CFP: Early Cinema in the Balkans and the Near East: Beginnings to Interwar Period (Athens, June, 2015)

It's great to see translation included in this conference call for papers; will look forward with interest to the resulting publication.


INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Early Cinema in the Balkans and the Near East: Beginnings to Interwar Period

Athens, Greece: 5-7 June, 2015

Hellenic Open University
Hyperion University Bucharest and Istanbul Şehir University
Altcine and Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies


CALL FOR PAPERS

This conference aims to broaden the geo-cultural scope of early film studies by providing a forum for scholarship on early and silent cinema in the Balkans and the Near East. These geopolitical designations are to be taken heuristically, as temporary placeholders for conceptual mappings that remain to be developed and that this conference seeks to encourage.

A key common denominator between these otherwise diverse areas in (film) historical terms is that the arrival of the moving pictures finds them in varying stages of transition away from the Ottoman imperial system. The post-Ottoman transition was characterized by intermediate geopolitical formations that no longer exist, though they remain controversial, and by a high degree of overlap between imperial, national, and colonial jurisdictions.

These are critical issues that contribute to the under-representation of the Balkans and the Near East in early film studies. It is broadly known that the Balkans and the Near East feature prominently in early Western cinema’s orientalist imaginary and have stocked Western film companies’ catalogues with filmed “views.” Scholarship on these issues is still scarce, however, and these areas, as producers and consumers of early cinema, are virtually non-existent in film studies. Understanding the impediments to scholarship and mapping out focus areas for investigation can make for exciting and paradigm-changing scholarship.

With this potential in mind, the conference committee welcomes presentation proposals from university-, museum- and archive-affiliated scholars, as well as from independent researchers.  In addition to showcasing developments in research, the conference should be an inviting environment for building collegial ties with a view to future archival, historical, and theoretical work. The broader objective is for this event to become the first step towards a transnational community of scholars working on early and silent cinema in and about the Balkans and the Near East across new media and multiple platforms.

A selection of the conference papers will be published in an edited Special Issue of Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies.

Sample Topics

§  Periodization: pre-history; introduction of sound; the meaning of “earliness” in the geocultural space in question; etc.

§  Production: the meaning of domestic (local, regional, indigenous, etc.) and national; genres; personnel; organizations; economics; etc.

§  Exhibition practices and contexts: intertitles and commentators; open-air venues and fairgrounds; travelling cinematographers-projectionists; urban venues; distribution; etc.

§  Regulation: censorship; film trade agreements; diplomacy; quota systems; litigation; professional associations; etc.

§  Imports: networks; markets; economics; etc.

§  Specialized press and other cinema-related writing: star and fan discourses; reviewing; advertizing and marketing; audience research; etc.

§  Reception: spectatorship (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.); translation and appropriation; cultural politics; etc.

§  Intermediality: film and oral or print cultures; film and photography, film and theater, film and music; film and shadow-play (shadow-puppet theater), film and mass commercial print genres; film and non-Western pictorial or other systems of (re)presentation; etc.

§  Comparative approaches: comparative film histories; comparative aesthetics; metropolitan vs. peripheral early cinema; trans-national, sub-national, trans-local approaches; etc.

§  Film and history:  film and war; film and national histories; film and colonialism; film between empires; film and society; propaganda and ideology; fiction and event; etc.

§  Theory:  film and the nation(al); geopoetics and national poetics; post-Ottoman and post-colonial transitions; “mimicry;” coloniality; genre theory; gender; orientalism; alternative theorizations; etc.

§  Archives and other institutions of cultural heritage: public education; access; preservation; etc.




The conference will be conducted in the English language.

Keynote speakers:

·      Prof. Dina Iordanova (University of St Andrews, UK)
·      Prof. Cemal Kafadar (Harvard University, USA)
·      Prof. Hamid Naficy (Northwestern University, USA)

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2014

Proposal length: 300 words + short BIO

Registration: 30€ (university faculty)—15€ (students and unaffiliated researchers).  Free and open to the public.

Contact & Submissions: earlybalkansfilms at gmail.com

Conference Committee:
Emmanuel Arkolakis<http://eap.academia.edu/EmmanuelArkolakis>
Canan Balan
Maria Chalkou
Vassiliki Tsitsopoulou
Marian Tutui

1920s Russian documentary at the seventyseven film club.

