Thursday, August 21, 2014

CfP : Cine Excess VIII - Are You Ready for the Country: Cult Cinema and Rural Excess

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Call for Papers - The 8th International Conference and Festival on Global Cult Film Traditions        

The University of Brighton Presents
Cine Excess VIII - Are You Ready for the Country: Cult Cinema and Rural Excess
The University of Brighton Grand Parade 14-16 November 2014
Over the last 7 years, the Cine-Excess International Film Conference and Festival has brought together leading scholars and critics with global cult filmmakers. Cine-Excess comprises of a 3 day conference alongside plenary talks, filmmaker interviews and 5-7 UK theatrical premieres of up and coming cult releases. 

Previous guests of honour to the annual Cine-Excess event have included Catherine Breillat (RomanceSex is Comedy), John Landis (An American Werewolf in London,The Blues BrothersTrading Places), Roger Corman (The Masque of the Red DeathThe Little Shop of HorrorsThe Intruder, The Wild AngelsBloody Mama), Stuart Gordon (Re-AnimatorKing of the AntsStuck), Brian Yuzna (SocietyBeyond Re-AnimatorThe Dentist), Dario Argento (Deep RedSuspiriaInfernoJoe Dante (The HowlingGremlinsThe Hole), Franco Nero (DjangoKeomaDie Hard II), Vanessa Redgrave (Blow UpThe DevilsJulia), Ruggero Deodato (Last Cannibal World,Cannibal HolocaustHouse on the Edge of the Park) Enzo G. Castellari (KeomaThe Inglorious Bast***s) and Sergio Martino (TorsoAll the Colours of the Dark). 

With the 2012 relocation of Cine-Excess to the School of Art, Design and Media at the University of Brighton, new developments connected to the event have included the recent 2013 launch of the peer-reviewed Cine-Excess E-Journal (www.cine-excess.co.uk), which publishes a selection of papers from the event.

Cine-Excess VIII is a collaboration between the School of Art, Design and Media and the C21: Centre for research in twenty-first century writings at the University of Brighton. To coincide with the 40th anniversary of Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s ground breaking backwoods classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,  Cine-Excess VIIIconsiders cult representations of the rural space and its inhabitants, analysing the extent to which depictions of the countryside often reveal fascinating issues of class, sexuality, race and regional distinction. 

From early moonshine movies depicting ribald rural rule breaking, to survival splatter epics such as Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Southern Comfort (1981), The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and beyond, the American countryside and its inhabitants come to evoke longstanding traditions of humour, horror and morbid fascination within a range of cult film genres. Beyond this established Stateside preoccupation with the South, Europe has also used cult imagery to acknowledge its own regional splits and divisions, which have fed into a range of representations, myths and case-studies that extended from eugenic case-study to exploitation cinema.  In addition to these territories, other global cultures frequently figure the rural space as a site of either erotic emancipation or fearful foreboding in a range of unsettling and iconic genres that warrant further investigation.

In order to explore these themes further, Cine-Excess VIII will consider the wide variety of representations of the cult countryside from a range of differing theoretical and methodological perspectives, while also considering larger national notions of the rural space within film, television, literature, comics and digital media. A number of iconic international filmmakers associated with rural cult cinema classics will be in attendance at Cine-Excess VIII to discuss their work and interact with academic speakers. Proposals are now invited for papers on any aspect of rural excess. However, we would particularly welcome contributions focusing on:
  • ‘White Trash’ Auteurs: From Tobe Hooper to Rob Zombie and beyond
  • From Deliverance to Dukes of Hazard and Beyond: genres of cult country folk
  • White Trash Terror: the American countryside in literature and film
  • From Eugenics to Exploitation: historical case-studies of Southern ‘deviance’
  • The Return of the Rural: a special panel on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its sequels
  • Yuppies in Peril: class, culture and the politics of hatred
  • Moonshine Madness: comic cycles and the country trickster
  • From Southern Belles to Savage Sisters: female vendettas in the rural space
  • Backwoods But British: the rural space in British film and literature
  • Revenge of Nature: animal revolts in the cult countryside
  • The Queer Countryside: sexuality and the rural space
  • Small Screen Southerners: TV representations of the countryside
  • Europe’s Others: transnational representations of the rural
  • Sounds of the South: the role of music and soundtrack in the rural movie
  • Cult on Cults: Southern saviours and preachers of hate
  • Bucks, Cucks and Harlots: eroticism and rural desire
  • ‘Hicksploitation’, ‘Blaxsploitation’ and race conflict within cult cinema
  • Deep River Savages: Italian cult cinema and the cruel countryside
  • Outback Outrages: the rural space in Australian cinema
  • White Trash in Tech: rural rule breaking in online and videogame formats
We welcome individual paper submissions, panels and roundtable proposals related to a range of international traditions of rural excess.

Please send a 300-word abstract and a short (one page) C.V. by 3RD September 2014 to:

Dr. Xavier Mendik - Director of the Cine-Excess Film Festival - x.mendik@brighton.ac.uk)

Or

Dr. Katy Shaw - C21: Centre for Research in Twenty-first Century Writings - k.shaw@brighton.ac.uk
  
A final listing of accepted presentations will be released on 17th September 2014.  A selection of conference papers from the event will be published in the Cine-Excess E-Journal in 2015. 

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