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The International Journal of Adaptation Studies  •  Established 1973


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News, Reports, CFPs, and Events:  2007


Conference Report:  Literature/Film Association Conference, 2007.  Guest post by Jim Welsh, Founding Editor Emeritus, Literature/Film Quarterly.  Posted on Literature Compass Blog.


 

Literature/Film Association Conference 2007

 

University of Kansas, Lawrence

 

October 11-14, 2007

 

Primary Focus:

 

Adapting Theatre into Film & Television

 

Also related issues of screen adaptation covering all genres

 

REGISTER ON-LINE NOW (CLICK HERE)

 


CONFERENCE SCHEDULE NOW AVAILABLE (CLICK HERE)

 

 

Updated Call for Papers

2007 Literature/Film Association Conference
11-14 October 2007, The University of Kansas, Lawrence


Featured Speakers Announced:

Primary Theme:  Adaptations of Theatre into Film and Television.  Papers are also invited from all areas of literature/film studies, including adaptations and remakes, literature/film theory, history and film, biography and film, genre topics, social issues (including race, class and gender studies), auteur studies, and individual film analyses.  The Theatre/Film focus should not be regarded as restrictive.

Proposals:  300-500 word abstracts due 15 August 2007.  Send to tibbetts@ku.edu and copy jxwelsh@salisbury.edu, cymiller@tiac.net, and tom.prasch@washburn.edu.


About Our Speakers:

Neil LaBute:  Director, screenwriter, and playwright, Neil LaBute is known for his edgy and often unsettling portrayals of relationships.  A recipient of awards and nominations from the Sundance Film Festival, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Society of Texas Film Critics, and the Independent Spirit Awards, among others, LaBute is known for theatrical productions and films alike, including In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty, Your Friends and Neighbors, Wicker Man, Fat Pig, and In a Dark, Dark, House, among others.

Dr. Frank Manchel:  A foundational scholar in the field of film studies, Dr. Manchel's work in the areas of film history and criticism has guided and informed generations of film scholarship.  He is the author of numerous volumes, including Terrors of the Screen (1970), Box Office Clowns: From Bob Hope to Woody Allen (1979), Gangsters on the Screen (1978)  Great Science Fiction Films (1982),  and the four-volume Film Study: An Analytical Bibliography (1990), along with countless articles in scholarly journals.  Dr. Manchel has had an extensive career teaching in the departments of both English and Communications at the University of Vermont, where he also served as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for more than a decade.  He is currently Professor Emeritus of English and Film at the University, and is celebrating the release of his latest volume, Every Step a Struggle: Interviews with Seven Who Shaped the African-American Image in Movies (New Academia Publishing, 2007), critically acclaimed as "must reading for anyone interested in the cultural politics of race in America."

Dr. Andrew Erdman:  Author of Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915 (McFarland, 2003), Andrew Erdman has taught film, theater, writing, and media studies at a number of New York Universities.  His work has appeared in Theatre Studies, The Theatre Annual, and The Bulletin of Biography, as well as Fortune and National Lampoon.  Dr. Erdman has also written for LifetimeTV.com, VH1, and the stage ("Likeable War Criminals" 2000), and is also featured as an expert in the documentary film, The Original Mermaid: The Amazing Story of Annette Kellerman, about a famous swimmer-turned-vaudevillian, produced for the Australian Broadcasting Company.  He is currently at work on a biography of Eva Tanguay (1878-1947), the so-called "Queen of Vaudeville."

Conference Director

Dr. John C. Tibbetts, Associate Chair
Department of Theatre and Film
The University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas 66045

Co-Directors

Jim Welsh, LFA Founder, Salisbury University emeritus
Tom Prasch, Washburn University, Topeka, KS/
Cynthia J. Miller, Emerson College, Boston, MA.

Sponsored by The Literature/Film Association, the University of Kansas Department of Theatre & Film, and the Hall Center for the Humanities (Lawrence, KS).

