Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal: Announcements

Call for papers: CfE 44 - World Cinemas of Resistance: Cinematic worlds as decolonial practices

2024-04-12T12:23:58+00:00

Call for Essays for the thematic section of Cinéma & Cie no. 44, edited by Daniele Rugo and Marco Benoît Carbone.

This CfE invites contributions that aim to map and investigate decolonial practices in cinematic worlds from the global south. This approach emphasises the potential of these cinemas to resist hegemonic filmic (and more generally cultural) forms and to move beyond thematic concerns, formal strategies and industrial frameworks generated and sanctioned in the Global North.

The Global South is understood here as a broad category that denotes contexts and sites that have been historically subjected to financial, political, and cultural othering and dominance, including therefore diasporic and indigenous cinemas practiced in the Global North. As a critique of ideologies, institutions, and power, the Global South draws on the paradigms of decolonisation, post-coloniality, and the notion of the post-national. As a political category aligning with that of a “cinema of the margins”, a south-driven approach challenges the othering of a “world cinema” label. In Traverso’s definition, (2017), a “south-to-south” approach entails hearing voices and seeing through the eyes of the world’s Southernmost nations to decentre the positionality of the subject, offering new perspectives, whether contextually or comparatively. This idea of a Global South cannot thus refrain from intersecting with the critical paradigms of Black cinema, indigenous cinemas, queer and feminist cinema, third cinema, imperfect cinema, poor cinema, migrant, diasporic, and accented cinema.

Inevitably, world cinemas produced away from the canons and infrastructures of Hollywood and/or Europe are also potential sites of resistance. Instances of world cinemas of this kind have the potential to decenter Western gazes and enact practices of decoloniality that are both mindful of and surpass the decolonial third cinemas of the 1960s and 1970s.

Resistance is understood here both in terms of the themes and issues developed, as well as the formal strategies deployed and the production and distribution frameworks adopted and/or created. In this sense, this CfE aims to interrogate resistant world cinemas as they emerge through a range of approaches that may include traditional fiction, political documentary to slow cinema, first-person cinema to avant-garde and collective filmmaking, as well as ethnographic documentaries and documentation. Resistant world cinemas ideally reconfigure planetary gazes on the real, produce deconstructions of the past, and imagine possible futures. Ultimately, the idea of world cinema as a decolonial practice may offer a chance to rethink formal and aesthetic theorization around cinema’s representational forms and objects and their power relations, while challenging the very idea of what cinema is and what discourse presides over definitions, without excluding its relations with cognate media forms.

Contributions to this CfE can focus on any geographical area and form (fiction, documentary, experimental, hybrid) and might address the following questions:

What forms of resistance do world cinemas from the global South produce? How can we measure their impact?
What formal strategies – if any – are privileged by resistant cinemas? What cinematic codes, gazes, perspectives based on decolonial approaches to gender, race, sexuality, practices of the self have emerged?
Can these cinemas initiate and establish alternative forms of production and distribution?
How do new media forms, mobile screens and intermedia practices redefine these forms?
How do cinematic worlds of resistance promote and advance a decolonial agenda?
What relations do contemporary global south cinemas maintain with earlier decolonial iterations (third cinema, imperfect cinema)?
How can global south cinemas escape ideas of diversity and other categories I.e. inclusivity that are underpinned, sanctioned, or sustained by traditional dominant powers?
How do translatability and untranslatability play a role in the intercultural and culturally relative view of planetary exchanges?
What are the actual chances for a Global South cinema to resist traditional and new forms of transnational commoditizationtion of cultures on a global market?
How do notions such as World Cinema and Global South change under the pressure of resistant and decolonial cinematic practices?

Abstract submission: Interested authors should submit an abstract (300 words) and an up-to-date biographical note (100 words) to daniele.rugo@brunel.ac.uk and marcobenoit.carbone@brunel.ac.uk by August 31st, 2024.
Acceptance notices will be circulated by 30th September 2024. Please note: the deadline for submission of draft articles for peer review will be January 30th, 2025. All article submissions should include: 5 keywords, name of author(s), institutional affiliation, contacts details and a short bio for each author. The articles must not exceed 5.000/6.000 words. Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. Contributions will be submitted to double blind peer review. The issue will be published in June 2025.

Call for papers: CfE 42 - Guerrilla Images. Aesthetics and Politics of Moving Images in Contemporary Uprisings

2023-06-19T13:17:54+00:00

Call for Essays for the thematic section of Cinéma & Cie no. 41, edited by Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Giuseppe Previtali, and Giacomo Tagliani.

