 2006.
Contributions from the CEE/SEE countries would be very welcomed!
Following the first Women and the Silent Screen Conference, held in Utrecht in 1999, the second in Santa Cruz, CA in 2001, and the third in Montreal in 2004, the Guadalajara conference will include scholarly panels and workshops that advance research on historical and theoretical issues related to women and silent cinema from 1898 through 1937. The conference will feature three plenary sessions: "Feminist Historiography"; "Gender Matters: The Politics of the Archive"; and "Women and Cinema Across Continents".
Scholars are invited to submit paper proposals for panels that address the following topics:

1. Women's platform: politics and the silent cinema
Redefining relationship between social/political spaces; women, politics and feminism.

2. Femininities and multiple identities
Redefining "the feminine" in silent cinema; the representation of sexuality on the silent screen; femininities/ feminism: feminism and essentialism; feminist film studies within an international context.

3. Silent cinema in context
Cinema and other media [newspapers, magazines, radio]; redefinition of cinematic practices across different media; cinema and the other arts [theater, novels, visual arts]; intermediality; film and other formats; film and ephemerality, exhibition and reception.

4. Career women in early and silent cinema
Women in film production, exhibition, distribution; and reception; women and managerial aspects; women and global distribution networks; gender and capitalization; women and home movies; religion, politics, and reception practices; censorship; the role of the state.

5. Women and labor in early and silent cinema
Reconceptualizing women's work; women in between domestic and public labors; women and the film factory; women's professional opportunities and aspirations; female workers and the union; women, craft and skills in the cinema industry; women's labor and traditional institutions (the family, the church, the state, the school).

6. Women and film reception in the silent era
Gender and film audiences within an international context; reconceptualizing the masses, questions of class and gender in national film context; comparative analyses of women's movie-going practices; women's places in exhibition spaces: women in public: the rural tent, urban theaters, and storefronts; female audiences and the itinerant exhibitor.

7. Early and silent cinema and the modern
Women and modernity: continuities and ruptures; cinema: a modern medium? silent cinema and periodization; gender, modernity and nationalism; the persistence the Victorian culture; women, the popular arts and cinema; women and modernist aesthetics.

8. Melodrama in context
Redefinitions and questions; the melodramatic mode in comparative national contexts; melodrama and transcultural appropriations.

9. How stars are born
Female stars and cultural specificity; transnational stardom; stardom and popularity; stars and genres; questions of race, beauty, and ethnicity; stars, scandals, and censorship.

10. Local and global capital in early and silent cinema
Film production, exhibition, and distribution in local and global contexts.

11. Theories and Methodologies
Historiography from a feminist perspective; questions of historical periodization; theoretical conceptualizations of early film spectatorship; the philosophy of feminist film history.

12. Her life as a movie
Women and genre; women's stories; women and home movies; women and amateur filmmaking.

Submit a 150-word abstract, a paper title, and a two-line biographical statement for either a panel or a workshop by October 1, 2005 to Patricia Torres San Martín. For more information, please consult the Conference Website.

Vilma Bánky (Hungarian silent movie star)