THE SOUND OF THE FUTURE: MUSIC AND EFFECTS IN FILM Area
2008 Film & History Conference
“Film & Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond”
October 30-November 2, 2008
Chicago, Illinois
www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory
Second-Round Deadline: May 1, 2008
AREA: Visions of the Future Through Music in Film
From Flash Gordon and Sun Ra's Space is the Place to Star Wars and Children of Men, music and musical effects affect how we understand film. In science fiction, music plays an especially important role--suggesting alternative perceptions, confounding or confirming our sense of time or space, indicating possible worlds, giving texture to extraordinary states of consciousness, making the progress of the world beyond the present both strange and palpable. Music operates in complex layers, integrating the narrative of a film at multiple levels of sensation and presenting a dense interpretive field for the audience.
Papers can look at a wide range of topics involving the use of music in the science-fiction film. How much can the aural help to create our visions of the future and of "progress"? In what way have specific artists or directors sought to use music in creating or characterizing their visions of tomorrow or of somewhere far, far away? What lineages have certain musical texts left in film production? All these questions and more are welcome in this area that will seek to explore how music creates future worlds.
Please send your 200-word proposal by May 1, 2008 to
Mathew J. Bartkowiak, Chair: THE SOUND OF THE FUTURE Area
Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal. Deadline for second-round proposals: May 1, 2008.
This area, comprising multiple panels, is a part of the 2008 biennial Film & History Conference, sponsored by The Center for the Study of Film and History. Speakers will include founder John O’Connor and editor Peter C. Rollins (in a ceremony to celebrate the transfer to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh); Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of Visions of the Apocalypse, Disaster and Memory, and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood; Sidney Perkowitz, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University and author of Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, & the End of the World; and special-effects legend Stan Winston, our Keynote Speaker. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory).