40+ Essays on Film, Moving Image, and Digital Media in the Sarai Readers

Framegrab image of early action heroine "Fearless" Nadia (née Mary Ann Evans) in Miss Frontier Mail (Homi Wadia, 1936). Read Rosie Thomas's 2007 article on this film.

Today, Film Studies For Free focuses on, and links to, some remarkable film and digital media studies essays commissioned and edited by the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi.

The Sarai Programme was initiated in 2000 by a group consisting of internationally renowned cinema scholar Ravi S. Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram (both fellows at CSDS) and the members of the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), a Delhi based group of media practitioners, documentarists, artists and writers.

Sarai's mission is to act as a platform for discursive and creative collaboration between theorists, researchers, practitioners and artists actively engaged in reflecting on contemporary urban spaces and cultures in South Asia. Its areas of interests include media research and theory, the urban experience in South Asia: history, environment, culture, architecture and politics, new and established media practices, media history, cinema, contemporary art, digital culture, the history and politics of technology, visual/technological cultures, free and open source software, social usage of software, the politics of information and communication, online communities and web-based practices.

The below collection of articles -- painstakingly drawn from the numerous, openly accessible Sarai Readers produced by the collective -- reflect the above interests, but have been curated here by FSFF because of their particular, potential relevance to scholars of cinema and related moving image and digital media studies.

• Rehan Ansari, 'On Mushtaq Gazdar's "History of Pakistani Cinema"’, Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Kaushik Bhaumik, 'Fear in Neo-Kaliyuga Epistemic Troubles in Techno-Smrti Times', Sarai reader 08: Fear
• Franco La Cecla, Stefano Savona and Piero Zanini, 'Light from the Box', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Saayan Chattopadhyay, 'Framing Frontiers: The Suspended Step towards Visual Construction of Geopolitical Borders', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Keti Chukhrov, 'Glamour as a Form of Culture in Post-Soviet Russia', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Rana Dasgupta, 'Beyond the Apocalypse: An Unfinished Meditation on Ethics', Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
• Tushar Dhara, 'The Khushboo Case File: Reverse Culture Jamming', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Deb Kamal Ganguly, 'Pixels of Memory on the Hypertextualised 'I’', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Shohini Ghosh, 'Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Nanna Heidenreich and Nicole Wolf, 'Conversation on Locating Conflict', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Menso Heus, 'Innovating Piracy: The Bare Act of Stealing, and Shaping the Future', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Hikari Hori, 'Representing a Woman’s Story: Explicit Film and the Efficacy of Censorship in Japan', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Lawrence Liang, 'Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Geert Lovink, 'Surveillance, Performance, Self-Surveillance: Interview with Jill Magid', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Geert Lovink, 'The Typewriter of the Illiterate: Interview with János Sugár', Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
• Kristian Lukic, 'Let us Become Children! Training, Simulations and Kids', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Lev Manovich, 'New Media: A User’s Guide', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Ranjani Mazumdar, 'Cracks in the Urban Frame The Visual Politics of 9/11', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Ranjani Mazumdar, 'Ruin And The Uncanny City Memory, despair and death in Parinda', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Media Researchers @ Sarai, 'Complicating the City: Media Itineraries', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Rahul Mukherjee, 'A Reply to Terrorism on a Wednesday: A Citizen Vigilante’s Prescriptions for Governing Terrorism', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Batul Mukhtiar, 'Journey through a Disaster: A Filmmaker’s Account of the Gujarat Earthquake, 2001', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media 
• Kartik Nair, 'Fear on Film The Ramsay Brothers and Bombay’s Horror Cinema', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Sandhya Devesan Nambiar, 'Factoring Fear: Investigations into Media(ted) Fear', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Warren Neidich, 'The Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence 
• Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Warporn Warpunk! Autonomous Videopoesis in Wartime', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Manuel Ramos Martínez, 'Betrayed Borders: Double Agents and the Crisscrossing of Conflicts', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Pooja Rangan, 'Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood As a Signifying Practice', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Raqs Media Collective, 'Dreams and Disguises, As Usual [on Fantômas]', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Janko Röttgers, 'P2P: Power to the People', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Chandak Sengoopta, 'Art without Frontiers? Satyajit Ray and the Constraints of Universality', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Debjani Sengupta, 'Mechanicalcutta: Industrialisation, new media in the 19th century', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life 
• Bhrigupati Singh, 'Screening Injustice: Race, violence and media flows', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Radhika Subramaniam, 'Urban Physiognomies', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Ravi Sundaram, 'Recycling Modernity: Pirate electronic cultures in India', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Anand Vivek Taneja, 'Begum Samru and the Security Guard', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Kuhu Tanvir, 'Myth, Legend, Conspiracy Urban Terror in Aamir and Delhi-6', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Hansa Thapliyal, 'Evictions - Projections Watching Dharmendra in Suburban Lagos', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Rosie Thomas, 'Miss Frontier Mail: The Film That Mistook Its Star for a Train', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Ravi S. Vasudevan, 'An Imperfect Public Cinema and citizenship in the "third world"', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Ravi S. Vasudevan, 'The Exhilaration Of Dread Genre, narrative form and film style in contemporary urban action films', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Ravi Vasudevan, 'Disreputable and Illegal Publics Cinematic Allegories in Times of Crisis', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Slavoj Žižek in conversation with Shuddhabrata Sengupta, 'From Anxiety to Enthusiasm', Sarai Reader 08: Fear 