Download the Call for Essays (.pdf)

So far, the 21st century could be labelled as the century of uprisings. As difficult as it is to historicize a multifaceted phenomenon that looks rather elusive and constantly changing, one cannot underestimate the ground-breaking role played by events such as the anti-WGO demonstrations in Seattle (1999) and Genoa (2001) in informing the new millennium’s imagination. In 2011, the so-called Arab Springs and the 15-M Movement in Madrid also made blatantly evident that this new wave of revolts is strictly connected to the latest development in the media ecosystem (Hartle and White 2021), showing the mutual bind between technical (re)producibility and the effectiveness (or even the possibility) of political action (Rovisco 2017; Snowdon 2020). Nowadays, mass uprisings are still one of the most representative phenomena within the global political scenario (Clover 2016), from the United States to the Middle East and to Taiwan. In turn, throughout these decades such uprisings have produced an increasing volume of audiovisual documentation which is spread all over the world in real time, enabling new professionalisms to emerge (Ristovska 2021) and creating layered ecologies in the media/movement dynamic (Trerè 2019).

Indeed, the last two decades have witnessed the emergence and gathering in the public space of several collective movements which have highlighted – in a more or less violent way – the contradictions of the present from social, political, economic, and ecological points of view (Amato 2019). Despite their heterogeneous claims, a key feature shared by these movements is the effort to refunctionalize media beyond their original aim and scope (Anden-Papadopoulos 2013). This includes the sphere of video production as a constitutive part of the acts of revolt (Della Ratta 2018). The continuous dialectic between the actions performed by the “singular-plural” body (Nancy 1996) and their audiovisual remediation (Mirzoeff 2017) seems to disclose a potentiality that is both political and aesthetic. Its features and consequences have only recently begun to be explored by media and visual culture studies (Askanius 2014; Razsa 2014; Eder, Hartmann, Tedjasukmana 2020; McGarry et al. 2020).

From this perspective, addressing uprisings demands a multifocal point of view. One the one hand, it requires the capability of considering the specificity of the revolts as they are situated in a certain historical and geographical context: the case of Gezi Park in Turkey is emblematic, but it would also be possible to refer to the site-specifity of uprisings on a larger scale, reflecting for instance on a Mediterranean way in the elaboration of strategies, topics and acts. On the other hand, it is necessary to identify the features of the different audiovisual practices shared by participants all over the world: for instance, carrying moving images (like eyewitness videos) of the victims of violence and of streets protests, a practice linking the Black Lives Matter movement and Middle eastern protesters. This also includes different types of moving images getting increasingly influential in current political conflicts and protests, such as web-documentaries or mobilizing informative videos, as well as user generated content produced by individual activist users like mash-up videos or video-selfies on TikTok (cf. Eder/Tedjasukmana 2020; Fahlenbrach 2020).

This multifocality is not limited to synchronic aspects, but it also involves the diachronic dimension. In fact, such a gaze should constantly adhere to the present but nevertheless be able to establish relationships with the past. This means that it needs to investigate with an archaeological approach those phenomena and circumstances which seem to predict questions that have become inescapable today, such as the role of female agency in the case of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the construction of a police gaze in response to the riots of 1968 in Paris (Scheppe 2021), or the “reinvention of the audiovisual beyond the cinema as a technological mechanism and ideological institution” occurred in the 1970s (Goddard 2018, 193). Didi-Huberman (2016, 2019, 2021) has recently shown the productivity of this approach, which aims to revisit key moments in the history of images by looking for those moments of tension that have somehow anticipated the contemporary ways of contesting the political.

This special issue intends to promote a transdisciplinary reflection on the role that moving images and video technologies play within uprisings. In fact, still images and pictures have been the object of several inquiries, whereas audiovisual media have been less investigated. Thus, this issue is fostering further analyses that highlight the specific features and mechanism of audiovisual making meaning in political protest. We particularly encourage transdisciplinary researches that can put into dialogue media and visual studies with different approaches (e.g. queer and postcolonial studies). Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Specific case studies of the role of moving images in the context of contemporary uprisings;
Themes and aesthetics: are there distinctive audiovisual features characterizing uprisings according to their core theme? What aesthetic conventions have developed in the mediation of specific protest themes?
How do current social-media-technologies and environments influence the aesthetics and impacts of contesting moving images?
How do uprisings affect the present-day media ecology?
History of moving images in revolt: how did past uprisings anticipate contemporary audiovisual practices?
How can videos of uprisings be understood within and beyond the paradigm of witnessing? How are these videos narrated and re-appropriated in the contemporary mediasphere?
How can we archive, preserve, and disseminate the memory of uprisings in the digital scenario? What specific role do traditions of cinema, visual arts, and contemporary media play in this context?
Revolts against images: iconoclasm and iconoclash (Latour and Weibel 2002) as audiovisual tactics in contemporary uprisings

Bibliography

Amato P. (2019), La rivolta, Napoli, Cronopio.

