Tuesday, April 26, 2011

SyFy Listings for May 2011

The following represent the upcoming month's medieval-themed listings for SyFy:

TUESDAY, 3 MAY

03:30 PM Stargate SG-1: Avalon - Pt 1
04:30 PM Stargate SG-1: Avalon - Pt 2
05:30 PM Stargate SG-1: Origin


WEDNESDAY, 4 MAY

08:00 AM Stargate SG-1: The Quest - Pt 1
09:00 AM Stargate SG-1: The Quest - Pt 2
06:00 PM Stargate SG-1: Camelot


THURSDAY, 5 MAY

11:00 AM Stargate SG-1: Thor's Hammer
12:00 PM Stargate SG-1: Thor's Chariot
03:00 PM Stargate SG-1: The Pegasus Project


SATURDAY, 7 MAY

10:30 AM Syfy Original Movie: Beyond Sherwood Forest
12:30 PM Movie: In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

09:00 PM Syfy Original Movie: Almighty Thor [PREMIERE EVENT]



11:00 PM Syfy Original Movie: Thor: Hammer Of The Gods


SUNDAY, 8 MAY

01:00 AM Syfy Original Movie: Almighty Thor
03:00 AM Movie: Highlander: The Source


TUESDAY, 10 MAY

08:00 PM Movie: Chronicles Of Narnia, The: Prince Caspian
11:00 PM Syfy Original Movie: Beauty And The Beasts: A Dark Tale


THURSDAY, 12 MAY

08:00 AM Invasion: The Nest
09:00 AM Invasion: The Fittest
10:00 AM Invasion: The Key
11:00 AM Invasion: Re-evolution
12:00 PM Invasion: The Son Also Rises
01:00 PM Invasion: Run And Gun
02:00 PM Invasion; Round Up


WEDNESDAY, 18 MAY

09:00 AM Scariest Places On Earth: Charleville Castle
11:00 AM Scariest Places On Earth: Cursed Italian Monastery
03:00 PM Scariest Places On Earth: Return To Romania


SATURDAY, 21 MAY
07:00 PM Movie: Reign Of Fire
09:00 PM Syfy Original Movie: Sinbad And The Minotaur [PREMIERE EVENT]



11:00 PM Movie: 7 Adventures Of Sinbad, The


SUNDAY, 22 MAY

01:00 AM Syfy Original Movie: Sinbad And The Minotaur
01:30 PM Movie: Reign Of Fire


MONDAY, 23 MAY

03:30 AM Movie: Bram Stoker's Way Of The Vampire


MONDAY, 30 MAY

07:00 PM Movie Marathon: Underworld
09:30 PM Movie Marathon: Underworld: Evolution


TUESDAY, 31 MAY

10:30 AM Movie: Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath Of The Dragon God
01:00 PM Movie: In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
03:30 PM Movie: Underworld
06:00 PM Movie: Underworld: Evolution


WEDNESDAY, 1 JUNE

02:00 AM Movie: In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

Chiller Listings for May 2011

The following represent next month's medieval-themed listings from Chiller:

TUESDAY, 3 MAY

06:00 AM The Twilight Zone--The Last Defender Of Camelot
06:00 PM The Twilight Zone--The Last Defender Of Camelot


SUNDAY, 15 MAY

10:00 AM Beast Legends--Dragon
01:00 PM Beast Legends--Dragon


TUESDAY, 17 MAY

08:00 PM Movie--The Forsaken


WEDNESDAY, 18 MAY

12:00 AM Movie--The Forsaken

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Film and Myth: Call for Area Chairs (8/1/11)

Film and Myth
CALL for AREA CHAIRS (organizers of multiple panels)
Deadline: August 1, 2011


The 2012 Film & History Conference (Sept. 26-30, Hyatt Regency, Milwaukee, USA) will examine the power of myth in film, television, and the other moving-image arts. As a collective pattern, myth transcends the individual, yet it provides structure to our most personal feelings and assumptions. It can be subtle or obvious, shallow or complex. It can move nations to attack each other—or to reconcile. It can induce affection or ridicule or longing. Myth operates somewhere between the waking consciousness of history and drowsy consciousness of mystery. Often it is both narrative and meta-narrative, trying to tell us what we know and how we might know it. And film is the most vibrant stage of mythmaking today. How do films exploit or succumb to certain myths? Why do audiences embrace one mythic pattern over another—in romance or tragedy or comedy? Who or what controls mythmaking in film and television? How do certain historical characters or events become legendary? How do they become mythic? What historical mutations have myths undergone in film? What myths are on the horizon?

Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal invites proposals to chair an area of multiple panels. Please send a brief description of your area (100-200 words) to FilmandHistory@uwosh.edu by August 1, 2011.

The deadline to be listed on your Call for Papers will be August 1, 2012. There will be no rolling deadlines before that date. The areas listed below are suggestions; you are welcome to modify an area or to propose an area of your own.

Mythmaking and Marketing: The Money Trail On and Off the Screen
Storytelling 101: History or Mythology
Innocence and Experience: Children, the Elderly, and Myth
Naught-I Movies: Untangling Sex and Gender Myths
Myths R Us: Nationality in Film
Music, Motifs, and Mythmaking
Archetype and Ego Psychology in Film
Natives and Primitives: The Myths of Oral Cultures
The Classic Myths of Classical History on Film
Facing Race: Film, Television, and Myth
Dwelling on Myth: The City, The Suburb, and The Farm
Heroes and Villains: Iconography, Narrative, and Film
Marriage and Family Myths in Film
Mythologies of Travel in Film and Television
Literature, Genre, and Myth: Structures, Texts, Films
West/East: Hollywood/Bollywood
Crime and Punishment: Mythologizing the Law
Beast or Human: Animal Myths in Film and Television
Ecology Mythology: The Natural Environment on Film
Myths of Time: Future Myths, Mythic Futures
Chalk It Up to Myth: Education on Film
Mything God: Religious Desire in Film and Television
The Myths of Science and Scientists
Cowboy Mythology: Frontier Myths
Sir Dude and Madame Chick: Mythologizing Class in Film
Legend or Myth: Anthropological Entanglements in Film
Evil, Sin, Death, Doom: Mythologizing the Underworld in Film
Myth, Inc.: The Business World in Film and Television
Doctored Reality: The Myths of Medicine in Film

Representations of Love in Film & History CFP (5/1/11)

Call for Papers
Deadline: May 1, 2011
for a specially themed issue of Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, to be published in the fall of 2011 (41.2):
“Representations of Love in Film and Television”

This issue (41.2) will consider how love, in all its historical manifestations, has been represented thematically, structurally, philosophically, and culturally in film and television. Presenters at the 2010 Film & History conference are encouraged to submit their papers, but submissions outside the conference pool are welcome and will be given equal consideration. All manuscripts submitted should be revised for scholarly peer review. Length: 4000-7000 words.

Send one manuscript (as a Word-compatible document) to FilmandHistory@uwosh.edu and one manuscript by postal service to
Editor, Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Center for the Study of Film and History
Polk 305, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Oshkosh, WI 54901

[Also available as PDF file]

2010 Film & History Conference (Catching Up)

The 2010 Film & History Conference was held this past November and included a number of sessions of interest to medievalists:

Thursday, 11 Nov.
Session 2 (2:45-4:15 PM)

118‐Love, Sex, and English Royalty (Medieval Love and Sexuality in Film and Television Area)
No American Gigolo in Camelot: Medieval Love and First Knight
Molly Martin, McNeese State University
“That, my angels, is the role of sex in history”: Text vs Film for Eleanor of Aquitaine and Heloise
Gwenllian Meredith, United Arab Emirates University
“To love is to obey: Shakespeare’s Henry Vth
Vivienne Westbrook, National Taiwan University
What Women Want Most: Peter Cook’s Pythonesque Sign/Mime for Video Adaption
Carol Robinson, Kent State University


