Deadline: 31 December 2013
Open to: scholars of all fields, including history, film studies, literature, cultural studies and social sciences
Venue: 19-20 September 2014 in Moscow, Russia
Description
An international conference on “The Cold War on Film: Then and Now” will be held at the German Historical Institute in Moscow, Russia, on 19-20 September 2014. The conference is supported by the Wilson Center in Washington, DC (USA), the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, and the German Historical Institute in Moscow.
A focus on culture has been one of the major innovations in the study of the Cold War over the past decade. This has helped historians and the general public to view the Cold War as a conflict of ideas and images as well as bullets and bombs. Film is thought to have played a particularly important role throughout the Cold War. Scholars now recognise that cinema was a powerful vehicle of entertainment and propaganda, one that, among other things, showed audiences the ‘reality’ of what was for many people a peculiarly abstract conflict.
This conference seeks, first of all, to take stock of what we now know about the role played by the American film industry during the conflict. Secondly, it aims to put Hollywood’s ‘performance’ in an international, comparative context. The conference will look beyond Hollywood and explore how cinemas from different areas of the world treated and were affected by the Cold War.
As well as looking at cinema during the Cold War, the conference also wishes to explore how filmmakers have dealt with the subject since the conflict ended. A lot has been written about how filmmakers ‘remade’ the Second World War in the 1950s and 1960s and how that might have influenced wider beliefs about that conflict. There is a need to look at whether filmmakers have done the same with the Cold War.
The languages of the conference will be English and Russian.
Eligibility
Proposals for papers are welcome from scholars of all fields, including history, film studies, literature, cultural studies, and the social sciences. Among the questions papers might address are:
- What are the similarities and differences between the ways that national film industries framed the Cold War?
- Which film industries gained from the Cold War and which lost?
- What was distinctive about cinema’s contribution to the Cold War?
- What does a comparative analysis of Cold War cinema tell us about the uses of propaganda during the conflict and about the cultural Cold War more generally?
- How prominent a subject has the Cold War been on cinema screens since 1989?
- Which national cinemas have paid the Cold War most attention, how and why?
- Which cinemas have effectively airbrushed the Cold War?
- What roles have governments or other organisations played in reworking the Cold War on the big screen?
Costs
All lodging and meals for the duration of the conference will be covered. A limited number of grants will be given to contributors to cover their travel costs.
Applications
The deadline for submitting abstracts is 31 December 2013.
Proposals of 500 words, together with a brief CV, should be sent to Professor Tony Shaw at a.t.shaw@herts.ac.uk. Invitations to the conference will be issued by 31 January 2014. Papers (up to 25 pages in length) should be distributed to all participants one month before the event.
Any question must be directed to Mr. Tony Shaw or a.t.shaw@herts.ac.uk or Mr. Sergey Kudryashov at Sergey.Kudryashov@dhi-moskau.org.