CFP: Media Cultures of the Early Cold War Era
Personally, I wish they'd give a little more heads up for these calls. Two months in the middle of the semester is not enough time to pull an article together!
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Velvet Light Trap
Issue #73: Media Cultures of the Early Cold War Era
Few historical periods are as rich for film and media history as the post-war/early Cold War era, which witnessed such epochal shifts as the domestic decline and international expansion of Hollywood, the global rise of art cinema, the diffusion of television, and the emergence of academic film study. Though these events are well-known and well-documented, recent scholarship has urged us to see them in the context of transnational cultural exchanges. Vanessa Schwartz has noted that "although we often speak of ‘global media’ culture we do not have a sufficiently textured sense of how it came to be,” and her It’s So French! shows "just how contingent the story of global media is when approached as a historical problem.” Recent anthologies expanding on this project include Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (Andrews and Joubert-Laurencin, 2011) and Global Neorealism: the Transnational History of a Film Style (Sklar and Giovacchini, 2012).
Issue #73, "Media Cultures of the Early Cold War Era,” will provide a forum for further research on the complexity of global circulation--of films, stars, personnel, technologies, media theories, habits of viewing--that resulted from the period’s geopolitical and economic realignments. Of particular interest is work attending to networks that emerged independent from North America’s and Europe’s industrial alliance, although research focusing on underexplored activities and practices of these media industries and their adjacent institutions is also encouraged. We are interested not only in commercial media industries, but also state agencies’ and international organizations’ experiments with and deployment of various media. For this issue, the editors of The Velvet Light Trap seek to bring together original scholarship that engages new theoretical frameworks, historiographical methods, archival sources, and historical perspectives that encourage re-evaluations of our understanding of this crucial period in media history.
Suggested areas of inquiry include, but are not limited, to:
- National and International film style and genre
- National, regional, and international documentary and educational films
- Early television history
- The rise of film culture, art cinema institutions, and cinephilia
- Cinemas and media cultures under occupation
- Global diffusion of new production and exhibition technologies
- International movement of filmmaking personnel
- Shifting centers of production, including International movement of filmmaking personnel, International coproductions and runaway production
- Postwar remakes and repurposing of pre-war and wartime media
- Early international film festivals
- Debates on the function, political or aesthetic, of moving image media
- Media industry unions, guilds, and other professional organizations
- Development of film culture institutions: festivals, nontheatrical distribution networks, publications, critics, academic courses and departments, etc.
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Velvet Light Trap
Issue #73: Media Cultures of the Early Cold War Era
Few historical periods are as rich for film and media history as the post-war/early Cold War era, which witnessed such epochal shifts as the domestic decline and international expansion of Hollywood, the global rise of art cinema, the diffusion of television, and the emergence of academic film study. Though these events are well-known and well-documented, recent scholarship has urged us to see them in the context of transnational cultural exchanges. Vanessa Schwartz has noted that "although we often speak of ‘global media’ culture we do not have a sufficiently textured sense of how it came to be,” and her It’s So French! shows "just how contingent the story of global media is when approached as a historical problem.” Recent anthologies expanding on this project include Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (Andrews and Joubert-Laurencin, 2011) and Global Neorealism: the Transnational History of a Film Style (Sklar and Giovacchini, 2012).
Issue #73, "Media Cultures of the Early Cold War Era,” will provide a forum for further research on the complexity of global circulation--of films, stars, personnel, technologies, media theories, habits of viewing--that resulted from the period’s geopolitical and economic realignments. Of particular interest is work attending to networks that emerged independent from North America’s and Europe’s industrial alliance, although research focusing on underexplored activities and practices of these media industries and their adjacent institutions is also encouraged. We are interested not only in commercial media industries, but also state agencies’ and international organizations’ experiments with and deployment of various media. For this issue, the editors of The Velvet Light Trap seek to bring together original scholarship that engages new theoretical frameworks, historiographical methods, archival sources, and historical perspectives that encourage re-evaluations of our understanding of this crucial period in media history.
Suggested areas of inquiry include, but are not limited, to:
- National and International film style and genre
- National, regional, and international documentary and educational films
- Early television history
- The rise of film culture, art cinema institutions, and cinephilia
- Cinemas and media cultures under occupation
- Global diffusion of new production and exhibition technologies
- International movement of filmmaking personnel
- Shifting centers of production, including International movement of filmmaking personnel, International coproductions and runaway production
- Postwar remakes and repurposing of pre-war and wartime media
- Early international film festivals
- Debates on the function, political or aesthetic, of moving image media
- Media industry unions, guilds, and other professional organizations
- Development of film culture institutions: festivals, nontheatrical distribution networks, publications, critics, academic courses and departments, etc.
All submissions are due January 4, 2013. Submission guidelines at the journal's website.
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