 

The Association

The Literature/Film Association was established in 1989 as an outgrowth of Literature/Film Quarterly, its editors, contributors and supporters, to provide for expedient conference planning and to encourage humanistic approaches to cinema studies. The first LFA conference was held at Salisbury State College in Maryland in 1980. Subsequent conferences have been held at Towson University in Baltimore, at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, at Arizona State University, the University of Rhode Island, Ashland, Oregon, and at the University of Bath in England. Jim Welsh, co-founding editor of Literature/Film Quarterly, was first President of the Association. The line of succession has included Tom Leitch of the University of Delaware, Peter Lev of Towson University, David Kranz of Dickinson College, and our current President, Nancy Mellerski of Dickinson College. John Tibbetts, our Conference Director for 2007, has served as Vice-President of the Association.

 

Jim Welsh

LFA Founder

 

Hotel Facilities:

Please Note: LFA Conference rates will apply only if rooms are booked by 11 September 2007. Rooms may be scarce thereafter, since on the Saturday of the Conference KU will host a home football game.

Parking at the Kansas Union should be available for $6.50 per diem. Best to arrive early on Saturday, however, because parking can be scarce on football weekends.

Location: Lawrence, Kansas, is located 35 miles west of Kansas City Airport (MCI), where cars can be rented. There is also an airport shuttle service to Lawrence. The University of Kansas is located on a hill (called Mount Oread) that overlooks the city of Lawrence. Spring Hill Suites are situated downtown on the Kansas River. Lawrence, one of the most livable cities in the Midwest, has a functioning "main street" (Massachusetts Avenue) where conferees will find decent restaurants, and many delightful shops, including a Borders for the bookish.

 

A PDF of the original conference brochure is available for download here.

 


The Association of Literature on Screen Studies

2nd Annual Conference

This year’s conference will be in Atlanta, 20-22 September 2007.  Anyone interested in submitting a paper should contact the seminar leaders below. Papers will be selected for publication for the first issue of the international journal, _ Adaptations: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies_ (OUP).  Any suggestions for further panels should be directed to the organiser, Barton Palmer, Department of English, Clemson University at ppalmer@Clemson.edu or visit our website http://www.literatureonscreen.com. A complete programme and additional seminars and panels will follow.

Panels proposed so far include:

 

 

 

Children’s Literature on Screen

Deborah Cartmell: djc@dmu.ac.uk

 

Film and the Critical Tradition

Timothy Corrigan: tcorriga@sas.upenn.edu

 

The Literatures of Film: screenplays, film romans, film reviews

Kamilla Elliott: k.elliott@lancaster.ac.uk

    

Parody and Adaptations

Douglas Lanier: doug.lanier@unh.edu

 

Videogame adaptations

Ian Hunter: iqhunter@dmu.ac.uk

 

Victorianism and Neo-Victorian Literature on Screen

Eckart Voigts-Vircow: voigts-virchow@anglistik.uni-siegen.de

 

'Chick Flicks': Women's Writing on Screen

 Imelda Whelehan: imw@dmu.ac.uk

 

The Screenwriter and the Director

Jack Boozer: jousb@langate.gsu.edu

 

 

Alfred Hitchcock at the Source

R. Barton Palmer: ppalmer@clemson.edu

 

Adapting Patricia Highsmith

Douglas McFarland: dmcfarland@oglethorpe.edu

 

The Economics and Institutions of Adaptation

Simone Murray: Simone.Murray@arts.monash.edu.au

 

Adaptations and Sequels

Carolyn Jess-Cooke: Carolyn.Jess-cooke@sunderland.ac.uk

 

Civil War Literature Into Film

James Grove: jgrove@mtmercy.edu

 

Adapting Southern Literature

(need coordinator  contact B Palmer)

 

Orientalism on Page and Screen

Robert Cross: rjcross6257@hotmail.com

 

 

 


News, Reports, CFPs, and Events:  2006


CFP:  Empathy and Ethics in Film and Literature (College English Association; November 1, 2006)

We invite papers on Empathy and Ethics in Film and Literature for the 38th annual meeting of the CEA.

Proposals should be submitted via the online database at http://english.ttu.edu/cea/conftool by November 1.