On the myth of the frontier in cinema and culture

'A whole new world that is nothing but frontier...': Richard Langley in the narration to his excellent short film, embedded above, American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters

This film concerns recent apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters, which have utilised notions of the ‘frontier’ to develop ideas of American hegemony in the uni-polar era, even as they postulate a universal erasure of national boundaries. Largely, the non-human agents of apocalypse in such films are responsible for erasing boundaries, but in so doing they simultaneously establish the conditions of American renewal. Indeed, the frontier must be continually renewed; it is drawn in order to be effaced, redrawn and effaced again.

      However, at the moment of effacement, when the boundaries between nations are broken down and a sense of universality seems triumphant, the dawning of a new world re-inscribes the frontier - the new world that is constructed is still American led; the mooted universality is both particular and parochial. Such films, which appear to posit un-American (or at least post-national) frontiers, actually achieve the inverse; the universal equality offered by apocalypse offers an American un-frontier, a site seemingly without boundaries, but which is simultaneously nothing but frontier, a re-dramatisation of America’s founding mythology.

The inspiration for today's Film Studies For Free entry -- on the (transnational) myth of the frontier in cinema and related culture -- was Richard Langley's excellent, highly persuasive, short documentary embedded above. That video also has a vivid, post hoc connection to this blog's popular list of "Links of Doom and Disaster! Apocalyptic Film and Moving Image Studies" posted but a few short weeks ago.

Like cinematic apocalypses, filmic frontier mythology turned out to be an incredibly rich vein of web scholarship. So, many thanks to Richard and all the below named scholars for making sure their very valuable work was openly accessible online.

Open Access is, after all, the real 'final [e-]frontier'.

And hopefully it won't turn out to be a myth...

• Catherine Lynn Adams, 'Africanizing the Territory: The History, Memory and Contemporary Imagination of Black Frontier Settlements in the Oklahoma Territory', PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 2010
• Tyler Lorey Adams, 'The Geography of Frontier', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
  
