London calling.

Society for Cinema and Media Studies 

Conference London, England

March 31-April 3, 2005

This year's Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference was not the first to be held outside of the United States, but it extended the intent of the several annual meetings held previously in Canada: to open the discussion of cinema and media studies instigated by the U.S.-based organization more broadly to British, European and Asian counterparts. Two straight days of sunshine set the mood for wonderful exchange in a capacious London conference center, located just off Russell Square in Bloomsbury. The attendees consisted of a mixture of nationalities, tinged with noir elements, including some suspicion about the motives of the invading Yanks (although the journey was too arduous or expensive for many Americans).

The London venue provided a chance to pay tribute to some of our most inspiring colleagues, some of whom work abroad. The Society granted an honorary membership award to Stuart Hall, one of the leading lights of cultural studies research as it developed in Birmingham in the 1970s, who continues to steer the field toward the most vital issues of the day. The second such award went to Pearl Bowser, whose untiring work with the Oscar Micheaux project and archives deserves thanks greater than our thunderous applause could record. The 2005 SCMS Dissertation Award went to Sylvia Chong of the University of California at Berkeley for her dissertation "The Oriental Obscene: Violence and the Asian Male Body in American Moving Images in the Vietnam Era, 1968-1985." The Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Award winner was Matthew Bernstein, for his essay entitled "Oscar Micheaux and Leo Frank: Cinematic Justice Across the Color Line," which was published in Film Quarterly. Honorable mention went to Edward Dimenberg for Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004) and Lee Grieveson for Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America (2004). This author was the recipient of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award for Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (2003).

A larger-than-usual number of plenary sessions showcased the work of other luminaries who are primarily based in Britain and Europe: Laura Mulvey, Isaac Julien, Charlotte Brunsdon, Annabelle Sreberny, Thomas Elsaesser, Leonardo Quaresima, Richard Dyer, Gertrud Koch, Tytti Soila, Tim Bergfelder and Norberto Minguez. These afternoon and evening sessions sought to bring together the conference's disparate and growing constituencies: this year's program tipped from "pamphlet" to "book," with 17 concurrent sessions in each of 14 time slots for a total of 238 sessions. The plenaries met with varying success, largely due to the demands of jam-packed days and the lure of London outside the conference center. A smaller than expected crowd heard Mulvey's interview with Isaac Julien, due to the event being held late on Saturday evening. Julien charted his movement from Sankofa and independent cinema (especially focused on Looking for Langston [1989]) through an engagement with feature films (Young Soul Rebels [1991] and the documentary BaadAsssss Cinema [2002]) and now to art house installations ("Baltimore," 2003). It was a bittersweet commentary on the difficulties of making important films in the context of a shrinking public sphere and winnowing resources. Mulvey's own talk followed, opening a discussion of new forms of spectatorship in the age of the DVD with a dazzling reading of the first shot of Douglas Sirk's 1959 version of Imitation of Life. Mulvey described the camera craning down from the boardwalk to the beach to follow Lana Turner's hunt for little Susie, after which a photographer is seen snapping a photo from the lower right-hand section of the frame. In the jostling a young black woman descends the same steps, and literally in the flash of the tourist's camera, she disappears. Without the tools to revisit the scene, this evanescent figure is lost, of course; with them, we see that Sirk offers the nexus of the film's themes in the frames of his opening shot. Mulvey's reframing of her observations from her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" begins, then, by insisting on the complexities of this spectator, able to see anew.

Other plenary sessions were as riveting. Brunsdon's work on television continues to be a model toward which others might strive. Her talk, along with Hall's presence and Mulvey's and Elsaesser's plenary remarks, also reminded conference attendees that much of what we are discussing today owes a great debt to the work begun by these scholars in the 1970s. Her clip of the television series "Jamie Oliver's School Dinners," in which the eponymous chef/heartthrob demonstrates the disgusting origins and inner workings of chicken nuggets, brought down the house. Koch offered an extraordinary paper that used studies of new media, including Lev Manovich's book The Language of New Media, as a road into thinking about a general theory of media as a "language."

Though the plenary sessions frequently directed attention to European and British objects, what seemed most compelling to many of the conference participants was the reframing of American cinema that took place as a result of this glimpse from abroad. No longer presumed to be the natural or naturalized referent of "the cinema," American film became, belatedly, a national cinema. And in both senses: it seemed pressing, on the one hand, to talk more than ever about American hegemonies in worldwide entertainment and media industries. On the other hand, it also seemed crucial to talk about dissent in activist and independent American media and as specifically as possible about social histories of American cinema without presuming that its models, practices or modes of organization require analogs or are exportable elsewhere.

For example, the session on queer cinema that included representatives from the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (which opened just prior to the conference and sponsored a special screening for SCMS members) made visible the complicated international circuits traversed by queer makers. On the other hand, it seemed equally important that the idea of national cinema be exploded, interrogated, put under pressure so that its own contradictions and seams could become more available to scrutiny. The pressure was felt keenly in discussions occurring during sessions devoted to the Rutgers University Press project "Screen Decades," a series of volumes edited by Lester Friedman and Murray Pomerance, each to contain commissioned essays on a single year of a given decade of American cinema without making substantial reference outside that frame.

If conference venues outside the U.S. produce a certain amount of reflection on the idea of America, it comes at the price of purchasing that reflection elsewhere. It's an avoidable but important tension, one I hope will be in evidence at the SCMS conference in Vancouver, Canada in 2006.

AMY VILLAREJO is an associate professor at Cornell University, where she teaches film and is Director of the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies program.