When you submit your proposal, you may use a pull-down menu to indicate your topic. Indicate at that pull-down menu that your submission should be directed to Carol Osborne, chair of the Film and Literature panels.

To preserve time for discussion, CEA limits presentations to 15 minutes.

All presenters must become members of the College English Association by January 1, 2007. For membership information, contact Joe Pestino at jpestin5@naz.edu

For more information about CEA, the general conference theme, or other special sessions, please consult the CEA web site - http://www2.widener.edu/~cea/


CALL FOR PAPERS:

PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS AND ARTISTRY IN FILM & TELEVISION

(Deadline:  November 1, 2006)

Statement: Dramatizations and documentaries of artists and artistry proliferate across the theater screens and on television. Their impact upon a viewer’s entertainment tastes and cultural education is difficult to assess. But it is clear that much of what we think we know about artists and their work could be the consequences of these audio-visual representations. The Journal of Popular Film and Television seeks original essays for a special issue on arts and artists in the popular media. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

1.  The BioPic as Genre. What might qualify the Biopic as a distinct genre? Or should we define it as a subset of the “historical film” genre? Further, do Biopics about artists (composers, painters, sculptors, literary figures, dancers, etc.)—as opposed to those about athletes, scientists, politicians, actors, explorers, etc.—deserve their own defining categories within that subset? Are there narrative models, or paradigms present in specific groups of Biopics, i.e., classical Hollywood in the 1930s-late 1950s; in postmodern biopics of the ’70s to the present?

2.  Debating the Conflicting Practices of Professional Literary Historiography and Audio-Visual Discourse. What are the issues in the current debate between literary historians and audio-visual historians involving the “credibility” of documentary and biographical films? Is our postliterate media culture as much visual as it is oral and written? How may a visual representation be as analytical and realistic as any written account; or, conversely, how may it achieve its own distinctive and unique qualities? Where does “truth” reside in both, i.e., how may we either “portray” or “betray” the artist?

3.  Fact and Fiction in Portraits of Artists. To what degree might a documentary portrait of an artist also flirt with fictive elements and dramatization? Conversely, to what degree should a dramatized biography be responsible to factual data?

4.  Visualizing the Creative Process. How can the interior creative processes of the artist be depicted in film and television? Consider the conception and execution of paintings in Minnelli’s Lust for Life; the composing and performance practices of music in Vidor’s A Song to Remember and Russell’s Mahler; the writing and enactment of poetry and prose in Molinaro’s Beaumarchais the Scoundrel and Dunmore’s The Libertine; the design and building of architecture in Vidor’s The Fountainhead and Kahn’s My Architect; the writing and staging of an opera in Leigh’s “backstage” Topsy-Turvy; etc.

5.  The Fictional Artist. Can filmed and televisual portraits of fictional artists reflect on the actual experiences and works of real-life artists and artistry? Consider the trumpet player in Curtiz’s Young Man with a Horn (based on Bix Beiderbecke) and the painter in Lewin’s The Moon and Sixpence (based on Paul Gauguin).

6.  The Influence of Artistic Movements and Styles on Audio-Visual Discourse. How have artistic movements and styles affected the work of filmmakers? Are the painterly styles of Impressionism revealed in the films of Jean Renoir; the operas of Verdi in the films of Visconti; architecture in the mise en scène of Antonioni; the modes of German Expressionism in “films noir”; the musical “theme and variations” form in Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould; the narrative experiments of Joyce and Woolf in such adaptations as Strick’s Ulysses and Gorris’s Mrs. Dalloway; the comic strip layouts of Ang Lee’s The Hulk and Berman’s American Splendor; etc.?

