James M. Welsh

Film and Literature: an introduction and reader (2nd edition)

determined. Another relevant factor is television’s greater socio-cultural specificity and therefore cross-border ‘cultural discount’, compared with that of movies, which constitutes one more barrier to penetration beyond its original cultural–linguistic market. This anthology will undoubtedly raise even more research questions, as the two editors envision. It is a valuable resource for both theoretical inquiries and empirical research as well as for undergraduate and graduate teaching on a fascinating and fast evolving area in the transformative age of globalization.

XXI IAMHIST Congress, Cincinnati, OHIO, July 22–23, 2005: Projections of Race and Ethnicity

The 21st Congress of the International Association for Media and History was held in Cincinnati, Ohio, the first time IAMHIST had ever visited Ohio, and only the third time IAMHIST convened in the United States. IAMHIST has a tradition for being timely in its concerns, but did Cincinnati notice? Suppose the most controversial film of the past year was shown there, the one that got director Theo Van Gogh murdered in Amsterdam? Was Cincinnati given notice? Should the proceedings have been promoted locally? At the end of the day, IAMHIST probably did not leave too big an imprint on the city at large or perhaps even on the campus of the University of Cincinnati, though the group was certainly well treated there. Certainly IAMHIST conferees cared about the assassination of the controversial filmmaker in Amsterdam, generally considered the most tolerant city in the world, and a city that has hosted IAMHIST in the past and will, perhaps, again in the future. Karsten Fledelius of the University of Copenhagen addressed the issue of ‘Islamism and Blasphemy’ in Holland, for example, and Gerda Jansen Hendriks of Nederlands National Public Television showed recent footage from the series ‘Primetime Live’ concerning the assimilation of the Moslem ‘other.’ According to Peter Lev, the redoubtable Karsten Fledelius was more a presenter than a speaker at this year’s conference. In discussing ‘Islamism and Blasphemy,’ Karsten presented a video copy of the short film Submission, about, as Lev notes,

The history of the future, visions from the past—University of Leicester, 16–19 July 2003

‘I flung myself into futurity’, said the Traveller in H. G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine. A voyage into future history was also the theme of the 20th IAMHIST biennial conference, ‘The History of the Future, Visions from the Past’, held at the School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester, 16–19 July 2003. Since the 1960s, Leicester has been renowned for its multi-ethnic population. It is also the hometown of filmmakers Richard Attenborough and Stephen Frears, and location of the University of Leicester, De Montfort University, and the United Kingdom’s new National Space Centre. More than 150 IAMHIST delegates from 22 countries met in plenary sessions and presentations held in the University of Leicester’s Gilbert Murray Conference Center and the Ken Edwards Building, whose auditoria, meeting rooms and residence rooms proved to be well equipped and comfortable. Hovering over the conference was not only the spirit of that futurist visionary H. G. Wells, who was the subject of several presentations, including, David Culbert’s analysis of the journalistic techniques employed by Orson Welles in his War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938, and Tristram Hooley’s examination of Well’s predictive fiction, but also the spirits of a wildly varied aggregate of media and cultural visionaries including George Orwell, Peter Watkins, Andrej Tarkovsky, George Pal, and Gerry Anderson. The conference began, appropriately enough, with a panel of speakers addressing issues in current scholarship concerning George Orwell, whose 100th birthday is being observed this year. Scott Lucas’s revisionist views of Orwell and the notoriety of Orwell’s list of fellow travellers was countered by Tony Shaw’s more traditional celebration of the iconic Orwell. Standing in between these two extremes was Orwell authority Dan Leab, the who took a more balanced position. He responded in spirited fashion to allegations regarding Orwell’s seemingly inconsistent political views. ‘He’s become lately too much a cottage industry among academics and pop commentators’, said Leab. ‘Let’s not subject him to simplistic passing fads and trends. Besides, Orwell would have strenuously objected to the adjectival formulation “Orwellian”—an unfortunate misuse of the language’. Concluding the opening session was Tony Price’s 1979 film Night Shift, a fable ‘in the spirit of Orwell’, about a future machine age that has rendered individual labor useless. Such a prediction reaches well past Orwell, to be sure. Our Traveller in the The Time Machine had earlier described such a future: ‘No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question