[Discussion] CFP: Fashionable Films & the Endless Cutting Edge (9/15/04; NEMLA, 3/31/05-4/2/05)

[sule tarakcioglu]

CFP: Film: Fashionable Films & the Endless Cutting Edge (9/15/04; NEMLA,
3/31/05-4/2/05)

	In his amusing analysis of signs such as haircuts and sweat in
Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar, Roland Barthes develops a brilliant
aesthetic of signifiers in what he later, perhaps condescendingly,
associates with "bourgeois" art. While the intention of this panel is
not to extend such an aesthetic ourselves, we will examine a variety of
filmic texts that introduce "fashionable" signs that have influenced
and/or represented shifts in popular culture and customary morality. For
example, Barbara Stanwyck's infamous anklet in Double Indemnity, Beatle
boots and "mop-tops" in a Hard Days' Night, disco clothes and dancing in
Saturday Night Fever, Annie Hall's Chaplinesque outfits, the ubiquitous
"shades" and black leather jackets and outfits in The Matrix all signify
profound cultural shifts and readjustments. With this broad focus in
mind, this panel invites a variety of critical papers that address this
notion of "the fashionable" in modern and postmodern film. Panelists are
asked to closely examine one "cutting edge" film and discuss what edges
are specifically being cut or a series of films that track a specific
"edge" over a period of time, perhaps across the life-cycle of a
specific genre. Further peripheral questions could include: Is it
inevitable that we will look back upon, for example, The Matrix, with
the same sense of wonder, amusement, and perhaps, cultural superiority
that we currently look back on Ozzie and Harriet reruns or Saturday
Night Fever? Moreover, when we do, what cultural epistemes create such
profoundly powerful, historical subjectivities? In short, how does the
hip of today become the camp of tomorrow? How do the exact same filmic
texts become interpretable from radically different perspectives? What
is actually being sold via fashionable films? Illusions of superiority,
of having somehow, at last, arrived? Where? Conversely, in what ways
(and for whom) do some filmic texts stand outside the clutches of
perceived datedness?

Deadline: September 15, 2004

Anthony Hughes
hughes@hilbert.edu

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