Call for Video Essays: Remakes and Memories
Film remakes seem to invite an engagement with memory. They rely on repetition with a difference as they place familiar characters and plots in new technological, aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts. Remakes foreground change through updates and revisions, but they are also always intricately linked to the past and thus to the realm of memory.
The “Hollywood Memories” research project invites video essays that explore the multifaceted layers of memory that emerge from the practice of remaking. Selected video essays will be submitted for consideration as an edited collection in the new Videographic Books series at Lever Press. In addition, the video essayists chosen for the collection will also be invited to present their work at an online event in the fall of 2024. Video essays may also be shown at a “Hollywood Memories” workshop (20-21 June 2024) and may be paired with relevant movies as part of a movie series at a local cinema in Hannover.
Topics of interest for the video essays include, but are not limited to:
- intertextual memory: e.g., analyzing how remakes remember earlier versions of themselves and render their own past visible on the diegetic level
- cultural memory: e.g., examining how remakes function as film-historical sites of memory and repositories of knowledge that open up a pathway to a collectively shared cinematic past
- personal recollections: e.g., focusing on how the return of the already-known can generate, maintain, and anchor individual memories that become entwined with memories of certain life stages and can shape feelings of generational belonging
- nostalgia and innovation: e.g., addressing the tension between the desire to preserve media object of the past and updating, renewing, and revising it in the present in terms of technology, visual aesthetics, and politics of representation
- global perspectives and cinematic echoes: e.g., exploring the role of memory in transnational remakes (as opposed to remakes within the same national context)
- theoretical reflections on remakes: e.g., discussing the format of the remake and its variations (such as shot-for-shot remake, auto-remake, etc.)
- experimental approaches to remakes: e.g., unconventional ways of exploring memory in film remakes
- …
All submissions must include:
- An original and unpublished video essay that is between 5 and 15 minutes long and that includes English subtitles if other languages than English are used in the piece of videographic scholarship.
- A written statement of between 500 and 1,000 words (incl. bibliography) that provides further theoretical background on the topic and/or reflects on the process of making the video essay.
- An abstract (150 words).
- A biographical note (100 words).
Send your written statement, abstract, biographical note, and a link to your unpublished video essay to Kathleen.Loock@engsem.uni-hannover.de by 15 June 2024.
Register now to participate in the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES project!
You want to be part of the project and share your memories of Hollywood movies with us? Then register here to participate. We will let you know when the questionnaire is launched on our digital research platform.