Anden-Papadopoulos K. (2013), Citizen camera-witnessing: Embodied political dissent in the age of mediated mass self-communication, in New Media & Society, 16/5: 753-769.

Askanius, T. (2014), Videos for Change. In: K. Wilkins et. al. (eds.), The Handbook of Development Communication and Social Change, New Jersey, John Wiley: 3453–470.

Butler J. (2015), Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Harvard, Harvard University Press.

Clover J. (2016), Riot. Strike. Riot. The New Era of Uprisings, London-New York, Verso.

Crimp D. (1989), Mourning and Militancy, in October, 53: 3-18.

Della Ratta D. (2018), Shooting a Revolution. Visual Media and Warfare in Syria, London, Pluto Press.

Didi-Huberman G. (2016), Peuples en larmes, peoples en armes. L’Oeil de l’histoire 6, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit.

Didi-Huberman G. (2019), Désires, desobéir. Ce qui nous soulève 1, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit.

Didi-Huberman G. (2021), Imaginer recommencer. Ce qui nous soulève 2, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit.

Eder, J., Tedjasukmana, C. (2020), Video Activism on the Social Web, in S. Presence et. al.(eds.): Contemporary Radical Film Culture: Networks, Organisations and Activists, London-New York, Routledge: 41-52.

Eder, J., Hartmann, B., Tedjasukmana, C. (2020), Bewegungsbilder. Politische Videos in Sozialen Medien, Berlin, Bertz.

Fahlenbrach, K. (2020), Video-Aktivismus: Formen und Strategien der audiovisuellen Mobilisierung im Netz, in Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, 33/2: 457-473.

Gerbaudo, P. (2014), The persistence of collectivity in digital protest, in Information, Communication & Society, 17/2: 264-268.

Gehl R. (2009), YouTube as archive. Who will curate this digital Wunderkammer?, in International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12/1: 43-60.

Goddard, M. (2018), Guerrilla Networks. An Anarchaeology of 1970s Radical Media Ecologies, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press.

Gregory D. (2013), Tahrir: Politics, Publics and Performance of Space, in Middle East Critique, 22/3: 235-246.

Hartle S., White D. (eds.) (2022), Visual Activism in the 21^st Century. Art, Protest and Resistance in an Uncertain World, London, Bloomsbury.

Harvey D. (2012), Rebel Cities. From the Right to The City to the Urban Revolution, London-New York, Verso.

Koukal D.R. (2010), Here I stand: mediated bodies in dissent, in Media Tropes, 2/2: 109-127.

Latour, B., Weibel, P. (2002), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Cambridge-London, MIT Press.

Malm A. (2021), How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, London-New York, Verso.

McGarry A., Erhart I., Elsen-Ziya H., Jenzen O., Korkut U. (eds.) (2020), The Aesthetics of Global Protest. Visual Culture and Communication, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press.

Mirzoeff N. (2017), The Appearance of Black Lives Matter, Miami, [NAME] Publications.

Nancy J.L. (1996), Être singulier pluriel, Paris, Éditions Galilée.

Ristovska, S. (2021), Seeing Human Rights. Video Activism as a Proxy Profession, Cambridge-London, MIT Press.

Razsa, M.J. (2014), Beyond ‘Riot Porn’: Protest Video and the Production of Unruly Subjects, in ethnos, 79/4: 496–524.

Rovisco M. (2017), The indignados social movement and the image of the occupied square: the making of a global icon, in Visual Communication, 16/3: 337-359.

Scheppe W. (2021), Taxonomy of the Barricade: Image Acts of Political Authority in May 1968, Milan, NERO.

Snowdon P. (2020), The People are Not an Image. Vernacular Video After the Arab Spring, London-New York, Verso.

Trerè, E. (2019), Hybrid Media Activism. Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms, , London-New York, Routldge.

Submission details

Please send your abstract (from 300 to 500 words, in English or French) and a short biographical note to kathrin.fahlenbrach@uni-hamburg.de, giuseppe.previtali@unibg.it, and giacomo.tagliani@unipa.it by August 31^st, 2023.

Authors will be notified of abstract proposal acceptance by September 30^th, 2023

If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the full article (in English or French) by December 15^th, 2023.

All article submissions should include: 5 keywords, name of author(s), institutional affiliation, contacts details and a short bio for each author.

The articles must not exceed 5.000/6.000-words.

Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.

Contributions will be submitted to double blind peer review.

The issue no. 42 of Cinéma & Cie will be published in June 2024.

