9th Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference set for July 2016 in Kuala Lumpur

Academics and film lovers will converge on Malaysia next year for the 9th Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference, which is set for July 20 to 22, 2016, at the University of Nottingham, Kuala Lumpur.

Held every other year, the next ASEACC will have the theme "Time, Space, and the Visceral in Southeast Asian Cinema". The group's Facebook page has more:

Cinema’s representation and manipulation of space, time, and spatiotemporal-perception have been critical to the theorization and practice of the medium since its origins. Accounting for cinema as a text, an industrial practice, a form of leisure, and a mode of visuality, such critical approaches have considered the advent and spread of mass communications technologies as both symptoms and catalysts of drastic changes in space-time perception and representation, with particularly dramatic, if often "belated," effects occurring outside of the West.

In the context of Southeast Asia, how might contemporary readings of local films, analyses of common exhibition practices like mobile cinemas, or investigations of the relationship between movies and other longstanding art forms engage, and possibly challenge, these influential theorizations?

Furthermore, how have local and embodied understandings of spatiality and temporality, and ways of representing or manipulating space and time – whether “traditional” or otherwise – influenced and shaped the texture, formal qualities, or narrative styles of films and cinemas in Southeast Asia? How might practices and technologies of production, distribution, and reception contribute to the creation of new spatiotemporal orders?

Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

• Sites of cinema exhibition and reception.
• Spatial-temporal distribution patterns, audiences, and publics.
• Spaces of production, production cultures, labor.
• Scales of media industrial practice (global, regional, national, local).
• Representations of intra- and transnational migration, urbanization, the rural.
• Embodiment and spectatorship.
• The importance of sound in reception and the production of affect.
• Colonial-imperial spaces and film.
• Memory, nostalgia, and space.
• Screen media, geography, and mapping.
• Tourism, travel, and film.
• Space, spectatorship, and filmic visuality.
• New media, space, and time.

The deadline for submission of topics and papers is November 30. Be sure to check the conference website for a look at past topics to ensure you bring something fresh to the table.

For conference contacts and further details, please check Facebook.