San Francisco State University
October 14-15, 2009
Plenary Sessions

Boundaries, borders, and limits signify separation between spaces—physical, conceptual, and otherwise. Cinema as a medium exemplifies and embodies resistance to boundaries. Since its advent film form has incessantly flirted with what lies beyond its porous borders traversing boundaries between narrative and non-narrative, documentary and fiction, art and science, humanism and exploitation.

As liminality connotes limits, how are these limits crossed and what are the results? In what ways might the category of liminality be productive to critical discourse and the creative enterprise? How are traditional cinema forms being challenged by blurred and traversed boundaries? What are discursive, spatial, temporal, sexual, cultural, political, aesthetic, metaphysical, ethical, and epistemological expressions of liminality within and related to cinema? How can curation and archival work cultivate and historicize liminality? How is film scholarship done from liminality?

We welcome submissions for individual presentations as well as panel sections as we seek to explore not only liminal cinematic spaces, but more importantly, theories, histories, criticisms and practices that refuse to be contained, even within those spaces.

Some possible topics under consideration include:

Globalization and Mobility: Mapping Movement and
Transmission in the Age of Migration

Bibliography:
Anselm Franke. B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond.
J. Hoberman. "World apart: J. Hoberman on the films of Jia Zhangke," Artforum International.
Doreen Massey. Space, Place and Gender.
Hamid Naficy. Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place.
Allan Sekula. Fish Story.

Where's the Class? Class in Cinematic Representations and the Representation of Class in the Academy

Bibliography:
John Bodnar. Blue Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture. David E James and Rick Berg. eds. The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class

Unbound Gender(s): Female Masculinities/Male Femininities

Bibliography:
Judith Butler. Undoing Gender.
Judith Halberstam. Female Masculinity.
Vivian K. Namaste. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People.
Nelly Richard. Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s).
Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. ed. The Transgender Studies Reader.

Phenomenology and Aesthetics: Noetic Liminality
Between the Immanent and the Transcendent

Bibliography:
Joseph G Kickasola. The Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski: The Liminal Image.
Jeffrey Pence. "Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing an Aesthetic Phenomenon," The Journal of Moving Image Studies.
Paul Schrader. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer.
Slavoj Zizek. The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Characterization of the Outsider in Popular Narrative Cinema

Bibliography:
Michael Z Newman. "Characterization as Social Cognition in Welcome to the Dollhouse," Film Studies.
Karl L. Dehne and Gabriele Riedner. "Adolescence: A Dynamic Concept." Reproductive Health Matters.
Beth A. Walker and Charles H. Noble. "Exploring the Relationships Among Liminal Transitions, Symbolic Consumption, and the Extended Self." Psychology and Marketing.
Linda Williams. "Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies.” Critical Inquiry.

Reasonable Doubt: Framing Contingencies in Documentary Form and Voice

Bibliography:
David Hogarth. Realer than Reel: Global Directions in Documentary.
Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, ed. F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing.
Bill Nichols. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture.
Michael Renov. The Subject of Documentary.
Michael Renov, ed. Theorizing Documentary.

Burning in the Melting Pot: Mestizo Cinema in North America

Bibliography:
Espinosa, Julio Garcia. “For an Imperfect Cinema.” In New Latin American Cinema, edited by Michael T. Martin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ©1997.
Guneratne, Anthony R. and Dissanayake, Wismal. Rethinking Third Cinema. New York: Routledge. © 2003.
Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality.
Cambridge University Press: UK. © 1992.
Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University. © 2001.

Submission guidelines:

Individual presentations between 15-20 minutes pertaining to some aspect of liminality in cinematic practice, history, criticism, and reception will be considered. The panels have not yet been determined; suggestions for special sessions are encouraged. Panels should consist of 3-4 presenters, and 1 discussant, who may also be a presenter.

Individual submissions should include: 1) 250-word proposal abstract with bibliography including a brief note on technical requirements and 2) a curriculum vitae.

Panel submissions should include: 1) a 250-word description of panel, including a proposed title and bibliography; 2) 250-word abstracts for each presentation with bibliography; and 3) a curriculum vitae for each presenter and the discussant.

All material must be submitted in PDF format and emailed to: sfsufilmconference@gmail.com

Deadline for submissions is June 22nd, 2009.