Friday, 12 Nov.
Session 1 (8:30-10:00 AM)
200‐ Medieval Heroes and Outlaws on the Big Screen (Medieval Love and Sexuality in Film and Television Area)
Making Merry Men Manly: Securing a Masculine Identity for Robin in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood
Thomas Rowland, Saint Louis University
“I Wanna Do Bad Things with You”: Guy of Gisborne and Sexuality in the BBC Robin Hood
Leah J. Larson, Our Lady of the Lake University
Fatherless Creatures: Parentage in Twenty‐first Century BeowulfFilms
Justin T. Noetzel, Saint Louis University

Session 3 (12:45-2:15 PM)

231‐Love at the End of Life
Paper 3 of 3: Truth and Falsity in the Name of Love: King Lear and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Noel Sloboda, Penn State York

Session 5 (4:15-5:45 PM)
251‐Across Borders and Boundaries (Shakespeare in (and Out of) Love Area)
Paper 1 of 4: The Bard in Bollywood: Song‐Dance‐Romance in Macbeth‐Turned‐Maqbool
Samhita Sunya, Rice University
Paper 4 of 4: Speaking of Rosaline, Romeo is Out of Love
Howard Schmitt, School of Theatre, University of Southern California


Saturday, 13 Nov.
Session 2 (10:15-11:45 AM)

318‐Chastity and Pornography in Medieval Film (Medieval Love and Sexuality in Film and Television Area)
Love without Sex: Ladyhawke’s Exploration of Relational Love
Michael Elam, Saint Louis University
Belle Chose: Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse Gets Acquainted with the Wife of Bath
Christina Francis, Bloomsburg University
“Thilke that sownen into synne”: Solaasas Sentencein the Pornographic Chaucer
Tim Miller, University of Notre Dame
The Wooing of Olga: Choosing between Loves in Alexander Nevsky
Kathleen McDonough, SUNY‐Fredonia

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

New Book: Bildhauer's Filming the Middle Ages

This is apparently the decade of monographs on medievalism in film, and Reaktion Books has just published Bettina Bildhauer's Filming the Middle Ages. Details as follows:

Filming the Middle Ages
Bettina Bildhauer

234 x 140 mm
264 pages
100 illustrations

Hardback
978 1 86189 808 1
February 2011
£25.00

In this groundbreaking account of film history, Bettina Bildhauer shows how, from the earliest silent films to recent blockbusters, medieval topics and plots have played an important but overlooked role in the development of cinema.

Filming the Middle Ages is the first book to define medieval films as a group and trace their history from the silent films of Weimar Germany to Hollywood productions and then to recent European co-productions. Bildhauer provides incisive new interpretations of classics like Murnau’s Faust and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, and rediscovers some forgotten works, such as Douglas Sirk’s Sign of the Pagan and Asta Neilsen’s Hamlet. As Bildhauer explains, both art house films like The Seventh Seal and The Passion of Joan of Arc and popular films like Beowulf or The Da Vinci Code cleverly use the Middle Ages to challenge modern ideas of historical progress, to find alternatives to a print-dominated culture, and even to question what makes us human. Filming the Middle Ages pays special attention to medieval animated and detective films and provocatively demonstrates that the invention of cinema itself is considered a return to the Middle Ages by many film theorists and filmmakers.

Filming the Middle Ages is ideal reading for medievalists with a stake in the contemporary, and film scholars with an interest in the distant past.


Contents (from WorldCat):
What is Medieval Film? An Introduction Part I: Time's Bow 1. The Non-linear Time of Medieval Film (Faust, Destiny) 2. The Medieval Dead Reanimated (Golem, Waxworks, Seventh Seal, Hard to be a God, Siegfried) 3. Queer Time (Hamlet, Lady Venus and her Devil, Abelard, Dreamship Surprise, Pope Joan, Joan of Arc, Ferryman Maria, The Immortal Heart) Part II: Lethal Letters 4. The Dangerous Power of Writing (Sign of the Pagan, Pope Joan, Passion of Joan of Arc) 5. The Printing Press vs the Cathedral (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Don Quixote, Copernicus) 6. Detecting the Middle Ages (A Canterbury Tale, Name of the Rose; War of the Oxen, The Da Vinci Code) Part III: Human Limits 7. The Birth of the Leader from the Collective (Condottieri, Alexander Nevsky, Luther) 8. The Nation's Lost Past (Nibelungen films, 1924, 1966, 2004) 9. Animation and the Human between Animal and Cyborg (Beowulf, The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, Jester Till) Film's Reliance on Medievalism: a Conclusion