Deadlines

Submission of proposals: August 31^st, 2023

Acceptance of proposals notified by: September 30^th, 2023

Submission of full articles for peer review: December 15^th, 2023

Publication: June 2024

Call for papers: CfE 41 Extended Deadline - Cinematic Continuities, Changes and Challenges in Europe: Reflections on Recent Shifts in European Cinema Cultures

2022-10-24T09:29:41+00:00

Call for Essays for the thematic section of Cinéma & Cie no. 41, edited by Daniel Biltereyst, Elena Gipponi and Andrea Miconi

Extended Deadline for abstract proposals: January 20, 2023

When looking at recent trends in the European (and worldwide) film market, one cannot escape the idea that probably no other era in film history has seen so many disruptive changes and challenges as the last three decades. These changes obviously include technological disruptions triggered by digitization—a disruption that deeply transformed the filmed entertainment business model and one that had a fundamental impact on the way films are made, distributed, exhibited, and shown, as well as how it transformed people’s relation to, and enjoyment of, films.

Since the late 1980s one saw how the post-theatrical life of a film is extended to releases via video/DVD/Blu-ray rental; video/DVD/Blu-ray sales; pay-TV and different types of free linear television; all kinds of digital audiovisual services, subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) and streaming services platforms; and so on. Although films are still watched in cinemas and other spaces with big screens (e.g. the lively film festivals landscape), consumers now see them more than ever on a multitude of screens—from TV sets, tablets, laptops, and smartphones, to other devices. Despite these significant evolutions in European cinema – and contrary to the many analyses on, for instance, the interwar period (1918-1939) or the postwar cinema period (1945-1969) – longitudinal analysis and reflections barely exist for the recent period—at least not on a pan-European level.

The aim of this theme issue is to invite authors to reflect on these recent cinematic trends in Europe from a longitudinal perspective and to go beyond the nation-state. How to make sense of the complexities of these recent shifts in the production, distribution, exhibition, consumption, and the experience of watching films in Europe? What effects have these changes had on the shared perception of European cinema? Has the relocation of the cinematic experience had an influence on the transnational circulation of European films? How can we longitudinally trace and measure the processes of Europeanization in cinema production and consumption in the last three decades?

This call for essays for Cinéma&Cie #41 special issue “Cinematic Continuities, Changes and Challenges in Europe: Reflections on Recent Shifts in European Cinema Cultures” is conceived within the scope of the Horizon 2020 project EUMEPLAT – European Media Platforms: Assessing positive and negative externalities for European Culture. Among the topics that could be addressed are:

Shifts in European film production
European co-productions
Centers and peripheries in European cinema
Distribution and flows of European films
Genres and European film flows
Diasporic film cultures in Europe
Shifts in film experiences in the theatrical cinema environment
Post-theatrical film experiences
Audiences and European films
European film festivals
Revising Hollywood in/vs. Europe
European cinema in the world
Cinema, nation-building, and European identity(ies)
The persistence of cinema in the multiscreen environment
Cinematic representations of Europe
Platformization and European cinema

References

Bondebjerg, I., & Redvall, E. N. (eds.)(2015) European Cinema and Television. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Elsaesser, Th. (2005) European Cinema: Face to Face to Hollywood. Amsterdam: AUP.

Gott, M. & Herzog, T. (eds.)(2015) East, West and Centre: Reframing post-1985 European cinema. Edinburgh: EIP.

Harrod, M., Liz, M. & Timoshkina, A. (eds.) (2014). The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalization. London: I. B. Tauris.

Jäckel, A. (2003). European Film Industries. London: British Film Institute.

Liz, M. (2016) Euro-Visions. New York: Bloomsbury.

Rivi, L. (2007) European Cinema after 1989. New York: Palgrave.

Submission details

Please send a 400-word abstract in English or in French, three/five bibliographical references, five keywords, and a short biographical note to daniel.biltereyst@ugent.be, elena.gipponi@iulm.it and andrea.miconi@iulm.it by 20 January 2023. Notifications of acceptance will be emailed no later than end of January 2023. If the proposal is accepted, a 6,000/7,000-word essay must be submitted for double-blind peer review by the end of June 2023.

Download the Call for Essays (.pdf)

Call for papers: CLOSED CfE 40 — Archaeologies of the Virtual. Attractions, Senses, Narratives

2022-07-07T21:12:31+00:00

Call for Essays for the thematic section of Cinéma & Cie no. 40, edited by Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Wanda Strauven and Simone Venturini

Download the Call for Essays (.pdf)

Even though it is often presented as an unprecedented technology, virtual reality (VR) is a new medium as much as it is an old one and an imaginary one. On the one hand, if the first VR experiments date from the 1960s, virtual technologies have been long foreshadowed by intermedia fictional worlds, that still nourish the imaginary texture of VR and even seem to dictate the agenda of its concretisation – as in the case of the Metaverse metaphor originated in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. On the other hand, virtual interfaces have been anticipated by the virtualization of visuality, that took shape during the 19^th century in dispositifs like the panorama and the diorama (Friedberg 1993), and have been prefigured by the multifarious attempts to realise the immersion of the spectator, which can be traced back to the most ancient forms of human art (Grau 2003, Nechvatal 2009).