Guest Editor: John C. Tibbetts, University of Kansas. Submissions should be no longer than twenty double-spaced pages and should conform to MLA style. Please include a fifty-word abstract and five to seven keywords to facilitate Web researchers. Send three hard copies (with self-addressed, stamped envelope if return is desired) no later than 1 November 2006. John C. Tibbetts, Department of Theatre and Film, University of Kansas, 356 Murphy Hall, Lawrence, KS 66045; e-mail: tibbets@ku.edu; phone: 913-599-1418. ]


 

Call for Papers (Literature/Film Annual Conference; August 21)

 

 

LITERATURE/FILM ANNUAL CONFERENCE
 

3-5 November 2006

 

Burkshire Conference Center, Towson University, Towson, Maryland

 

Director: Peter Lev

Associate Directors: Jim Welsh, Nancy Mellerski

Organizing Committee: Greg Faller, Jennifer Lackey, Peter Lev

Program Committee: Greg Faller, Peter Lev, Rebecca Pauly, Richard Vela.

 

Call for Papers: Papers are invited from all areas of literature/film studies, including adaptations and remakes, literature/film theory, history and film, genre topics, social issues (including race, class, and gender studies), auteur studies, and individual film analyses.

 

This year’s area of special interest is transnational adaptation, e.g., literature, drama and film from one country that is adapted in another country (and often in another language). Or, a filmmaker working apart from his home country, language and/or culture, e.g., Ang Lee making Brokeback Mountain in Alberta and Wyoming.

 

Proposals should be 200-400 words. Submit proposals via email (preferred means of transmission) to Peter Lev (plev@towson.edu) with a copy to Greg Faller (faller@towson.edu). Please verify that your email has arrived.

 

If you would rather send a proposal via US mail, use this address: Peter Lev, Electronic Media and Film, Towson University, 8000 York Rd., Towson, MD, 21252-0001.

 

Deadline for proposals: 21 August 2006; notification of acceptance by 9 September.

 

Registration: Early registration is $120 for faculty, $90 for graduate students; must be postmarked by 10 October 2006. Please make check payable to Towson University. Late registration (after October 10, or at the door) add $10. Registration includes buffet lunch at the Burkshire on Friday, November 3 and Saturday, November 4.

 

Literature/Film Association Dues: $10; Please make separate check payable to Literature/Film Association.

 

For Information:  Contact Peter Lev, (410) 704-3189, Email: plev@towson.edu

 

Conference Hotel: Burkshire Guest Suites and Conference Center, 10 West Burke Avenue, Towson, MD, 21204. Reservations 800-435-5986 or 410-324-8101; general number 410-324-8100.

  

The Burkshire Guest Suites and Conference Center is a joint venture between Towson University and Marriott Conference Centers. All 103 suites offer full kitchen, living room and dining room areas, bedroom and balcony. Conference rooms and services are downstairs, along with a 140 seat dining room. Towson University is across the street, and the restaurants and shops of downtown Towson are two blocks away.

 

Hotel Reservations: Book your rooms directly with the Burkshire Guest Suites and Conference Center, 800-435-5986. Ask for the Literature/Film Conference Rate: $99 for one person (single suite)/per night; $119 for two people (double suite)/per night. To protect your room, reserve by October 1. After this date, remaining rooms will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, and the Conference rate is not guaranteed.

 


CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Film and History Conference: 

"The Documentary Tradition"

Click here to download the pdf for this conference:  Documentary Tradition pdf

Or visit the website directly at http://www.filmandhistory.org

 


News, Reports, CFPs, and Events:  2005


 

Spectacular Utah, Spectacular Shakespeare!

How about a Conference in Paradise, Pilgrim?

 By Jim Welsh, Literature/Film Quarterly Founder (Salisbury University emeritus)

It’s a continuing spectacle, that’s what.  On the way to the Utah Shakespearean Festival and the Wooden O Symposium one first arrives at Las Vegas, a man-made paradise fabricated of glitz and glitter for the entertainment of addicted morons.  It’s a potentially evil place, replete with Satanic seductions, a place where the Seven Deadlies might (and probably do) thrive.  My wife and I wanted to get out of town fast, before Mephistopheles materialized.  We would later see Mephistopheles, however, accompanied by lesser green goblins and Lucifer himself—Egad!—in the thrust study of Dr. Faustus, protected all the while by that metaphorical Fourth Wall.  But I’m getting way ahead of myself…

