Breaking Barriers: Borders and Beyond Liminality in Cinematic Media

San Francisco State University
October 14–15, 2009
Plenary Sessions
Cinema Studies Graduate Student Association
Deadline for submissions is July17th, 2009.

Boundaries, borders, and limits signify separation between spaces—physical, conceptual, and otherwise. Cinema as a medium exemplifies and embodies resistance to boundaries. Since its advent film form has incessantly flirted with what lies beyond its porous borders traversing boundaries between narrative and non-narrative, documentary and fiction, art and science, humanism and exploitation.

As liminality connotes limits, how are these limits crossed and what are the results? In what ways might the category of liminality be productive to critical discourse and the creative enterprise? How are traditional cinema forms being challenged by blurred and traversed boundaries? What are discursive, spatial, temporal, sexual, cultural, political, aesthetic, metaphysical, ethical, and epistemological expressions of liminality within and related to cinema? How can curation and archival work cultivate and historicize liminality? How is film scholarship done from liminality?

We welcome submissions for individual presentations as well as panel sections as we seek to explore not only liminal cinematic spaces, but more importantly, theories, histories, criticisms and practices that refuse to be contained, even within those spaces.