No stranger to the works of Walter Benjamin, Catherine Russell continued her extensive research into the philosopher’s writings in her presentation “Walter Benjamin, Archiveology, and Critical Film Practice”. Through a close analysis of the structure and content of Morgan Fisher’s experimental film Parenthesis (), Russell theorized how some of Benjamin’s observations can lead to new insights on archival films and express them within the new language spoken in this experimenta

At the 11 AM panel on the very last day of SCMS, attendees settled in to the Fairmont’s Bersimis room, luggage in hand, ready to dash off to the airport after catching a final panel or two. At the “Ethics After Cinema” panel, Concordia’s Adam Rosadiuk presented on “The Anti-human and the Inhumane: Reading Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) through the Image Theory and Eco-ethics of Hans Jonas” alongside Rebecca Sheehan from California State University, Fullerton, and Harvard

Before beginning his presentation this morning, Concordia’s Martin Lefebvre drolly thanked all in attendance for making it to the 9 AM panel on the 22nd day of SCMS. Indeed, it has been somewhat of a marathon of scholarly rigour by day and snazzy events by night. It speaks to the attractiveness of this morning’s “Revisiting Film Theory II” panel that so many of us postponed our brunching in order to catch it. A reconsideration of cinephilia united the four presentations, each

While the title of Masha Salazkina’s presentation may have been “The Geography of Third World Cinema at International Film Festivals in the 1960s”, much of her concentration focused on one particular Festival during the panel “Geopolitics of Global Film Circulation: Third Cinema and the International Festival Circuit, 1960s-19070s”, chaired by Luca Caminati. Nestled in Central Asia, the Tashkent Film Festival is somewhat of an oddity. Prefiguring a kind of political imaginary

At first glance, PhD candidate Papagena Robbins was the odd woman out in panel B7 “Canadian Media Institutions: Negotiating the Local and the National” on Wednesday. While her fellow panelists—Mark Hayward (York University) and Peter Urquhart (Wilfred Laurier University)—may have concentrated on local and national distribution networks, all three presentations were thematically linked through their discourses on audio-visual heritage and finding the national within lost or fo

Although presenter Ora Gelley of North Carolina State University was unfortunately absent due to illness, both Concordia’s Tom Waugh and University of Missouri’s Brad Prager delivered engaging presentations in the panel “Alternative Views of Sexuality and Pornography.” Prager’s “German Film Rescues the Rain Forest: From New German Cinema to F*ck for Forest” compares the handling of non-Western sexuality in two German documentaries: Werner Herzog’s Ten Thousand Years Older (20

Kicking off day three of SCMS to a great start was the panel “On Paramediality: Transformations and Transgressions of the Paratext.” Following University of Winnipeg’s Andrew Burke, Carleton’s David Richler, and York’s Thomas Dorey, Concordia PhD candidate Matthew Ogonoski closed the panel with a presentation on “’You’ll Like This (Paratext) Because You’re in It’: Sweding, Fan Cultures, and the Remaking of Trailer Aesthetics.” Ogonoski’s primary object study is “sweding” whic

One of the final panels of day one of SCMS, “The Care for Opacity in East Asian Cinema,” was comprised of a group of four Montreal-based scholars: Erik Bordeleau (Concordia University), Dr. Sivestra Mariniello (Université de Montreal), Suzanne Beth (Université de Montreal) and Adam Syzmanski (Concordia University). Both Syzmanski and Bordeleau work with Concordia University’s Sense Lab. Bordeleau, the chair of the panel, started by conducting a cosmopolitical reading of Tsai

Opening up SCMS 2015 was a panel on Queer Media featuring Concordia’s Brandon Arroyo, alongside NYU’s Bruno Guarana, Indiana U’s Mark Hain, and Curran Nault of University of Texas. Complementing great presentations from an array of media contexts, Arroyo’s insightful “Chris Crocker and the Making of a Transindividual Celebrity” considers LGBT identity issues through an analysis of internet blogger/celebrity Chris Crocker, infamous for the “Leave Britney Alone” viral video tha

Sponsored by: The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Concordia University, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, and the National Film Board of Canada. Saturday, March 28th at 8pm in H-110 FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC check out the event on Facebook ____________________________________________________________________ “An evening featuring early stereoscopic animation, transnational film productions, pioneering women animators, early experiments in electronic soun

In part thanks to the hard work of those at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, the continent’s première moving image studies conference held by the Society of Cinema and Media Studies will be hosted this year in Montréal from March 25th to 29th. The preliminary 2015 program has just been revealed today. As with previous years, the massive program features a number of Concordia students and faculty, both at the MA and PhD level. Congratulations to those who have been selecte

As you probably all know, the 2015 annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) will be taking place in Montreal. This event is a terrific opportunity for scholars of all levels, as it makes possible for a huge community of thinkers from all parts of the world to be assembled under one roof. Researchers from many different institutions, yes, but also whose work spans the enormous field of study which makes the SCMS what it is today. This being said, m

Deadline: August 6th Details Below ____________________________________________________________________________ CFP for Panel: Approaching the WWE Universe SCMS 2015, Montreal In Show Sold Separately, Jonathan Gray writes that “we are all part-time residents of the highly populated cities of Time Warner, DirecTV, AMC, Sky, Comcast, ABC, Odeon, and so forth.” World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) undoubtedly belongs on this list as well. Indeed, the media company already concep

Deadline: June 30th Details Below ____________________________________________________________________________ “Digital Voyeurism:” Binge-watching, Streaming, and Individual Screens SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) Annual Conference, Montreal, March 25-29, 2015 Webcasting of video, television and audio started circa 1993. Inspired by two decades of ever-growing consumption of streamed visual content, as well as by the growing popularity of streaming platforms such

This week, at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Annual Conference, many students and faculty members from Concordia University will be presenting papers and participating in various events in and around the conference. To help you in finding out when and where to see these presentations, I’ve taken the liberty of creating a list of all the talks which feature students or faculty from Concordia. You can also refer to the full program to see who else will be presenting.

Today, the Cinema Studies Graduate Student Colloquium Series held its second Workshop, where PhD students presented their papers in preparation for the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Annual Conference, which will take place in Seattle next week (March 19-23.) In the presence of peers from the graduate program, as well as faculty members, PhD candidates Zach Melzer and Kaia Scott presented two very interesting papers. Zach’s presented his paper “Outdoor Digital Advertisin

When a snowstorm shut down all the airports in Chicago the day before the 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference was to start, we all panicked. Out of the nine grad students in the MHSoC contingent going to SCMS, only Kristen had attended before, and three of us – Kester, Rachel, and I – were scheduled to present on the first day. An over-night layover in Toronto and yet another delayed flight later, we arrived in Chicago just in time for the conference to start

Brandon Arroyo – “The Internet as Public Utility: Localizing the World-Wide Web” Brandon’s paper is concerned with situating the current politicized debates on broadband access within a historical continuum of contested control, in order to begin to understand what it might mean for the future of broadband if it is going to be regulated in the same way as a public institution or utility. Brandon is also chair of the panel Public Interactions with Cyber Connectivity, which he