Elsewhere from an American Perspective: Foreign Places in American Cinema

Abstract

Sponsored by the SERCIA (Société d'études et de recherche sur le cinéma anglophone), a society founded in 1993 to gather researchers in the field of English-speaking cinema, and now television, and by the research working group "Textes et cultures," the international conference "Elsewhere from an American Perspective: Foreign Places in American Cinema" was held on May 5 th and 6 th , 2022 at the Maison de la recherche on the university campus of Arras. The conference was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and finally took place on-site save for a Japanese speaker who did her presentation via Zoom. It included six panels and two plenary lectures by Dr. Antoine Gaudin (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3) and Pr. W. Anthony Sheppard (Williams College, Massachusetts). The conference aimed to explore how the American cinema has created the illusion of foreign places, landscapes, and cities. There is a long tradition in the history of Hollywood that demonstrates its interest in using fake movie sets, rear projections, and matte painting that give the impression of visiting a foreign land to a motionless audience. In the postwar period the practice of location shooting increased, therefore corroborating exoticism, voyeuristic impulses, realistic effects, a sense of authenticity, and raising issues related to compositional conventions. If such aspects implied a commitment to faithfulness in the representation of the others, stereotypical and biased portrayals have remained, to a certain extent, intact. With themes such as mobility, exile, wandering, tourism, romance, and personal or professional trips pervading the American screen, new questions have become central at many levels: cultural, political, social, economic, and aesthetic. The conference touched on all of them, dealing with transnational exchanges, co-productions,