Special Session

Film and Media Studies / Languages and Linguistics

Shabnam Piryaei (San Francisco State University)
shab@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

Dawn Dietrich (Western Washington University)
Dawn@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This session opens a space for critical and creative analysis of the relationship between poetry and film, and the social, cultural, political, and economic impact of such works. How can film, video, and poetry generate possibilities for, enhance, or inhibit one another? How has the internet provided a venue for more hybrid and plural filmic and poetic expressions? In the context of censorship, how do poetic aesthetics provide a venue for critical discourse that may be more difficult to police? How can poetic engagement serve as a rupture to the violence of an absolute and singular understanding? How do memory, image and text interact differently in poetry and in film and what may be gained by reading one form of expression through another? Submissions may examine poetry films, videopoems, digital-poetry, poetry video, spoken word films, visual poetry, choreopoems, media poetry, and all films that are visually driven by text.

This session opens a space for critical and creative analysis of the relationship between poetry and film, and the social, cultural, political and economic impact of such works. How can film, video and poetry generate possibilities for, enhance, or inhibit one another? How has the internet provided a venue for more hybrid and plural filmic and poetic expressions? In the context of censorship, how do poetic aesthetics provide a venue for critical discourse that may be more difficult to police? How can poetic engagement serve as a rupture to the violence of an absolute and singular understanding? How do memory, image and text interact differently in poetry and in film and what may be gained by reading one form of expression through another? Submissions may examine poetry films, videopoems, digital-poetry, poetry video, spoken word films, visual poetry, choreopoems, media poetry, and all films that are visually driven by text.

Possible topics include:

· Poetry as a means of challenging media censorship

· Poetry as a mode of ethical filmmaking

· Poetry and documentary film

· Poetics in cinema as a mode of resistance against state violence

· Social media and performance poetry

· The internet’s impact on the development of poetry videos

· The poetics of the citizen journalist