I've just spent a lovely evening at the Arts House in Stokes Croft watching 1920s Russian sort-of-documentaries (if you like your documentaries with lashings of Soviet propaganda).

First up: Salt for Svanetia (1930) a visually astonishing piece of early ethnography which in its tone strongly reminded me of some aspects of Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli. Funny to think that this mountain scenery was shot the same year as Die Weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü. Fanck's mountain footage is better, but the camera work in Salt for Svanetia is much more interesting, as indeed one can see for oneself thanks to the miracle of Youtube:

The second film was Turksib (1929) an account of the building of the Turkestan-Siberian railway which was hugely influential among British documentary filmmakers of the 1930s, and is frequently mentioned in Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now.

Turksib (Turksib, 1929, Victor Turin) from Carlos Muguiro on Vimeo.

The above version is a very odd-looking one which seems to be an amalgam of a German version, complete with localised maps with German script, and a version with English titles in a very generic 'silent film' font. The version which we saw this evening, is the version released by the BFI, done by John Grierson in 1930, which is neither of these; it's very cleverly and emotively titled. We are told by Rotha that:

An appreciation of the titling of Victor Turin's Turksib appeared in the Sunday Observer, for 23 March 1930, and is worth citing: '...I have been waiting a great many years to see a film in which the titles would play a definite part in the visual and emotional progress of ideas...In Turksib the titling is inseparable from the sweep of the film...I cannot describe the curious assault on the senses of those moving arrangements of letters, the cumulative effect of the final titles with their massive cadences. The words of Turksib are images; integral, triumphant, menacing. They are symbols of disaster and determination, fear and terrific jubilation. They have no longer sound or aural meaning--they are eye-images, mute, rapid and wrought from the emotional fibre of the film itself.' This criticism is all the more interesting in that it comes from the pen of an advocate of the dialogue film.'

 

It was interesting to see the two films back-to-back, because the titles in Salt for Svanetia were in Russian, with English subtitles (from a German DVD). It's a very different experience as a translation, because you're seeing the two texts constantly juxtaposed (not quite as in the video above; I remember, from the viewing, lots of play with size of text, which isn't there in these titles (and may, indeed, be a figment of my imagination).

[trundles happily off to think some more about the translation of the titles of silent film]

Theatre in translation in Bristol, autumn 2014

I noticed a poster for the Theatre Royal in Bath the other day announcing a positive plethora of plays in translation coming to the theatre this autumn.  

One Man, Two Guvnors, an adaptation of Carlo Goldoni's 1743 play Il servo di due padroni, and adapted by Richard Bean, runs 8-20 September. Richard Bean is also the adapter of The Hypochondriac, from Molière's Malade Imaginaire, which opens 8 October.

The Ustinov Studio is putting on a season of black comedies: Dürrenmatt's Play Strindberg (which is in turn an adaptation of Strindberg's Dödsdansen), in a new translation by Alistair Beaton (11 September-11 October); The Father, a version of Le Père by Florian Zeller, which won a bunch of Molière awards in France this year, translated by Christopher Hampton (16 October-15 November); and Exit the King, a new translation by Jeremy Sams of Eugène Ionesco's Le roi se meurt (20 November-20 December).

Closer to home, the Tobacco Factory Theatres are putting on Strawberry and Chocolate. The production is oddly described as 'the UK première of the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and Chocolate' - presumably, what is meant is 'the UK première of a new stage adaptation of the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and Chocolate'...? Runs 2-13 September. It sounds great, though I'd be interested to see how much it owes to the translations which preceded it: there are published English translations of the screenplay for Fresa y chocolate and the Senel Paz short story on which it is based, both by Peter Bush; and there are at least two subtitled English versions extant. (Dissertation project, anyone?).

REMINDER: ARTIS call for applications (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies

 

REMINDER: CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

 

This is a quick reminder about the new ARTIS (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies) initiative. It offers training designed to help researchers in the field to improve their research skills and methods, to set up and manage research projects effectively, and to negotiate and apply theoretical models. Building on the long and successful history of the Translation Research Summer School (run by the University of Manchester, University College London, the University of Edinburgh and Hong Kong Baptist University), ARTIS has been conceived as a flexible platform to collaborate with institutions worldwide in the delivery of short, research intensive training in a variety of places, responding to local needs. Further information on the application process, application assessment criteria and future deadlines can be found at http://artisinitiative.org/events-2/hosting-an-artis-event/.