This issue aims to investigate the present state of the art of virtual technologies against the background of recent and past cinema and media history and theory, by drawing on a threefold articulation:

Attractions and environments

Immersive interactive environments have come to challenge contemporary spectatorship and audio-visual creation. By triggering our bodies to respond as though the experience they convey were real, VR interfaces offer us intense thrills, awe, and goose bumps. In order to enter CAVEs and to wear head-mounted displays, VR spectators are brought back to fairs and arcades, where they strive to get themselves accustomed to the new medium, as much as moviegoers of the early 20^th century crowded into theatres not to watch films, but, rather, to experience cinema. Likewise, nowadays, immersive experiences renovate an emphasis on spectacle and monstration over narrative, since what becomes most captivating for the audience is the sensorial impact of the medium itself. Featuring rollercoasters, wanderings in outer space, flight simulators, and so forth, many of the contents that are offered to immersive users remediate the exotic fascination raised by travelogues and curiosities. Furthermore, virtual creations are also the locus for cinephilia (as they reinterpret classic movie genres, like horror, science fiction, and documentary) and for creative cinematic reuses and archiving practices (Montegelato 2021), which thematize the remediations that are afoot (The Horrifically Real Virtuality 2018, Cesare’s Dream – In the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 2019).

An account of immersive virtual environments could find in the concept of cinematic “attraction(s)” coined in the mid-1980s by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault (Gaudreault & Gunning 1989, Gunning 1990, Strauven 2006) a decisive theoretical framework to reassess their position within a broader spectrum of moving image culture, but also to critically reframe the spectacularity of present-day virtual contents in the policing of public discourse. What are the differences and discontinuities between early cinema attractions and their current rearticulations, in terms of affective engagement, ideologies and theoretical models underlying our relationship to technology? How does it mean for the creators to design an environment to be experienced (rather than an image), and for the experiencer to become the “centre of attraction” of the image-making process?

Materiality and the senses

VR technologies are commonly presented and understood as a dematerialisation of human experience. This is in contrast with the hypermediation (Bolter, Grusin 1999) of virtual interfaces and in particular with the fact that the gestures and bodily movements of the spectator are precisely the source of the actualisation of the virtual image. Hence, a comprehensive account of virtual environments needs to bring the focus back on the material conditions of the sensory encounter with immersive media.

During the 20^th century, movie theatres displayed a tension towards an immersive format – from Polyvision to the geodesic domes – as a propitiatory device able to better ensure the passage from the physical to the virtual space. Today, the experience of the virtual image is delimited by new rituals, like the performative gesture of tracing the so-called guardian, outlining the grid that delimitates the experiencer’s operations in virtual environments (Grespi 2021). VR productions come to redesign the collective and individual spaces of reception, through festivals and happenings, but are also reshaping the system of distribution, as well as the material infrastructures and normative protocols of spectatorship, that need to be investigated in the light of a long-range trajectory.

Interactive VR interfaces rely on the generation of sensori-motor stimuli that are coherent with the functioning of human perception of space (Slater 2009) as much as on the design of site-specific installations and props to match with haptic feedbacks the visuality of virtual environments. Only through a multisensory approach it is possible to account for the visceral, sensual involvement triggered by immersive interactive environments. In this respect, VR seems to bring into being the way early and classic film theories described the sensorial impact of cinema: by envisioning the prospect of a “total cinema” (Barjavel 1944, Bazin 1946) film theory prefigured the future of cinema as an immersive medium with an eminently multisensory vocation, while the domain of cinematic creation engaged in countless attempts to enhance film experience with tridimensional projection and stereoscopic depth, but also with spatialized sound effects, proprioceptive, haptic, and even gustatory and olfactory stimulations (Eisenstein 1947, Barnier & Kitsopanidou 2015, Spence 2020, Khot & Yi 2020, Barnier 2020, Strauven 2021).

Imaginaries and narratives

By providing the illusion of being in a world other than our physical location, virtual interfaces revive the topos of the (supposedly) naïve spectator that characterised early cinema (Elsaesser 1990) – from the myth of the terrified reactions to L’arrivée du train à la gare de la Ciotat up to the different variation of Uncle Josh’s credulity – and the manifold attempts to provoke a blurring of the threshold between the physical space and the image world (Pinotti 2021). This was made possible especially by optical immersive devices such as magic lantern, panorama, phantasmagoria, stereoscopic and peep media (Oettermann 1980, Huhtamo 2013, Grespi & Violi 2019, Grossi 2021).