Bettina Bildhauer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of German, University of St Andrews. She is the author of Medieval Blood (2007), and co-editor of The Monstrous Middle Ages (2003) and Medieval Film (2009).


‘In this seriously smart book Bettina Bildhauer demonstrates that “medieval film” is a genre that, far from merely providing an escape hatch for a pressured and disillusioned modernity, takes up and meets head on the challenges modernity poses . . . In a series of brilliant readings Bildhauer opens up the strange temporalities and posthuman bodies of medieval film, situating them at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first century concerns.’
– Carolyn Dinshaw, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English, New York University

Filming the Middle Ages maps a cinematic landscape of surprising compass, directing our gaze from the Weimar films Faust and Destiny to the CGI spectacle of Beowulf. Space and time, the perennial subjects of film study, acquire a charged potential in this exceptional book, which marks a fresh beginning in genre analysis. With lucid intelligence, Bettina Bildhauer has created a brilliant, engaging work that will define the field.’
– Robert Burgoyne, Professor and Chair of Film Studies, University of St Andrews

Contents for The Vikings on Film

McFarland has at last posted the contents for Kevin J. Harty's latest collection The Vikings on Film: Essays on Depictions of the Nordic Middle Ages. Complete details can be accessed at McFarland's website.


Table of Contents

Preface 1
Introduction: “Save Us, O Lord, from the Fury of the Northmen”; or, “Do You Know What’s in Your Wallet?” 3
KEVIN J. HARTY

The Trope of the Scopic in The Vikings (1958) 9
KATHLEEN COYNE KELLY
Guess Who’s Coming to Plunder? Or, Disorientation and Desire in The Long Ships (1964) 24
DONALD L. HOFFMAN
“To be, or not to be”—King: Clive Donner’s Alfred the Great (1969) 39
CHRISTOPHER A. SNYDER
Valiant and Villainous Vikings 46
ALAN LUPACK
Silly Vikings: Eichinger, Hickox, and Lorenz’s Anglo-German-Irish Production of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant (1997) 56
JOSEPH M. SULLIVAN
When Civilization Was Less Civilized: Erik the Viking (1989) 72
SUSAN ARONSTEIN
“The Love of All Mankind but Also the Love of One Woman Alone”: Hrafn Gunnlaugsson’s Shadow of the Raven (1988) 83
JOAN TASKER GRIMBERT and CLAUDIA BORNHOLDT
Different Pathfinders, Different Destinations 96
ROBERTA DAVIDSON
Who’s Savage Now?!—The Vikings in North America 106
KEVIN J. HARTY
Call of the Wild: Culture Shock and Viking Masculinities in The 13th Warrior (1999) 121
ELIZABETH S. SKLAR
Harrying an Infinite Horizon: The Ethics of Expansionism in Outlander (2008) 135
DAVID W. MARSHALL
Between Exploitation and Liberation: Viking Women and the Sexual Revolution 150
LAURIE A. FINKE and MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN
Time Out of Joint: Why a Gaul Fought the Normans in Astérix and the Vikings (2005) 165
ANDREW B. R. ELLIOTT
Northern Lite: A Brief History of Animated Vikings 178
MICHAEL N. SALDA
The Vikings on Film: A Filmography 193
KEVIN J. HARTY

About the Contributors 215
Index 219

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Tangled Now on DVD

Walt Disney Picture's Tangled, a re-imagining of the Rapunzel story is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray Disc. Details (from Amazon.com) follow the trailer below.




