Ciclaho / Crea international conference

Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

29-30 April 2011

Cinema may be called a bastard art in both meanings of the word: because it is usually defined as a hybrid art form, obviously, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it has been able to become formally as well as generically innovative mostly through adulterous relationships, thus making illegitimacy its grounding principle by preferring a blurred lineage to a legible succession. Trying to find which film is referred to in a sequence, therefore, amounts to establishing a clear family tree, which takes no account of the illegitimate unions, natural children and forgotten ancestors that are nevertheless part and parcel of film history. If that quest should still be conducted, its object, it seems, should not be one sole point of reference. The aim of this conference is to create the opportunity of studying, and perhaps of rehabilitating, those shadowy corners of cinematographic creation and film memory.

We wish to focus on the following research fields:

Field 1: Bastardy as a process of cinematic creation.

- The origins of cinema as a place of ontological bastardy.

- Film genre hybridisation as a form of adulterous union.

- Quoting (in) films as borrowing, theft or rape.

- Blending media storage devices (videotape and conventional film tape), forms of expression (actors and cartoon characters) or film forms in one movie as a search for impurity.

Field 2: The film and its bastards.

- The “making of” as an illegitimate genre, conceived backstage, or as the film’s natural brother.

- The film’s bastard brothers (Director’s cut, uncut version, shortened version, censored version, restored version, reconstructed film, etc) as legitimate products or the author’s imagination or illegitimate offshoots.

- Retroactive effects: legitimating processes.

- Cinema’s adulterous relationships with the new technologies (the Internet, digital camera, etc) and/or new media (videogames, TV series, etc) as a search for legitimacy or illegitimacy.

- Film’s DVD and interactive versions as legitimate or illegitimate by-products.