CFP: Remake│Remodel: New Perspectives on Remakes, Film Adaptations and Fan Productions
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Call for Papers
REMAKE │REMODEL
New Perspectives on Remakes, Film Adaptations and Fan Productions
Interdisciplinary Conference
June 30-July 2, 2010
University of Göttingen (Germany)
Although film remakes present a continuous phenomenon throughout cinema history, they tend to be mostly regarded as derivative copies of earlier films, produced for purely commercial reasons. Many remakes, however, have received critical acclaim - in 2007, Martin Scorcese's The Departed, a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, won four Academy Awards, including one for best adapted screenplay - and the last decade in particular has seen a noticeable proliferation of commercially and/or critically successful remakes. Among these are the heist film Ocean’s Eleven (2002), cross-cultural remakes of Asian horror films like the Ringu-series, and a number of remakes of classic horror and Science Fiction films such as Dawn of the Dead (2004), War of the Worlds (2005), The Omen (2006), The Invasion (2007), and I Am Legend (2007). These commercial remakes attest to a current cultural trend that has also begun to attract academic attention.
Furthermore, non-commercial fan-made productions such as fan-films, fanvids, mash-up or recut trailers and machinima are gaining unprecedented visibility: Fanvids leave their respective fan communities by ‘going viral’ on YouTube, while semi-professional fan-films like the Lord-of-the-Rings inspired The Hunt for Gollum (2009) receive high media coverage, and the interdisciplinary field of fan studies has broadened considerably since the publication of Henry Jenkins' influential study Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture in 1992. The non-profit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), founded in 2007, is building a fan archive and is supplying legal advocacy to protect and defend fan works. Both remakes and transformative works often appropriate their predecessor's material in complex and multifarious ways, whether through cultural transfers, refocalization, or by shifting with the zeitgeist in order to address contemporary cultural preoccupations or anxieties. Fanvids in particular serve as a way for audiences to produce critical readings and rewritings of the source material instead of mere reproductions.
This interdisciplinary conference aims to stimulate discussions on the ways commercial remakes and fan-produced remodellings of films and TV series work. We invite paper proposals that offer theoretical approaches and/or case studies related to the following list of topics:
· Questions of originality, authorship and ownership
· Theories of intertextuality, repetition and seriality
· Remakes of classic horror and science fiction films
· The cultural work of remakes
· Cross-cultural remakes
· Fanvids, mash-up trailers, machinima and other fan productions
· Fan productions and gender
· Production and reception of fan works
· Copyright questions and corporate appropriation of fan works
Please note that the list of topics is meant to be suggestive rather than restrictive. The conference wants to bring together scholars from film and media studies, fan studies, literary and cultural studies, and gender studies. We especially encourage doctoral candidates and postgraduates to participate in this conference.
Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent to:
Kathleen.Loock@phil.uni-goettingen.de and Dorothea.Schuller@phil.uni-goettingen.de
The deadline for submission is February 15, 2010.
All submitters will receive a notification of acceptance or rejection by March 15, 2010.
Conference website at http://sites.google.com/site/remakeremodelconference.