From Mafia Babylon to Biblical Icons

            Driving northeast out of Sin City, one will be treated to a different kind of spectacle, natural, not man-made.  For an hour or so, it’s all dusty mesquite, but then one crosses the northwest corner of Arizona, which is utterly gorgeous!  Thence unto the bosom of Abraham and the safety of Zion National Park, almost too beautiful to be believed, as the pilgrimage continues.  On our metaphorical journey to Southern Utah University, which is home to a major annual Shakespeare Festival, we stayed a few days in this Biblical Paradise (rather than the Fool’s Paradise of Las Vegas) before taking a northeastern loop through God’s Country to witness (Biblical diction still works best here) Cedar Breaks National Monument, which is only a dozen miles or so up the mountain (at 10,300 feet) from Cedar City, Utah, our final destination.

            There we would find a different kind of spectacle and magic.  Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (as directed, adapted, and imagined by Howard Jensen) has a pretty thin plot, after all, despite the ornamentation of Marlowe’s “mighty line,” but the Utah Festival dressed it up properly with elaborate costumes and marvelous special effects, smoke, fire, and mirrors, made further effective by a tempest conveniently conjured up during the evening open-air performance.  It was as if Prospero might have been in the wings, pulling strings and things.

So, What Did We Expect?  Not a Tony in the Wilderness!

            I went to Cedar City thinking, oh, yeah, I’ll hear a play or two besides participating in the 5th Annual Wooden O Symposium and I’ll see how well they know Shakespeare.  However, as Master William Baldwin hath written (in Beware the Cat, published in London “at the signe of the Faulcon by Wylliam Gryffith” in 1570), “A wise man may in some things change his opinions.”  And did I ever.  Once there, I was truly surprised, and I wanted more, more, more!  How good is the Utah Shakespearean Festival?  Good enough to win the 2000 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre!  And the 2005 season demonstrated why that Tony was so well deserved.

            We saw, for example, Romeo and Juliet (directed by Kate Buckley) and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (a play I never expected to see in production) in the Adams Theatre, roughly modeled after Shakespeare’s Globe, an open-air theatre with seats for the “groundlings” surrounding the thrust stage, but with all the tricks and traps of Shakespeare’s Globe, and the capacity to move the action to an indoor stage in the event of inclement weather midway through the production.  Romeo and Juliet was also performed in this theatrical space, a fine production with an enchanting Juliet (Tiffany Scott; Paul Hurley played Romeo) that, following the Folio text, dispensed with the stately Prologue and gave us a more humane Lady Capulet (Melinda Pfundstein) than Franco Zeffirelli might have ever imagined.  This production was an excellent demonstration of Shakespeare’s manipulation of chronological logic and the audience’s awareness and perception of time, as discussed by Simon Ryle, visiting the Wooden O Symposium from the University of Split in Croatia.  Ironically, Simon himself ran out of time in shaping his thesis, but the production clearly showed that Simon was on to something potentially new and interesting, even though one of his major sources was as old at St. Augustine.  Because, you see, it’s OK to be a traditionalist at the Wooden O.

            Shakespeare is performed in two theatres in Cedar City, one outdoor, and one indoor.  Across the street from the Adams Theatre in the newer of the two theatres, this one named for Randall Jones, one could see A Midsummer Night’s Dream (remarkably staged!  Fairies in the funhouse!  Director Kathleen Conlin did it with a distorting mirror!); or Camelot (director Brad Carroll did that one with a hidden live orchestra, and a right villainous bastard to complicate the plot); or an Irish surprise, Stones in His Pockets, by Marie Jones, directed by J.R. Sullivan, a two-hander with two gifted and versatile actors, David Ivers and Brian Vaughn, playing no fewer then 15 roles, a theatrical tour-de-force that was as well done in Utah as it had been done when I saw it—twice!—in London in January of 2004.  (The two actors, in their main roles, play extras, along with one claiming to be the oldest surviving extra from The Quiet Man, for a movie that is being shot down towards the Dingle peninsula.)  Actor Brian Vaughn also played King Arthur in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, which was based upon and adapted from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King.  Christine Williams was enchanting as Guenevere, and in excellent voice in the lusty (if not merry) month of May (though August was indeed upon us). 

