[Filmfestivalresearch] NECS 2013 Panel Proposal

Dennis Broe Dennis.Broe at liu.edu
Mon Jan 28 18:34:52 CET 2013


--
I am trying to pre-constitute a panel with
a colleague Terri Ginsberg. We are looking for a third and then a fourth or
co-respondent. Would anyone be interested in joining the panel and/or do you
know anyone who might? Hope to see you in Prague.

Panel: “Politics, Aesthetics and Mode of Production: Economic Censorship as
Handmaid to Political Censorship." This panel will focus on how one may read
the political in the economic, how such discourses as "economic censorship"
are seldom discussed and how deliberate changes from one mode of production
to another forced by economics may result as well in changes in the
political and aesthetic content of the media object in question, be it
films, television, or the internet and in such areas as film festivals.

Dennis Broe: “Runaway Realism: How Italian Cinema Learned to Start Worrying And Love the Box Office" 
A  consideration of the changeover in Italy from Neorealism to the more
commercial cinema of the 50s, induced by the Andreotti Law which helped
install the American mode of production and produced more Hollywood style
stars and genres, though in the Italian context because of the prior history
of Neorealism and because the popular cinema itself was politicized in the
immediate postwar period the traces of this resistant cinema remained. The
test case will be DeSantis' Bitter Rice which locates itself on the cusp of
this change. The paper will also focus on how actively the U.S. was involved
in effecting this change and how this interference was on the economic plane
similar to the interference on the political in the election of 1948. The
film itself is a divided text, perhaps in the U.S. similar to Sweet
Sweetbacks Badass Song, in that it forecasts the studio "star" direction in
Italian cinema but since it is also at the same time a documentary on the
female labor in the rice fields, it predicted a possible amalgamation of the
political and the popular. The films that followed, though, generally tended
to shrink the documentary option and enlarge the melodramatic star qualities
of a cinema shot on location, but which was being forced more and more back
into the studio, a move which Andreotti specifically favored as
rationalizing film production.
>
Terri Ginsberg [terri1 at mindspring.com]
I want to propose a paper on Simon Louvish's 1974/5 film, To Live in Freedom
[aka To Be a Free People]--a British/Israel documentary that is perhaps the
ideologically most radical Israeli film of which I am aware as far as goes
the question (history and theoretical analysis) of Zionism.  The film is not
too terribly challenging cinematically, although its narratology and use of
direct footage are interesting historiographically, thus giving me an
opportunity to complicate and elaborate the neostructuralist approach
developed thus far in some earlier analyses.  Indeed the film's discourse is
in minor ways, not surprisingly, limited by its Israeli production context,
but it's also very important because of the controversy it stirred, not
merely, expectedly, in the Israeli mainstream but on the Israeli
left--including the far left.  The film is firmly situated intellectually on
the left, with apparent revolutionary nationalist leanings that were--and
remain--critical of the official Israeli left's Zionist apologeticism and
patronizing containment of Palestinians and their concerns.  I have thus far
interviewed Louvish and one of the film's Palestinian interview subjects and
may conduct one more pertinent interview before completing the full piece.



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