Category: Events

Diana  Anselmo,
Anna Luise Kiss 
Adrien José Charlois

The first IAMHIST challenge was launched this year and we received a lot of fascinating and interesting proposals. Please find here a short overview of the winning projects (alphabetical order):

Diana Anselmo for the symposium Looking Back and Moving Onwards: Devising Innovative Strategies to Produce Diverse Knowledge and Academic Activism in Women’s Film & Media History to be organised at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, on 24 February 2017.

Though women and girls have significantly impacted film production since its onset, our knowledge of the myriad ways they contributed to the worldwide success of Hollywood’s media industry is still limited. From the loss of primary sources to the historical marginalization of nonwhite, non-male, non-privileged, and non-heteronormative individuals, our records of women in silent film history are riddled with gaps and blind-spots. This one-day symposium brings together five innovative film and media scholars who are currently working with novel digital archives, alternative sets of data, and forgotten film pioneers in a quest to restitute diversity and depth to our knowledge of women’s roles in cinema and media history.

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Adrien José Charlois for the seminar on The construction of historical narrative and identity through cinema and television in Mexico and Ibero-America to be organised at the Unidad Azcapotzalco facilities of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), Mexico.

As one of Latin America’s principal producers of cinema and television, Mexico is well situated as a relevant center for related fieldwork and is currently at the crossroads where media, history, and memory studies stand to gain tremendous importance at a regional level. The planned conference will serve as impetus to this development. The dynamic we propose is the creation of a space for discussion within the logic of a seminar, which will explore different investigations concerning representations of the nation’s past in the two principal audiovisual media: cinema and television. To this end, we are inviting specialists in both areas to present works focused on their respective research interests, which will allow for raising questions about the ways in which the nation’s past is constructed, as well as about the forms of cultural memory that inevitably come into play through the process of remediation of memory evoked by audiovisual media.

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Anna Luise Kiss for a workshop on Film extras and bit-players in film history to be organised at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf on 14-15 July 2017, Germany.

As film extras and bit-players in Germany are a highly unexplored field of research, I decided to offer a research based seminar for Master’s students in Media Studies at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. This seminar will be dedicated to the history of film extras at Germany’s oldest film production site, Studio Babelsberg which is next to our university. Seven highly motivated students applied for this research project (as we are a very small university, this is quite a proper group). Since 1912 – when the first film was produced here – thousands of extras have worked on the studio lot. The main aim of the seminar is to shed light on the way extras were employed during the period of the UFA, DEFA and nowadays. By combining this research with seven case studies, we hope to develop an understanding of the transitions in the way extras and bit-players were hired, the conditions of their work, the way they were staged and the reception of their work.