So What About Next Year?

            What will be playing in Cedar City in 2006?  Hamlet leads (as Hamlet bleeds, June 22 to September 2), accompanied by Antony and Cleopatra and The Merry Wives of Windsor in the Adams Theatre.  Across the street what delights may await?  H.M.S. Pinafore for Gilbert and Sullivan fans, On Golden Pond for Ernest Thompson fans, and Room Service (by John Murray and Allen Boretz) for those who may remember the Marx Bros.  The actors are at hand, ready to be cast and fitted for costumes such as you’ll rarely see.  (The technical support in Cedar City is awesome!)  I would hope that friends active in the Literature/Film Association will want to participate in a Theatre/Film Symposium that might be linked to the Festival’s 6th Wooden O Symposium next year.  We’ll hope to have plans sorted out by October.  You may never have a chance to attend an academic conference linked to such quality theatre.

Hence, a Tentative “Call for Papers”

            I might remind new members that the Literature/Film Association has so far held four conferences west of the Mississippi—first on the campus of Arizona State, then in Ashland, Oregon, then in Iola, Kansas (linked with the Buster Keaton Festival), and finally in Dallas/Ft Worth (with the Film and History League in 2004); but we’ve never been linked to a major Shakespeare Festival before, to say nothing of that infernal nonsense, Pinafore; and, depend on it, this could be the start of something big.  Meanwhile, check the following website:  www.bard.org  The Wooden O “Call for Papers” for the 2006 Symposium, to be held early August, has already been issued, with an April 1, 2006, deadline.  Abstracts (250 word minimum) should be sent to woodeno@suu.edu and copied to jxwelsh@salisbury.edu with a clearly designated LFA link noted.  Focus on problems of Shakespeare to film (and Hamlet in particular), or theatre to film adaptation (On Golden Pond in particular).  What an excellent opportunity may await, supposing that bureaucratic details might be cleared.  We hope to have more details at the 2005 Dickinson College LFA Conference.  Stay tuned.

Jim Welsh is the co-founding editor of Literature/Film Quarterly, now in its 33rd year of publication, and the founder of the Literature/Film Association, which has been conferring annually for the past 16 years.  He is also co-author of Shakespeare Into Film (Checkmark Books, 2002), The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays Into Film (Facts On File, 2001), and The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film, 2nd Edn. Rev. (Facts On File, 2005).


Literature/Film Editors Revise Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film

(Salisbury, MD)  Professor Darrell G. Hagar of the Salisbury University English Department, an eighteenth-century specialist in literature and rhetoric, has read all of the 20 nautical novels of Patrick O’Brian; so when his colleague Jim Welsh needed a specialist to write an entry evaluating director Peter Weir’s adaptation Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World for the 2nd Revised Edition of The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film, just published by Facts On File, New York, he knew exactly whom to ask. Hagar considered the film a “sensory delight,” even though the film, he thought, missed some of the depth and complexity of Captain Jack Aubrey as portrayed by actor Russell Crowe.

The Encyclopedia, originally published in 1998, was edited by Jim Welsh and John C. Tibbetts of the University of Kansas. The new “revised” edition includes a “Foreword” written by Robert Wise, past president of the Motion Picture Academy and director of several popular films, including The Sound of Music, West Side Story, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The book includes entries for many adaptations released since 1998, as well as some titles overlooked by the first edition, such as Winston Groom’s novel Forrest Gump, published in 1986, and later adapted to film by Robert Zemeckis, Eric Roth, and the uncredited Barry Sonnenfeld, who was originally supposed to direct the picture, which became a sentimental blockbuster hit starring Tom Hanks.