• Jon Baldwin, 'Other Bother: The Alien in Science Fiction Cinema; Sardar and Cubitt's Aliens R Us' , Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 20, August 2003
• Ann Barrow, 'The Cutting Garden: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis and ReceptionTheories of Audiences or Fans', Cultural Studies Conference Proceedings, 2004
• Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis (eds), Dislocating the Frontier: essaying the mystique of the outback (ANU E-Press, 2006)
• Maria Beatrice Bittarello, 'Another Time, Another Space: Virtual Worlds, Myths and Imagination', Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Vol. 1. No. 1, July 2008
• Henrik Bødker, 'The Mercy Seat as Inescapable Heat - The Proposition and Ideas of Justice in the Australian Outback', P.O.V. No.24 - The Western, December 2007
• Barbara Buchenau, 'Comparativist Interpretations of the Frontier in Early American Fiction and Literary Historiography', CLCWeb Volume 3, Issue 2, June 2001 
• Angus Cameron, 'The Metaverse Frontier', PSA 2008
• Cynthia-Lou Coleman, 'Framing Cinematic Indians within the Social Construction of Place', American Studies, 46:3/4 (Fall-Winter 2005): 275-293 Indigenous Studies Today, 1 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006)
• Felicity Collins, 'History, Myth and Allegory in Australian Cinema', Trames, 2008, 12(62/57), 3, 276–286
• Chris Cowan, 'Reflections on The Blair Witch Project', 49th Parallel, Issue 11, Autumn 2003
• Melissa Daniels, '"History Is a Funny Thing": African Americans in the West, American Studies, and the Screen', Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2010, Volume 9, Issue 2, Fall 2010
• Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, 'Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum', Western Journal of Communication Vol. 69, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 85–108
• Klaus Dodds, 'Hollywood and the Popular Geopolitics of the War on Terror', Third World Quarterly 2008
• Dan Edwards, 'Australian Western: Fear on the frontier [on The Proposition]', RealTime Arts Magazine, 70, December-January 2005
• Rainer Eisfeld, 'Myths and Realities of Frontier Violence: A Look at the Gunfighter Saga', Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 3(5) (1995) 106-122
• Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King, Alexander Horwath (eds), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
• Thomas S. Engeman, 'Why The American "Frontier" Will Always Be Populated By Democratic, Christian Knights', The Claremont Institute, September 2002
• Theo Finigan, '"To the Stables, Robin!": Regenerating the Frontier in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns', Image Text, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2010 
• Austin Fisher, 'A Marxist's Gotta Do What a Marxist's Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier', Scope, 'Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation' e-book, 2009
• Austin Fisher, 'Out West, down south: Gazing at America in reverse shot through Damiano Damiani’s "Quien sabe?"', The Italianist, 30:2, 2010
• Peter Flynn, 'The Silent Western as Mythmaker', Images Journal, Issue 6, February 2004 
• Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos,' Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction', in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice (SUNY, 2001)
• Martin Fradley, '“Why Doesn’t Your Compass Work?”: Pirates of the Caribbean, Fantasy Blockbusters and Contemporary Queer Theory', originally published in Karen Ross (ed.), "The Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media" (Blackwell, 2011), pp.294-312
• Martin Fradley, '[Review of] Gary Needham, "Brokeback Mountain" (Edinburgh University Press, 2010)', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 19:2 (Fall 2010), pp.143-146 
• Christiane Gerblinger, ‘"Fiery the Angels Fell": America, Regeneration and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner', Australasian Journal of American Studies, 21.1, July 2002
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Genre Films and Cultural Myth', Film International, April 20, 2011 
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Introduction: Spokes in the Wheels', John Ford's Stagecoach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• Michael Grimshaw, 'Preacher, or the Death of God in Pictures', JCRT 3.2
• David Gunkel and Ann Hetzel Gunkel, 'Terra Nova 2.0—The New Worlds of MMORPGs', Critical Studies in Media Communication 26(2), June 2009, pp. 104-127 
• Alia Haddad, 'An American Take on Mythic Mexico and its Revolution in The Wild Bunch', Volume VII, Number 2, Fall 2011
• Rowena Harper, 'Frontier Mythology in the American Teen Film', PhD Thesis, University of Adelaide December 2008
• Christina Judith Hein, 'Battleground Masculinity: Gendertroublers and Gatekeepers in Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986)', COPAS, Issue 8, 2007
• Kurt Hemmer, 'Political Outlaws: Beat Cowboys', American Studies Journal, No. 50, 2007
• David Ingram, ‘"Go to the forest and move": 1960s American Rock Music as Electronic Pastoral', 49th Parallel, Vol. 20, Winter 2006-2007
• Nicholas Jelley, The Potential for Rewriting Myth: Finding 'Kindness' on the Frontier, MA Thesis, University of Florida, 2005
• Kathleen Kennedy, 'Bodily Pain and Nation Making: Catholics and Indians in the Protestant Historical Imagination', Queen: A Journal of Rhetoric and Power, September 2003
• Geoff King, 'Spectacular Narratives: Twister, Independence Day, and frontier mythology in contemporary Hollywood', originally published in SPECTACULAR NARRATIVESHollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: IB Tauris, 2000)
• Katherine Kinney, 'Cold Wars: Black Soldiers in Liberal Hollywood', WLA Spring/Summer 2000
• Stephen Koetzing, 'The Trespassing Cyborg: Technology, Nature, and the Nation in Wild Wild West', AS Peers 4, 2011
• Marie Claire Kolbenschlag, 'Film and the American experience', from Jump Cut, no. 6, 1975, pp. 16-21 
• Sam Kula, 'National Image, National Dream',  Cinema Canada, February 1976
• Emma Lambert, '[De]Constructing John F. Kennedy?: Herschensohn's Years of Lightning, Days of Drums', 49th Parallel, Issue 4, Winter 2000
• Richard Langley, 'American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters',Vimeo, November 17, 2011 (originally screened at the American Frontiers conference, University of Birmingham, 12 November 2011)
• Helen Laville, 'What kind of Man are you? - Masculinity in Oliver Stone JFK', 49th Parallel, Issue 5, Spring 2000
• Christopher Le Coney and Zoe Trodd, 'John Wayne and the Queer Frontier: Deconstructions of the Classic Cowboy Narrative during the Vietnam War, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2005 
• Julia Leyda, 'Black-Audience Westerns and the Politics of Cultural Identification In the 1930s', Cinema Journal, 42, No. 1, Fall 2002
• Julia Leyda, 'Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility In John Ford's The Searchers', The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13, 2002 [click on PDF]
• Stephen McVeigh, '[Review of] The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory, By Will Wright (London: Sage Publications, 2001)', Scope, November 2003
• Mark Mordue, 'Dead Men Walking', Frieze Magazine, Issue 114, April 2008
• Gabrielle Murray, 'Fact and Fiction: The Iraq War Film in Absence', Screening the Past, 29, 2010
  