Even before the creation of Morton Heilig’s “Stereoscopic-Television Apparatus” and Ivan Sutherland’s “Sword of Damocles”, the very first head-mounted display systems, the advent of VR technologies had long been foreshadowed by literature (Burton 1860, Bioy-Casares 1940), comics (Ghost in the Shell 1989-1991), science fiction films (The Student of Prague (1913, 1926), Tron (1982), Brainstorm (1984), Total Recall (1990), Until the End of the World (1991), The Lawnmower Man (1992), Strange Days (1995), eXistenZ (1999), The Matrix (1999-2021), The Congress (2014), Ready Player One (2018), to name a few), and television series (from Star Trek 1966-1969 to Roar 2022), becoming part of the technoculture imaginary (Chan 2014).

More broadly, the possibility to create bridges between the physical world and invisible realities, to overlap spaces and temporalities, inaugurated by virtual environments can be traced back to the human attempts to evoke the supernatural through spiritualism, magical devices (Gunning 2021), and even to some of the most ancient forms of divination (Dalmasso 2019). Providing a historical parallax, media-archaeological investigations could bring into light latent aspects of contemporary virtual media practice, revealing the different layers of a longstanding drive: the desire to transcend the limitations of physical embodiment.

Topics that could be addressed include (but are not limited to):

genealogies of immersive media in early cinema and cinema of attractions
prefigurations of virtual reality in film narratives and television series
forms of multisensory cinema as precursor of virtual immersive environments
infrastructures and architectural spaces as catalyst of immersive spectatorship
archaeologies of optical immersive dispositifs (magic lantern, panoramas, phantasmagoria, stereoscopic and peep media, and so on)
VR cinema production and distribution systems reviving the spaces of cinematic reception (festivals, fairs, arcades)
theories of cinematic participatory spectatorship and interactive spect-actorship
early and classic film theories addressing cinema as an immersive and multisensory medium
film genres and VR cinema (aesthetic strategies, clichés, and debates)
cinematic reuse and archiving practices in VR
historical and media-archaeological approach of contemporary VR (topoi, survivances, imaginary media)
the notion of virtual and virtual visuality and the relationship between the virtual and the real in film and media theory

Bibliography

Barjavel, R. (1944) Cinéma total: essai sur les formes futures du cinéma, Paris, Denoël.

Barnier, M. (2020) Spectacle immersif, une vieille histoire des mondes virtuels, in La réalité virtuelle, une question d’immersion, Rouge Profond, Paris, 2020.

Barnier, M., Kitsopanidou, K. (2015) Le cinéma 3D. Histoire, économie, technique, esthétique, Paris, Armand Colin.

Bazin, A. (1946) The myth of total cinema, in What is Cinema?, Volume II, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1967: 23–27.

Bédard, Ph. (2019) La machine subjective? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains, in Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 28/1 (Spring 2019): 66-92.

Bolter, J.D., Grusin, D. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.

Chan, M. (2014) Virtual Reality. Representations in Contemporary Media, Bloomsbury.

Dalmasso, A.C. (2019) Reframing immersive environments through the templum. An archaeology of the frame, Imago, 20: 81-99.

Eisenstein, S. (1947) On Stereokino, in Public, “3D Cinema and Beyond”, 47, Spring 2013.

Elsaesser, T. (ed.) (1990) Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, British Film Institute.

Friedberg, A. (1993) Window Shopping. Cinema and the Postmodern, University of California Press.

Gaudreault, A., Gunning, T. (1989) Le cinéma des premiers temps: un défi à l’histoire du cinéma?, in J. Aumont et al., Histoire du cinéma. Nouvelles approches, Paris, Sorbonne: 49-63.

Grau, O. (2003) Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.

Grespi, B. (2021) Passing Through: Gesture Interfaces in Virtual Reality, Imago, 23: 111-124.

Grespi, B., Violi A. (eds.) (2019) Apparizioni. Scritti sulla fantasmagoria, Roma, Aracne.

Grossi G. (2021) La notte dei simulacri. Sogno, cinema, realtà virtuale, Johan & Levi.

Gunning, T. (1990) The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde, in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, London, British Film Institute: 56-62.

Gunning, T. (2021) The power of the virtual. From magic to illusions, in K. Rein (a cura di), Illusion in Cultural Practice. Productive Deceptions, London, Routledge, 2021.

