Presenting interdisciplinary analysis and sharing considerations about their self-discipline, members of the Society for Cinema and Media Research met in Chicago April 3-6, 2025.
This annual worldwide convention at all times intrigues with its imaginative POV on movie and film-like phenomenon in world tradition. Topics included cop physique cameras, podcasts, AI-generated jokes and AI-generated pretend faces to anonymize interviewees in documentaries, and the historical past of the parable that film theaters as soon as banned popcorn as a result of noisy munching would distract audiences from studying intertitles and listening to dialogue.
The nonprofit’s membership numbers 3,148 from 39 international locations. Distinguished within the roster of 1,688 presenters have been regionally sourced lecturers from the College of Chicago and Northwestern College. One very rewarding worthwhile panel was Seeing SAIC: The College of the Artwork Institute of Chicago and Experimental Movie/ Video Historical past. Underscoring the worldwide focus, I counted “Hollywood” in solely 25 titles of shows. Experimental and avant-garde works have been properly represented.
A well timed workshop was on “DEAI Integration and Implementation: Approaching Collaboration in Audiovisual Archival Initiatives”. Two back-to-back roundtables on Saturday have been “Politicized Pedagogy” and “Scholarly Organizations Throughout More and more Precarious Occasions”. A number of the registrants skipped the second to attend the Fingers Off! Rally and March to Rise Up and Struggle Again Towards Trump/Musk Assaults protest. Indicators there included “Captain America Taught Me To Struggle Fascists” and “Take Your Stinking Paws Off Our Nation You Rattling Soiled Ape!”
The day after the convention closed—held on the Fairmont Lodge and Swissotel—the Washington Put up reported: “Greater than 1,200 grants that assist tradition and historical past applications throughout the nation are estimated to have been reduce by the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities, in line with a coalition [National Humanities Alliance] that advocates for the company focused final week within the Trump administration’s efforts to overtake the federal authorities and reshape American tradition.”
One supply who’d fairly go unnamed emailed: “At this second in time, given how precarious issues really feel throughout academia and the nonprofit world, I’d choose to be anonymized… So unhappy to be so guarded today!” One presenter, I’m advised, pleaded with attendees to not take good cellphone pictures of a slide that, if posted, might presumably jeopardize their job.
After we coated the SCMS convention in 2017, within the wake of Trump’s journey bans, the final line learn: “Subsequent yr in Toronto, I wager extra of SCMS’s 3025 members from 46 international locations will theorize on Trump his tweets and his TV-watching—barring passport points for U.S. students.”
SCMS members have interpreted Trump through media principle from the beginning.
In 2017 there have been papers titled “American Idol: Actuality TV and Candidate Trump” and “Precarious Whiteness within the Time of Trump: UnReal, Anti-heroines, and Psychological Sickness.”
The next yr in Toronto 2018 classes proliferated: “Coming to Grips with the Present Second,” “Trumped Media within the Age of Trump,” “Media and American Political Disaster,” “Trump’s Girls Gender, Have an effect on, and Company in Modern U.S. Media Tradition,” “Anti-Trump Resistance throughout Feminized Media Cultures.” A prof from Dublin discoursed on “Ivanka Trump and the New Plutocratic (Put up)feminism.”
In Seattle in 2019 papers included “Trumpism and the Rhetoric of Media Pathology,” “F for Faux Information: Orson Welles, Donald Trump and the Powers of the False” and “Twitter Watchers: The Care and Feeding of MSNBC within the Trump Period.”
In Denver in 2020 there have been panels on “Media Cultures within the Trump Period,” “Movie Noir within the Age of Trump” and “Powers of the False Media Allegories of the Trump Age.”
Assorted papers coated “The Good Place: Imagining U.S. Tv’s ‘Ethical Imaginary’ within the Age of Trump” and “ABC’s Black-ish and the Cultural Politics of the Community Sitcom within the Trump Period,” “(Former) Teen Idols for Trump: The Grotesque Movie star of 80s Sitcom Idols,”and “Exorcising Males’s Demons: Possession Movies & Extremism from Obama to Trump.”