• Robin Murray and Joe Heumann, 'Oil drilling and the search for the “golden shrimp”: the myth of interdependence in oil drilling film', Jump Cut, No. 53, summer 2011
• Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont, 'Daughter of Earth: Judith Merril and the Intersections of Gender, Science Fiction, and Frontier Mythology', Science Fiction Studies, 107, Volume 36, Part 1, March 2009
• Gregory H. Nobles, 'Beyond Myth and Master Narrative: Toward a New History of the American Frontier', Quaderno, 6, 2004
• Allison Perlman, 'The Brief Ride of the Biker Movie', International Journal of Motorcycle Studies, March 2007
• Lauren Rabinovitz, 'More Than Meets the Eye: Movies in American Studies', MAASA Presidential Symposium 2005
• Rod Romesburg, 'Regeneration through Vampirism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s New Frontier', Slayage 5.3 [19], February 2006
• Christina Rowley, ‘The Disappearance and Re-emergence of the Western in Vietnam War Films’, PSA 2010 
• Christian Seidl, '"Regeneration through Creativity" – The Frontier in Paul Auster's Moon Palace', PhiN 31, 2005
• Ron Smith, 'Mistaken Images in Serge: Cecil B. DeMille’s Northwest Mounted Police (1940)', 49th Parallel, Vol. 24, 2010
• Saralyn Smith, '"Come see a fat old man sometime!" Masculinity and Aging in True Grit (1969) and Unforgiven', MA Thesis, Claremont Graduate University, December 2010 
• Barry Stephenson, 'Swaggering Savagery and the New Frontier', Journal of Religion and Popula Culture, Vol. 16, Summer 2007
• John Streamas, '"Patriotic Drunk": To be Yellow, Brave, and Disappeared in Bad Day at Black Rock',  New Voices Conference, American Studies, 44:1-2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 99-119
• András Tarnóc, 'Narratives of Confinement: Revisiting the Founding Myths of American Culture', Americana, Volume VII, Number 1, Spring 2011
• Nann Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (Amsterdam University Press, 2006 [on the emergence of the  Western]) 
• Edvin Vestergaard Kau, 'The Western Experience: Reflections on the Phenomenology of the Western', P.O.V. No. 24, December 2007
• Geoffrey Walker, 'Deconstructing an American Myth: Hollywood and The Last of the Mohicans', 10th Cooper Seminar, James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, July, 1995
• Jerry White, 'POSSUM, film noir, and the past/future of New Zealand', P:O.V. No.7, March 1999
• Gioia Woods, 'Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq: Jessica Lynch, Lori Piestewa, and the Great American Makeover', Studies in Popular Culture, 29.1 October 2006
• Ray Bourgeois Zimmerman, 'Gruntspeak: Masculinity, Monstrosity and Discourse in Hasford's The Short-Timers', American Studies, 40:1 (Spring 1999): 65-93 