Many of the entries (including Gump) were written by emeritus Salisbury professors, Jim Welsh and  Tom Erskine, who jointly founded the academic journal Literature/Film Quarterly at Salisbury in 1973 and then went on to develop a film major within the English Department at Salisbury University. Welsh and Erskine wrote or co-wrote entries for dozens of adaptations, including The Bourne Identity (2002), Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001), Cider House Rules (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), The Manchurian Candidate (2004), Mystic River (2003), Red Dragon (2002), The Shipping News (2001), The Tailor of Panama (2001), and Whale Rider (2002). But by far the single longest entry, running to over 6,000 words, was written by co-editor John Tibbetts covering The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Several other entries were written by members of the extended editorial board of Literature/Film Quarterly, such as Peter Lev of Towson University, Tom Leitch of The University of Delaware, and David Kranz of Dickinson College, where the next Literature/Film conference is scheduled for October of 2005.


Sweetness & Light, History, Literature & Film, War & Conflict near Dallas

By Jim Welsh, Founding Editor LFQ

Before going to the joint conferences of the Literature/Film Association and the Film and History League, my wife and I had been spoiled by a week north of Venice in Pordenone in a 4-star hotel while attending the Cinema Muto silent film festival of 2004. The American Airlines Dolce Conference Center near the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport fell a bit short of that elegance.  Our room was comfortable, but cramped.  “I feel like we’re in a foreign country,” my wife said upon first seeing the room, “a bad one!”   But after a week it didn’t seem so bad.  Though the closets were absurd, the bed was comfortable and the plumbing worked really well, even though the hot water seemed to be turned off about noon.  How Eastern European!

“Raw Turkey” Leads the Way…

Isolation was the watchword, even though the conference center was reasonably close to a railway station that could transport conferees either to Dallas or to Fort Worth.  Problem was, one had to get over the Interstate to get to the station.  This didn’t stop our British friend Laurence Raw, who currently is teaching in Turkey.  Laurence certainly had the most distinctive name tag of the conference.  It read: “RAW, TURKEY.”  Laurence assured us that getting over the Interstate was no worse than negotiating traffic in Istanbul.  “Raw, Turkey” not only got to shopping centers in Dallas but also to a Rodeo and even to a production of an Oscar Wilde play, something I had not thought to look for in that part of Texas.  But for people less adventuresome than Laurence, who worked for the British Council all through the Balkans before settling in Turkey, the Dolce location probably helped to capture audiences for the conference proceedings.

Sic transit [guts &] gloria mundi…

Plenary speakers invited to the conference included Larry Suid, celebrating the latest oversized incarnation of his UP Kentucky book, Guts and Glory, as he had also done at the national PCA conference held in San Antonio last spring.  The plenary speaker invited by the Literature/Film Association was Frank Thompson, author of no fewer than five books on the Alamo, including Alamo Movies, the Newmarket Press movie tie-in book for John Lee Hancock’s film The Alamo, released in April of 2004, and the novelization of the screenplay (in English, German, or Polish, take your pick).  Frank’s theme was historical accuracy in “remembering the Alamo” (or exploiting it) and part of his presentation involved a montage of clips from all of the Alamo movies representing the massacre.  Although Frank once worked for the outrageous “reality” TV show “Blind Date,” he brought no thought bubbles, though he did give a thoughtful, entertaining insider’s glimpse into The Alamo.

The plenary headliner for the Film and History League, however, was Adrian Cronauer, who totally explained to us why he was not Robin Williams, who once played a character named “Adrian Cronauer” in the Barry Levinson film, Good Morning, Vietnam! (1987).  Turns out the “real” Adrian Cronauer shares a vision of Viet Nam with conference organizer Peter C. Rollins.  Both of them served in Southeast Asia in 1965-1966.  Salisbury University Professor Donald M. Whaley provided a rather different perspective on the attitude of veterans towards Viet Nam in his paper “Lifers, Juicers, White Morons, and Heads: Oliver Stone, Vietnam Veterans, Film Historians, and the Contest over the Meaning of Vietnam.”  For Don Whaley, veterans who served after 1968 fought a very different war than those who had served earlier on.  He was careful to stipulate, however, that the experience of the earlier troops was in no way nullified by the alienated short-timers who found themselves in Viet Nam during the 1970s. 

