The cinematic has never been confined to “the cinema”: throughout film history, spectatorship has taken place across a multitude of sites. From home movies projected on living room walls, to vaudeville recordings shown in prisons, to all-Black westerns that played in segregated theaters — cinema has always been a vexed site, the experience of which has been predicated on the subjectivities of spectators and the nature of the spaces they inhabit. Identity, accessibility, and proximity to power all collide to inform how we see a thing. Where we see it adds a new depth.

This conference celebrates increasing scholarship that seeks to create a more kaleidoscopic view of where cinema can be found and who its spectators are. Nowhere is this more true than in the shifting configurations we see today, including streaming services, mobile viewing, alternative approaches to exhibition, and much more. “Site/Seeing” puts the diverse histories of cinematic spectatorship in conversation with the present and possible futures.

In keeping with the theme of the conference, the keynote speaker is Dr. Alison Griffiths (PhD, NYU; MA, University of London), Professor of Film and Media Studies at Baruch College and an internationally recognized scholar of film, media, and visual studies. Her research crosses the fields of film studies, nineteenth century visual culture, and medieval visual studies and examines cinema’s relationship to and experience in non-traditional spaces of media consumption. Griffiths is the author of three monographs and over 35 journal articles and book chapters. Her most recent book, Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prisons in Early Twentieth Century America (Columbia, 2016) examines how cinema gained a foothold in American penitentiaries as well as the range of early images of inmates that fed the carceral imagination.

Call for papers