Unmade, Unseen and Unreleased: Shadow Histories of Cinema and Television 23rd and 24th May
About this event
Unmade, unseen, and unreleased films and television programmes are a burgeoning area of academic study, allowing for the excavation of hidden and lost histories. For every film or television programme we watch, there are hundreds more that never made it to our screens. This conference explores this shadow world of the unmade, considering the film and television history that might have been and providing a series of fascinating, never-before-told case studies. The conference papers draw on archival sources such as scripts, synopses, and newly discovered manuscripts, as well as interviews, and expert testimony from screenwriters.
The appeal of ‘lost’ films is furthered by the discovery of unproduced screenplays. As well as books on Kubrick’s Napoleon and The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See, recent years have seen documentary films on ‘lost projects’ such as Lost in La Mancha (2002) and Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), radio adaptations of unmade films like Welles’s Heart of Darkness, and stage readings of unproduced Hammer horrors such as Vampirella. There are also archives filled with audio-visual footage of outtakes, cuts, and unseen material of films that might have been. Even more tantalising are those archives containing films and television that have been unseen for many decades, lost to time and that have gone unrecorded in official histories.
Join us for this in-person two-day conference at Sheffield Hallam University on the 23rd and 24th May and prepare to enter the shadow world of the unmade, unseen, and unreleased.
Date and time
Mon, 23 May 2022, 09:00 –
Tue, 24 May 2022, 16:30 BST
Tickets are available for purchase on Eventbrite.
The conference will feature conference keynotes from:
• Dr Hannah Hamad (Cardiff University), who will discuss the unmade films about the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper.
• Professor Sue Vice (University of Sheffield), who will discuss the unused outtakes of the Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985).