Post-Election “Blues”

The conference ended with a huge, ungovernable panel that was organized to “debate” the meaning or the importance or the political impact of Michael Moore’s groundbreaking, record-breaking “documentary,”  Fahrenheit 9/11.  Turns out not everyone in the “Flagship” Auditorium liked Moore’s film, but the “debate” turned out to be something of an albatross that never really took off, really, though some of us tried to flap our wings and talk like Fibber McGee.  Perhaps this was a result of post-election depression for die-hard Blue-depressed Democrats, strangers in a strange Red land.  Adrian Cronauer buttonholed me afterwards, wanting to know why colleges are teaching youngsters how to think.  Good open-ended question, that.  Maybe television in general or the Fox News Network in particular has had a psychologically subversive effect that has ultimately impeded natural thought processes?  Maybe timid educators are afraid to ask hard, alienating, probing questions?  Maybe Bill O’Reilly and Chris Matthews and other cathode bloviators have permanently damaged thoughtful discourse, and not only on television?   Maybe even historians have forgot how to think?  Maybe Morris Berman got it right in his book The Twilight of American Culture (W.W. Norton, 2000), which suggested that religious superstition is replacing rationalism and that we are slowly drifting into a new “Dark Age”?   When Adrian put this question to me, I was standing in the Men’s Room at a urinal, and all I could think to say was, “Gee, I dunno; I guess I’m just pissing around here.”  Let’s say there was not an entirely successful meeting of minds here (or there).  I wish I had followed my original instinct and proposed a paper keyed to Saving Pvt. Ryan following the interpretation of Curtis White in his book The Middle Mind (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), which bears the subtitle: “Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves.”  The point I’m trying to make here is that maybe Adrian was on to something.

In a way this was a breakthrough conference for the Film and History League because David Culbert and other IAMHIST members opted to participate this time around.  IAMHIST (The Internationl Association for Media and History) is a long-established organization of historians, archivists, filmmakers, and television producers that meets every other year, most frequently in Europe.  Their meetings I have attended figure among the best conferences I have ever experienced.  David Culbert, who edits the IAMHIST journal, The Historical Journal of Radio, Television, and Film and Roger Smither, Keeper of the Imperial War Museum Film and Photograph Archives in London, were in the forefront of the IAMHIST delegation in Dallas.

LFA papers were limited to 20-minute presentations so as to allow time for discussion; Film and History papers were given 30 minutes.  In general, time limits were observed.  The conference was frustrating, however, because we too often had to choose between parallel sections including friends we only get to see once a year.  “Raw, Turkey” was not so happy, for example, that I somehow missed his paper discussing “Turkish and British Views of T.E. Lawrence on Screen,” but my friend and fellow amanuensis John Tibbetts was there to witness and write up the session.  I might add that Laurence Raw has become a regular at out Lit/Film conferences and that I have recommended that he be appointed our European delegate for the Literature/Film Association.    But such oversights were unavoidable, not at all intentional.  I will say, however, that almost all of the papers I heard were well structured and seemed to make sense and were also well presented, by and large.  Rumor had it that something like 400 people had registered for the conference. Perhaps a special citation should go out to Susan Rollins for her amazing efforts to organize this ambitious conference.  On the Lit/Film side, David Kranz of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania was particularly effective as well.  In other words, the conference was well organized and well administered.  We were fated to be sated with what the youngsters call “discourse.”

Soup, Soup, Beautiful Soups!

Of course we were also fated to be feted.  The banquet food at the conference center was also quite good, especially the nicely prepared soups, the tortilla soup, the creamed sweet potato soup, and the salmon bisque. We were reminded of the lyrics from Carousel at the conference:  “The vittles we et, wuz good, you bet, and we all had a wonderful time!”  As Jackie Gleason might have said of the Dolce Conference Destination, “How sweet it was!”

Next year the Literature/Film Association will meet at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Film and History League will hibernate, freeing up members to attend The XXI Conference of the International Association for Media and History in Cincinnati, Ohio, 20-24 July 2005, sponsored by the University of Cincinnati and The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion..  Send abstracts to Dr. Frederic Krome by 15 January 2005 (fkrome@huc.edu) ; the topic will be “Projections of Race and Ethnicity.” It’s another conference to look forward to.