Again in Denver in 2023 SCMS program had just one paper: “The Joke Who Received Elected: The mediated spectacle of Donald Trump in Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties display tradition.” And in Boston’s 2024 convention just one presentation cited Trump: “Mediating Nationwide Disaster: Cable Information Representations of Trump’s Put up-Presidency.”
Again in 2017, there have been two Trump papers on the Chicago gathering: “American Idol: Actuality TV and Candidate Trump” and “Precarious Whiteness within the Time of Trump: UnReal, Anti-heroines, and Psychological Sickness.”
This yr too there was only one: an distinctive discuss by Kathleen McHugh from College of California, Los Angeles, titled “From D.W. Griffith to Donald Trump: The Hysterical Scenes Males Make with Girls’s Anger,” impressed by Karen Cooper’s on-line performances of Trump’s personal phrases recorded at press conferences, debates, rallies, and so on. McHugh linked a scene with the biracial character Lydia in “The Beginning of a Nation” to Trump’s 2020 assault on Senator Kamala Harris: “Form of a madwoman, I name her, as a result of she was so offended and such hatred with Justice Kavanaugh.”
If Trump himself is analyzed much less at this convention, the influence of his journey insurance policies is much more regarding for display students in 2025 than in 2017. A SCMS consultant emailed: “We all know the uncertainty round U.S. immigration and border insurance policies continues to create actual anxiousness—significantly for our worldwide attendees, in addition to for our queer and trans members, who could face extra layers of vulnerability when touring. These considerations are one thing we take significantly.”
“We’re conscious that some members from international locations at the moment dealing with strained relations with the U.S. authorities selected to not attend this yr’s convention as a matter of precept.”
“[O]ur members have already been considerably impacted by a spread of urgent points — from ongoing challenges in greater schooling, to shifts in museum and library funding, to uncertainty round NEH grants and adjustments inside the Division of Schooling. These developments aren’t summary; they straight have an effect on the instructing, analysis, and institutional assist constructions that our members depend on.”
SCMS points statements occasionally, sometimes co-signing with nationwide organizations such because the American Council of Discovered Societies. On the primary day of this yr’s convention the group posted a Joint Assertion on Cuts to the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities that urged: “Important thought, cultural reminiscence, and knowledge fostered by the humanities stay essential to a vibrant democracy.” Two years in the past, it opposed The Effort to Undermine Educational Freedom in Florida Home Invoice 999. “Educational freedom means freedom of thought, not the state-mandated manufacturing of histories edited to swimsuit one celebration’s agenda within the present tradition wars,” argued the profs.
NEH grants are crucial for profs and grad college students in all of the humanities, not only for cinema and media research. Of their unilateral conflict on tradition, Trump apparatchiks goal politically incorrect topics in a scattershot vogue.
SCMS President Victoria E. Johnson, at Division of Movie and Media Research College of California, Irvine, famous in a cellphone interview that, “This yr one of many areas that we actually see creating inside the group and throughout the sphere is a deal with incapacity research. So I’d say that’s a very sturdy emergent pattern inside scholarship within the discipline. I’d additionally say that one of many actual strengths of SCMS is its breadth of understanding of what’s meant by media.” One discuss I missed was “Is Yoga Media? The Technocratic Re-Creativeness of Nationwide Yoga.”
Undertaking 2025 itself, lengthy earlier than Trump’s second inauguration, threatened funding even not directly for journey to tutorial conferences. In principle, that coverage might have an effect on attendance on the subsequent SCMS assembly.
“We’ll be returning to Chicago subsequent yr,” states the SCMS workplace. “That call goes again to our COVID-era onsite convention cancellation negotiations—agreements we made throughout a interval of large uncertainty to assist defend the Society’s long-term sustainability.”
U.S. society and this organizational Society face a brand new interval of large uncertainty. New shifting imagery on our screens little question will furnish SCMS members with new issues to debate.