Hediger, V., Schneider, A. (2005) The Deferral of Smell: Cinema, Modernity, and the Reconfiguration of the Olfactory Experience, in Valentina Re et. al. (eds.). The Five Senses of Cinema. Udine: Forum, 2005: 241-264.

Huhtamo, E. (2013) Illusions in Motion. Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.

Khot, R.A., Yi L. (2020) GustaCine: Towards Designing a Gustatory Cinematic Experience, in TEI '20: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction: 757–770.

Nechvatal, J. (2009) Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances: A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms, Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken.

Oettermann, S. (1980) The Panorama. History of a Mass Medium, Zone Books, New York.

Pinotti, A. (2021) Alla soglia dell’immagine. Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale, Torino, Einaudi.

Slater, M. (2009) Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments, in Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society London, 364: 3549–3557.

Spence, C. (2020), Scent and the Cinema, i-Perception, Vol. 11(6): 1–22.

Strauven, W. (2006) The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press.

Strauven, W. (2021) Touchscreen Archaeology: Tracing Histories of Hands-On Media Practices, Meson Press.

Submission details

Please send your abstract (from 300 to 500 words, in English or French) and a short biographical note to annacaterina.dalmasso@unimi.it by September 15^th, 2022 — [subject: CfE #40 — C&C + name surname author(s)].

Authors will be notified of abstract proposal acceptance by September 30^th, 2022.

If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the full article (in English or French) by November 30^th, 2022.

All article submissions should include: 5 keywords, name of author(s), institutional affiliation, contacts details and a short bio for each author.

The articles must not exceed 5,000/6,000-words.

Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.

Contributions will be submitted to double blind peer review.

The issue #40 of Cinéma & Cie will be published in June 2023.

Deadlines

Submission of proposals: September 15^th, 2022

Acceptance of proposals notified by: September 30^th, 2022

Submission of full articles for peer review: November 30^th, 2022

Publication: June 2023

Call for papers: Permanent CfE — Beyond Cinema

2022-01-24T15:36:40+00:00

The call for essays for the Beyond Cinema section is permanent and always valid. This section of the journal provides a space to re-discuss the thresholds of the cinematic medium, as well as the boundaries of traditional film studies, by addressing a variety of under-investigated contexts and objects through innovative and unconventional approaches and references.

Following the so-called “digital revolution”, dramatic transformations have affected the ways in which cinema is produced, consumed and perceived, to the extent that it seems to have gone “beyond” itself: beyond its very language and discourse; its traditional consumption practices and spaces; its position and function within the social (as well as the medial) sphere. As a consequence, during the last two decades, research in film studies has significantly widened its scope: the study of cinema has been re-articulated in several fields of inquiry and through a variety of methodological approaches and (inter)disciplinary perspectives, in an attempt to keep up with these most recent developments.

This section of Cinéma & Cie aims therefore to function as a permanent observatory of this “beyondness”. Specifically, it provides a space to re-discuss the thresholds of the cinematic medium, as well as the boundaries of traditional film studies, by addressing a variety of under-investigated contexts and objects through innovative and unconventional approaches and references. Beyond Cinema encourages proposals related to the following main frameworks:

Cinema Beyond the Film Text. Cinema in a transtextual perspective: intertextual, metatextual and hypertextual relations among films, and/or between films and other cultural products; practices of appropriation of pre-existing images (found-footage, archival footage, collage films, and so on).

Cinema Beyond the Cinematic Medium. Cinema in a transmedia perspective: remediations and intermedial practices; processes of translation, differentiation, assimilation, hybridization and mutual exchange with other media formations, on both the aesthetic and material level.

Cinema Beyond the Movie Theatre. Cinema in a translocational perspective: the relocation of cinema and new forms of circulation and consumption (from mobile phones to urban screens); musealization and exposition of cinema and films; non-institutional forms of filmmaking (amateur cinema and non-theatrical genres, such as the medical, industrial, touristic film, etc.).

Cinema Beyond Film Studies. Cinema in a transdisciplinary perspective: intersections between film studies and other disciplines, from both the humanities and hard sciences (cinema and philosophy, cinema and neuroscience, cinema and cultural studies, etc.); the role of cinema as a didactic tool and as an instrument of scientific inquiry.

We invite the submission of articles in English or French (max 5,000-6,000 words), edited according to the journal’s style guidelines. Contributors are also asked to provide an abstract (300-500 words), 5 keywords, and a short biographical note (150 words).

Authors will be notified of acceptance or non-acceptance within one month of submission. Once their article has been assessed for suitability by the section’s editors, it will then be peer-reviewed by anonymous, expert referees.