Institutions interested in hosting an ARTIS event are invited to apply by 15 September 2014. We welcome approaches from prospective event organisers. If you have questions, or would like to speak to a member of our team to discuss your event idea, please feel free to write to artisinfo at artisinitiative.org.

For the latest news about ARTIS, our Twitter feed is @ARTISinitiative.

Dante in Essex

I'm now back from my rain-washed and internet-deprived summer in Italy and blogging may resume, hurray.

We've had Dante in Leicestershire on the blog before, and now it's the turn of Essex. Before the summer we had the great pleasure of welcoming to Bristol Philip Terry, author of a recently published translation of Dante's Inferno, who was the guest at a round table and reading hosted by Dr Ellen O'Gorman of the Department of Classics and Ancient History.

You can read Ellen's account of the event here.

Terry's Inferno takes a completely brilliant slant on a text that has already been translated scores of times by transposing the action to the present day and the University of Essex campus (of which I have bitter memories, having once got totally lost there). The opening tercet pretty much sets the scene:

Halfway through a bad trip
I found myself in this stinking car park,
Underground, miles from Amarillo. 

Virgil becomes Ted Berrigan, ex-writer-in-residence at the University. The intertextual references throng thick and fast. It is not Beatrice who urges Berrigan to rescue the poet, but 'Marina':

I come from a place I must quickly return to,
For I need to give a talk at the

British Library, this same afternoon,
Where there is a symposium on the sonnet,
With Jeff Hilson and Paul Muldoon -

When I return there, often will I sing your praise."
She was silent then, so I began:
"Oh Lady of Grace, aren't you that

Lady writer on the TV
Talking about the Virgin Mary
Celebrated in that Dire Straits song?

Part of the purpose of the translation is to offer a commentary on UK higher education today. (The choice of text already gives us a great honking clue as to what Terry thinks of that.) A 'digital display / Above the entrance to the Knowledge Gateway' reads:

THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE DOLEFUL CAMPUS,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO ETERNAL DEBT,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE FORSAKEN GENERATION.

You can find Canto 13 of Terry's translation, with a few words about the concept behind the translation here. Readers with a London Review of Books subscription can read Canto I here. Excerpts from Cantos 1 and 18 can be read here. A bit of Canto 33 can be read here. Truly the internet is a marvellous thing. But what you should really do is just go buy the book.

Subtitling panel at Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Montréal, 25-29 March 2015

This may be of interest to some readers:

CFP for SCMS 2015 panel: On Subtitles

Patricia Rozema’s “Desperanto,” the first section of the 1992 omnibus film Montréal vu par/Montreal Sextet, follows Ann, an Anglophone Canadian housewife who just wants to have a good time visiting this Francophone city, yet struggles mightily with her inability to speak or understand French. A fantasy sequence during a party, however, suddenly allows her to see – and then interact with – the subtitles in English at the bottom of the screen, eventually serving as a magic carpet of sorts that whisks her off the screen at the end of the film.

Rozema’s character playfully enacts the viewer’s rather serious relationship with international cinema through the use of the subtitles. Subtitles permit wider, transcultural distribution of cinematic and televisual images, but do so by altering the image (and the viewer’s relationship with the mise-en-scène of that image). As such, viewers simultaneously read two images – one cinematic, one textual, both prone to mistakes and misreadings.

Inspired by Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour’s edited collection Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, this panel invites papers that consider subtitles as critical objects of study. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

- The practice of subtitling
- The history of subtitling
- Mistranslation in subtitles
- Theorizing the relationship between image and subtitle
- Films that metatextually interact with their own subtitles (e.g. “Desperanto,” Who the Hell is Juliette?) or place subtitles somewhere besides the bottom of the screen (e.g. Man on Fire).
- Subtitles vs. dubbing
- What gets subtitled and what does not
- Cinematic vs. televisual subtitling
- Subtitling practice and archives on the internet
- Subtitles for the hard of hearing

Please submit a paper title, an abstract no longer than 2500 characters, a five-item bibliography, and a brief author bio (no more than 500 characters) to Jeffrey Middents (middents at american.edu) by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Monday, August 4th.

More information on the conference at http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=call_for_submissions.