Links of Doom and Disaster! Apocalyptic Film and Moving Image Studies

Updated November 21, 2011

Image from Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998)

Aside from the current stirrings of challenge to the disastrous, real-world, global order, Film Studies For Free was inspired to produce the below, awesome entry of links to studies of apocalypse and planetary disaster in film and moving image culture by three earth-shatteringly exciting things:

1. A very impressive digital-cinema screening of Lars von Trier's latest film Melancholia (Is cinema dead? FSFF thinks it may still have a few years of life left... Some good thoughts on this film are linked to here); 
2. A thrilling call for papers for an upcoming conference on The End, in relation to motion pictures (scroll to the foot of the post);
3. The just-in-the-nick-of-time appearance of a great, film-related, free-to-read-online book published by the wonderful people at OpenBook Publishers: Maria Manuela Lisboa's The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture (Open Book Publishers, 2011). OBP have also produced a new, free-to read online version of Robert Philip Kolker's long freely available, classic book The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema.

Now, if you don't mind, the all-too-easily scared FSFF will anti-climactically head for the hills (or, perhaps, for the sofa) to remove itself from all this eschatological excitement.

• Karin Badt. 'Apocalypse Too Soon: Wheeler Winston Dixon's Visions of the Apocalypse', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 27, May 2005 
• Lior Barshack, 'Intimate Enunciations: Carnival and Apocalypse in Fellini', Cardozo Law Review, 31.4, 2010
• Brent Bellamy, 'We are Apocalyptic! [on Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Zero Books, 2011)]', Reviews in Cultural Theory Vol. 2, Issue 2, 2011
• Adam Bingham, 'Images from the end of the world: Werner Herzog's La Soufrière', Senses of Cinema, September 2006
• Kurt Bullock, 'Vertical Apocalypse: Altered Noir Cityscape within Blade Runner’s Dystopia', SBCC.edu
• L.T. Copier, Preposterous revelations: visions of apocalypse and martyrdom in Hollywood cinema 1980 – 2000, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• Sérgio Dias Branco, 'Being Her/She in ‘Who Are You?’”. It’s the End of the World. Again?!?: Why Buffy Still Matters, Conference at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, March 16, 2007
• H. Bruce Franklin, 'Don't Look Where We're Going: Visions of the Future in Science-Fiction Films, 1970-82 ("Ne cherche pas à savoir où on va": les Visions de l'avenir dans le cinéma de SF de 1970 à 1982), Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1983), pp. 70-80 
• Asbjørn Grønstad, 'Coppola's Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered', Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2005
• Mark Harris, 'The New Scene Canon - Chopping Choppers Unforgettably: The "Nowhere to Go but Down" Scene in Apocalypse Now', Cinephile, 6.1, 2011
• Despina Kakoudaki, 'Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film', Camera Obscura 50, Volume 17, Number 2, 2002
• Kate S. Kelly, 'Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Century Thompson, Kirsten Moana. Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007', Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 22.1, 2010 
• New Richard Langley, 'American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters',Vimeo, November 17, 2011 (originally screened at the American Frontiers conference, University of Birmingham, 12 November 2011)
• Bruno Lessard, ‘"It’s the End of the World!": The Paradox of Event and Body in Hitchcock’s The Birds', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010
• Jeff Lewis and Kirsty Best, 'Pure Filth: Apocalyptic Hedonism and the Postmodern Surfer', Scope, Issue 2, June 2005
• Maria Manuel Lisboa, The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture (Open Book Publishers, 2011) [Apocalypse Now and Again; The World Gone M A D ; Is the End Ever; Falling Out with Hal and Hester; Utopia at the End of this; Libera Me Domine De Vita Æterna]
• Ewa Mazierska, 'Polish Cinematic Dystopias: Metaphos of Life Under Communism - and Beyond', Kinema. 2004
• Walter Metz, 'Atomic Animals: Toward the Re-Invention of Natural History and Science Filmmaking', IM: Interactive Media. 2. [2006]. 1-12
• Angela Ndalianis, 'Buffy, Angel and the Palimpsest Apocalypse', Slayage Online, 2003
• Conrad Ostwalt, 'Visions of the End: Secular Apocalypse in Recent Hollywood Film', Journal of Religion and Film, 2.1, 1998
• Conrad Ostwalt, 'Armageddon at the Millennial Dawn', Journal of Religion and Film, 4.1, 2000
• Iván Pintor, 'Melancholay and Sacrifice in Contemporary Science Fiction' FORMATS, No. 5, 2009
• Gyan Prakash, 'Imaging the Modern City, Darkly', in Gyan Prakash (ed.) Noir Urbanism: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton University Press, 2010)
• Justin Remes, 'Apocalyptic Premediations', Journal of Religion and Popular CultureVolume 22(2): Summer 2010
• Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki, 'Visions of Apocalypse: A Rhetorical Analysis of The Day After', Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (34th, San Francisco, CA, May 24-28, 1984
• D. Bruno Starrs, 'Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer's Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)', Forum, 5, 2007
• Kevin Stewart, 'The Zombie Aesthetics and the Post-Apocalyptic Franchise', Kinema, 2007 
• Kirsten Moana Thompson, 'Apocalyptic Dread, Kierkegaard, and the Cultural Landscape of the Millennium', Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium (New York: SUNY Press, 2007)
• Robert Torry, 'Apocalypse Then: Benefits of the Bomb in Fifties Science Fiction Films', Cinema Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991) 
• Roslyn Weaver, '"The Four Horsemen of the Greenhouse Apocalypse": Apocalypse in the Science Fiction Novels of George Turner', Forum, 5, 2007

