The XIII Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand looks like it's going to be pretty good value. Scanning the list of speakers for names I know, a few jump out at me: Bill Routt ('It's the hundredth anniversary of The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906): Should we care?', with Ina Bertrand); Rolando Caputo ('The Historicity of Gesture'); Adrian Danks ('Domesticating the Archive: Re-Presenting the Australian Home Movie', which sounds rights up my alley); Barrett Hodsdon ('Auteur Games'); George Kouvaros, whose book on Cassavetes is a must-read (The Misfits and Late Style); Christian McCrea ('"It Was Not A Significant Bullet": Beautiful Images on Ugly Screens', which is about what a video iPod does to Herzog). Pouring over the program, session titles jostle for my attention: 'The Short Horizon: Historical Insecurities in Film Theory and Practice' by Tom Redwood; 'Australian Film Theory Criticism 1975–85' by Deane Williams and Con Verevis; 'Digitising Memory Traces' by Dirk De Bruyn. The highlight, however, undoubtedly and unsurprisingly, would have to be Adrian Martin's plenary session, 'Stop the World, I Want to Get Off: Uses and Abuses of the 'New Cinephilia''. Here's the abstract: There has been, in recent years, an enormous amount of discussion (books, essays, conference panels, reams on the Internet) devoted to cinephilia the love of cinema and its practice, whether in acts of writing, curating/programming, teaching or filmmaking. But certain excesses and contradictions in the current discourse are disconcerting, to say the least especially to anybody who, in any fashion, chooses to define themselves as a cinephile. There is now practically a master narrative, a myth or legend concerning the rise, fall and comeback of cinephilia from the gloriously innocent '50s, through the 'rise and ideology' in the '60s and '70s, and finally to the triumphant current 'return of the cinephile'. In this supposed age of the 'new cinephilia', where bits of films are yoked to powerfully fashionable theories of memory and modernity, it's worth trying to intuit what ongoing cultural battles are hidden behind what Paul Willemen once called the "smokescreen" of the cinephile passion, and what lessons are to be found in the writing of its history. The conference begins on November 17. You can access the program here and the full list of abstracts here. Some of the papers are already available online in the latest issue of Senses of Cinema.
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