Conference Papers, and The Tyranny of Choice

I have submitted a proposal for a conference being held in Rome this June. The whole conference is devoted to the giallo, a film genre I have to admit to only now becoming acquainted with. But my desire to expand my academic reach, coupled with the idea of spending some time in Rome again, has prompted me to get on board. I had previously seen The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, and my interest in Mario Bava has been developing for a couple of years now, so it is not impossible that I can find something to say on it! Indeed, I think I have found an angle that fits well with my own research interests, and hopefully will be fairly original for the conference. If I get accepted I'll start presenting some of the research here.

I also found out last week about a three-day conference in Paris on Hammer films. This sounds like my sort of thing too, but writing academically about Hammer is out of my current comfort zone. I wrote about some Hammer films during my degree, but that was a long time ago and I have felt, somewhat arrogantly, that I have "moved on" from Hammer.But it still has a hold over me. By a rough count today I have over eighty Hammer films on DVD and blu ray, and I have written extensively about them for Cinema Retro. I have interviewed stars and directors, and been to loads of Hammer events and conventions. I have had my photo taken with many a Hammer Glamour girl, as well as many of the ageing male stars too. I feel like my problem is that I'm in too deep with Hammer. It is such a vast subject area, that to choose just one small part to present a paper on seems virtually impossible.

Surrounding myself with DVDs today, and looking through the list of suggested topic areas by the conference organisers, I think I have come up with an idea. It has nothing to do with my PhD, but I feel I can justify it by saying I am stretching myself as an academic. If I can speak on a wider variety of subjects, I'm going to get more exposure in the global academic community. This, like I said, is how I justify it to myself anyway. Spending a few hours of a day staring at Hammer DVDs has to be justified one way or another.

So I think I've narrowed it down to The Stranglers of Bombay and The Terror of the Tongs.

I've also submitted a proposal for a conference on exploitation cinema being held in London this May. So I've gone from doing one paper in the past two years to potentially writing and presenting three within a couple of weeks of each other. Fun times ahead.