Proposed Panel for SCMS Conference, Los Angeles, March 17-21 The Artificial Life of Film: Dolls, Puppets, Automata, and Cyborgs in Cinema Organizer Names: Deborah Levitt, Assistant Professor, Culture and Media Studies, Eugene Lang College, The New School Allison de Fren, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology, Connecticut College Summary: From the early films of Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang, and the Surrealist movement to Blade Runner, Being John Malkovich, Ghost in the Shell, and Lars and the Real Girl, the cinema has had an enduring fascination with artificial humans due to their unique ability to picture the tensions between motion and stasis, animation and inanimation, humanity and artificiality, the real and the virtual, and the vital and the mechanical. Artificial bodies have also made diverse appearances in film theory, from the "spiritual automaton"of Gilles Deleuze to Roland Barthes' meditations on a cinematic automaton in Camera Lucida to the broad field of reflections on cyborgs and/in cinema. This panel seeks to interrogate any or all of these conjugations of cinema and artificial lives — material and philosophical, live action or animated, in fiction or documentary. We are interested in the kinds of performativities engendered by these ambivalent bodies: their uncanniness, their ontological destabilizations, their epistemological games of masking and unmasking. Papers might also consider how artificiality is mobilized within particular genres or what kinds of meanings accumulate around artificial bodies in relation to gender or race. We are interested in how these figures help to construct a new genealogy of audiovisual culture, one that could illuminate cinema's digital or animatic present and future, as well as connections to various moments in the historical long durée of dolls, puppets, and automata. Please send an abstract of up to 300 words, five key references, and a brief bio to levittd@newschool.edu and adefren@conncoll.edu by August 10th.
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