The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh” and the Giallo: an International Film Conference

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H-Film CfP “The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh” and the giallo: an International Film Conference

Discussion published by Andreas Ehrenreich on Saturday, November 29, 2014

The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and the giallo: an International Film Conference

Hosted by the Austrian Historical Institute and

Sheffield Hallam University’s Department of Humanities in cooperation with Cineteca Nazionale

The giallo is a cinema of leather gloves and razors, of inappropriate pathos, which dignifies murder as an artistic act. It is a guilty pleasure whose concise mannerism represents a unique phenomenon within the history of European film. Mario Bava who conceived the formula with The Evil Eye (1963) provided its first masterpiece withBlood and Black Lace (1964) to inspire very heterogeneous successors. Dario Argento, Massimo Dallamano, Luciano Ercoli, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi and, especially, Sergio Martino are the most influential but only a few of all the directors producing perhaps more than 200 gialli in the 1970s. Through the DVD boom, a new generation of cinephiles has gained access to the popular film cycle, which has been enthusiastically embraced. The conference, whose aim is to explore the genre beyond Bava’s and Argento’s well-studied contributions, takes Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971) as a focal point, but proposals on other films are just as welcome.

Likely topics include:

Cinematic characteristics of the film cycle Configurations of the set piece The significance of film music (of, e. g., Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani or Ennio Morricone) The giallo as a transnational phenomenon Production/distribution/exhibition/reception contexts The construction of authorship Generic hybridity/the giallo’s relation to coeval popular film cycles Cross-media appropriations Studies of specific films or remakes Archival sources stemming from giallo productions

Of course, the topics above are to be understood merely as suggestions and not as constraints.

We are delighted to announce Professor Richard Dyer (King’s College London) as our distinguished keynote speaker.

Citation: Andreas Ehrenreich. CfP “The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh” and the giallo: an International Film Conference. H-Film. 11-29-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/14467/discussions/53511/cfp-%E2%80%9C-strange-vice-mrs-wardh%E2%80%9D-and-giallo-internation al-film Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Film

Venue: Österreichisches Historisches Institut, Viale Bruno Buozzi 111–113, I-00197 Roma

Date: June 8–9, 2015

Deadline for submission: For presentations (max. 20 minutes) in English, please submit a short abstract (title, topic, resources) and a current CV by February 20, 2015. Notification by the end of February.

Contact: Andreas Ehrenreich, Sheffield Hallam University, [email protected]