The End of ...? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures - University of Kent, UK, January 21, 2011

This one-day conference is for postgraduate students and early career researchers whose work incorporates the study of motion pictures and aims to explore the interdisciplinary conception and representation of “The End.”
     As the conspiracy theories for the end of the world in 2012 culminate in the mainstream disaster movie and the relevant literature, our concern and anxiety with closures remain within the margins of academic attention. In addition to the ubiquitous representations of “The End”, phrases such as “the end of cinema” and “death of celluloid” are recurrent in scholarly circles, calling forth a new era of engagement with film and other media. “The End” in the latter case evokes a new beginning that requires close examination: perhaps an analogy that could be extended to Film Studies as a discipline, outlining (or criticizing) its potential methodological changes in the future as well as in the past. The aesthetics of “The End”, however, is clearly evident in our direct engagement with time-based cultural artefacts. In other words, the study of various methods of narrative closure in film, music, literature and theatre can inform one of our fundamental obsessions: a good ending.
     We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations from candidates across arts and humanities, welcoming individual papers as well as group panels that investigate “The End” as a broad phenomenon that can be approached through a variety of methods. Possible research subjects include, but not limited to: End of cinema: changing patterns of distribution and exhibition; End of Theory: the methodological shifts in film studies as a discipline; End of story: the aesthetics and strategies of narrative closure, open endings, narrative inconclusiveness in relation to film and other arts; End of the world: recent preoccupation with the disaster film genres; End of cinephilia: alternative channels for watching and discussing movies; End of film: the death of celluloid, the rise of digital technologies and issues of medium specificity; Case studies of films or other media that address any of the aforementioned issues; Representation and/or conception of “The End” within the history and philosophy of art.
     The conference will conclude with a film screening and an introduction by the keynote speaker in the Gulbenkian Cinema, an independent cinema located within the university campus at Canterbury.
Please send abstracts (300 words) and a short biographical note to thendof2012@gmail.com. Deadline for applications is 15 November 2011. Should you have any queries, please do not
hesitate to contact us at the same e-mail address. Website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/film/filmcentre/the_end_of.html
Conference Organization Committee: Emre Caglayan, Frances Kamm, Pete Sillett

Tina Pippin (ed.), Apocalyptic Bodies: the biblical end of the world in text and image (London: Routledge, 1999)