DVD
•2 original storybook openings
•50th Animated Countdown

2-Disc BD Combo Pack (BD+DVD)
•DVD features plus
•3 deleted scenes
•The Making of a Fairy Tale
•2 extended songs
•9 Theatrical Teasers

4-Disc BD Combo Pack (BD 3D+BD 2D+DVD+Digital Copy)
•DVD features plus
•3 deleted scenes
•The Making of a Fairy Tale
•2 extended songs
•9 Theatrical Teasers

CFP: All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming (5/1/11)

I am grateful to Dan Kline for passing this along:

http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/40747

All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming
full name / name of organization: Daniel T. Kline
contact email: afdtk@uaa.alaska.edu

CFP: All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming

The Middle Ages remains a vibrant presence in contemporary culture, and while cinematic medievalism has been intensively investigated in the last decade, digital gaming has received relatively little attention despite its widespread cultural impact. For example, the video game market now grosses more domestically than Hollywood, and World of Warcraft boasts more than 12 million monthly paying subscribers (25 million total units). Gaming theory too has seen its share of innovation, and digital technologies are now a regular feature of higher education and cultural studies. Medievalism, in its various guises, has also been the subject of intense scrutiny in anthologies by Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Film (2009); Karl Fugelso, Memory and Medievalism (2007); and David Marshall, Mass Market Medieval Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture (2007). Further, the turn toward speculative medievalisms, object-oriented philosophy, and Actor-Network Theory has initiated new methodologies, raised new questions, and offered new possibilities for understanding actor-actant networks and overcoming the subject-object distinction, all of which enrich our understanding of digital and historical realities and problematize traditional understandings of subjectivity, temporality, and textuality.

A few of the more popular medievally-inflected gaming titles (and series) include:

Age of Empires: Age of Kings
• Diablo
• MediEvil
• Arthur: Quest for Excalibur
• Dragon Age
• Medieval Total War
• Assassin's Creed
• Dungeon Siege
• Morrowind
• Baldur's Gate
• Dynasty Warriors
• Oblivion
• Beowulf
• Elder Scrolls
• Sims Medieval
• Civilization
• Fable
• Shogun Total War
• Dante's Inferno
• Jeanne d'Arc
• Stronghold
• Dark Age of Camelot
• Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader
• Warcraft & World of Warcraft

I am soliciting 500 word proposals for a volume dealing with the Middle Ages, medievalism, and contemporary digital gaming, broadly defined. Some possibilities include:

• Gaming and medieval texts; medieval texts and digital textualities
• Gaming genres (Sword and sorcery/fantasy games, etc.), game types (MMORPG, FPS, RPG, RTS, stealth, survival/horror, etc.), single-player/cooperative/multiplayer games
• Gaming, speculative medievalisms, and counterfactual history
• Gaming, secret societies, arcane religions, and the 'templarization' of history (Dead Space, Mass Effect, and others)
• Gaming, digital sociologies, and electronic epistemologies
• Gaming, object-oriented philosophy, complexity, and Actor-Network Theory
• Gaming, digital communities, and electronic subjectivities
• Gaming, gender, sexuality, class, age; trans-developmental and trans-temporal subjectivities
• Gaming and race and nation; digital orientalism and postcolonialism; space-based societies
• Gaming and cross-platform media (games and/as film tie-ins)
• Gaming and pedagogy
• Gaming, discursive/symbolic violence, and ethics
• Gaming, social simulations, LARPing and LARPers (Live-Action Role Playing & Players)
• Gaming and cheats, glitches, hacks, mods
• Gaming, the academy, medievalism, and generational divides.

Please send your proposals (and any questions) to Dan Kline, University of Alaska, Department of English, 3211 Providence Drive, ADM 101-H, Anchorage, AK 99508 at afdtk@uaa.alaska.edu by May 1, 2011.

Please cross-post freely

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Advance Notice Kalamazoo 2012

The Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages has proposed the following sessions for the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies to be held from 10-13 May 2012. Further details on each session can be found by clicking the respective links.

Are You From Camelot? Recent Arthurian Film, Television, and Electronic Games as Innovators of the Arthurian Tradition and Their Impact (Roundtable)


The Comics Get Medieval at Kalamazoo: New Perspectives for Incorporating Comics into Medieval Studies Teaching and Research (Roundtable)

SyFy April 2011 Listings

The following represent this month's medieval-themed listings for SyFy. Of note is the season finale on Merlin airing this Friday at 10 PM; it is preceded during the day by a mini-marathon beginning at 8 AM.


FRIDAY, 1 APR
10:30 AM Movie--Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath Of The Dragon God
01:00 PM Movie--Highlander: The Source

05:30 PM Movie--In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

10:00 PM Merlin, Season 3--The Coming Of Arthur - Part 1


SATURDAY, 2 APRIL
2:00 AM Merlin, Season 3--The Coming Of Arthur - Part 1


FRI, 8 APR
08:00 AM Merlin, Season 3--The Tears Of Uther Pendragon - Part 1
09:00 AM Merlin, Season 3--The Tears Of Uther Pendragon - Part 2
10:00 AM Merlin, Season 3--Gwaine
11:00 AM Merlin, Season 3--The Crystal Cave
12:00 PM Merlin, Season 3--The Changeling
01:00 PM Merlin, Season 3--The Castle Of Fyrien
02:00 PM Merlin, Season 3--The Eye Of The Phoenix
03:00 PM Merlin, Season 3--Love In The Time Of Dragons
04:00 PM Merlin, Season 3--Queen Of Hearts
05:00 PM Merlin, Season 3--The Sorcerer's Shadow
06:00 PM Merlin, Season 3--The Coming Of Arthur - Part 1

10:00 PM Merlin, Season 3--The Coming Of Arthur - Part 2 [season finale]




SAT, 9 APR
12:00 AM Merlin, Season 3--The Coming Of Arthur - Part 2

11:00 AM Syfy Original Movie--Wyvern


WEDNES, 13 APR
09:00 PM Ghost Hunters, Season 7--Knights Of The Living Dead
11:00 PM Ghost Hunters, Season 7--Knights Of The Living Dead


THURS, 14 APR
10:00 PM Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles--Dungeons & Dragons [medieval content dubious]


SUN, 17 APR
11:00 AM Syfy Original Miniseries--Riverworld - Part One
01:00 PM Syfy Original Miniseries--Riverworld - Part Two




11:00 PM Syfy Original Miniseries--Triangle, The - Part 1


MON, 18 APR
01:00 AM Syfy Original Miniseries--Triangle, The - Part 2
03:00 AM Syfy Original Miniseries--Triangle, The - Part 3


WEDNES, 20 APR
08:00 AM Syfy Original Miniseries--Triangle, The - Part 1
10:00 AM Syfy Original Miniseries--Triangle, The - Part 2
12:00 PM Syfy Original Miniseries--Triangle, The - Part 3


THURS, 21 APR
08:00 AM Syfy Original Miniseries--Riverworld - Part One
10:00 AM Syfy Original Minseries--Riverworld - Part Two


SUN, 24 APR
09:00 AM Syfy Original Movie--Book Of Beasts, The



11:00 AM Movie--Merlin - Part One
01:00 PM Movie--Merlin - Part Two




WEDNES, 27 APR
12:00 PM Syfy Original Movie--Reign Of The Gargoyles
02:00 PM Syfy Original Movie--Rise Of The Gargoyles




SAT, 30 APR
04:30 PM Movie--Underworld
07:00 PM Movie--Underworld: Evolution
09:00 PM Movie--Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans
11:00 PM Movie--Underworld

Chiller Listings for April 2011

The following represent the (pithy) medieval-themed listings for this month on the Chiller network. I should have the listings for SyFy up by tomorrow.


WEDNES, 6 APR
10:00 AM
The Twilight Zone The Last Defender Of Camelot

TUES, 26 APR
08:00 PM
Movie The Forsaken



WEDNES, 27 APR
12:00 AM
Movie The Forsaken

SUN, 1 MAY
04:00 AM
The Forsaken