Call for papers: CLOSED CfE 39 — The Representation and Care of Illness. Visual Culture, Trauma and Medical Humanities

2021-11-10T09:06:13+00:00

Call for Essays for the thematic section of Cinéma & Cie n. 39, edited by Silvia Casini, Alice Cati and Deborah Toschi.

Download the Call for Essays (.pdf)

The recent phenomenon of pandemic has highlighted how the current visual and audiovisual production has not simply favored phenomena of re-sematization of reality, thanks to the dissemination of images and narrations devoted to the fragile bodies of the pandemic, but it also has engendered social practices and symbolic actions useful to orient the intersubjective process, self-perception and the perception of the other through physicality or its simulation.

Within this framework, this special issue wants to provide a new reading of some theoretical concepts and methodologies in order to reconstruct/reopen the debate posed by visual culture applied to:

- Trauma Studies. Since the Eighties, by harmonizing humanistic, psychological and cultural approaches, this field of research has helped to formulate a series/corpus of theories concerning an analysis of trauma as an interpretative model. Accordingly, trauma studies have internally developed various perspectives of research, as a confirmation of an intrinsic multidisciplinary vocation: cognitive approach (Andemahr 2016); critic-cultural approach (critical trauma studies – Alxander et alii 2004; Casper-Wertheimer 2016); affect theory (Leys 2000; Leys 2011), etc. In particular, a large part of the debate takes on a visual-aesthetic view, as it questions the ways and possibilities to represent trauma through images and narrations, which are considered the main mediators for historical knowledge and private and cultural memory (Broderick-Traverso 2010; Radstone-Walker-Shenker 2013; Hodgin-Thakkar 2017). Moreover, mediation processes of trauma are usually associated to therapeutic models (working through, acting out, replacement, re-enacting) in order to demonstrate the reparative potential of media representations and practices (Cati 2013; Cati 2016). Following these lines, it would be worth broadening and systematically reviewing the contributions specifically focused both on figures of suffering, wounds, mourning, and on care experiences linked to recent traumas caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

- Medical Humanities/Medicine Visual Culture (Jordanova 1990; Christian Bonah, Anja Laukötter 2020). This paradigm, which can make use of a specific expertise on representation forms (Gilman 1982; Ostherr 2013), deepened the ways in which techno-scientific innovations and the imaging technologies reshaped the conceptualization of the body, the reconfiguration of care forms and practices using an STS and posthuman framework (Casini 2021; Mol, Moser and Pols 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa 2018), the human being and the role of self-care and the care of others (Kevles, Bettyann 1997; van Dijck 2005; Treichler, Cartwright, Penley 1998; Anker, Nelkin, 2004; Toschi 2016; Toschi 2018). The visual dimension has been recently promoted and relaunched in the area of Medical Humanities (Interdisciplinary Entanglements: Towards a Visual Medical Humanities, 2018 Edinburgh; see also the creation of a visual medical humanities manifesto in Johnstone 2018), a disciplinary orientation that relies on art and visual and narrative-based strategies in order to open to patients’ points of view for a better understanding of the symptoms of the disease, to improve the doctor-patient relationship and care-giving practices. In this case as well, by considering the potentialities of mediating and mediatizing practices (van de Vall 2009) in self-recognition processes, audiovisual media have been connected to therapeutic models set up within specific pathological and health-care contexts (e.g. dementia and Alzheimer).

Both fields appear as frayed lines of research, but are useful enough for a broad comprehension of the profound transformations that assailed on the one hand the representation and conceptualization of corporeality; on the other hand, the ways of conceiving the living body and its vulnerabilities (disease, anesthetization, perceptive distortions and alterations, affective lacerations, relational fractures, spatio-temporal discontinuity). In this sense, with the aim to analyze the media products that will be identified and selected, it is necessary to develop a new interdisciplinary methodology suited to grasp emotions, material dimensions, bodily practices, performative dynamics, intersubjective systems that, as a whole, consolidate the mise en discourse of the body as an object of care.

Submission details

Please send your abstract and a short biographical note to silvia.casini@abdn.ac.uk , alice.cati@unicatt.it and deborah.toschi@unipv.it by January 28, 2022 — [subject: CfE #39 — C&C + name surname author(s)].

Abstracts should be from 300 to 500 words of length (in English). All submissions should include: 5 keywords, name of author(s), institutional affiliation, contacts details and a short bio for each author. Authors will be notified of proposal acceptance by February 7, 2022.

If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the full article, in English, by April 30, 2022.

Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.

The articles must not exceed 5,000/6,000-words.

Contributions will be submitted to double blind peer reviews.

The issue number #39 of Cinéma & Cie will be published in November 2022.

Deadlines

Submission of proposals: January 28, 2022
Acceptance notified by: February 7, 2022
Submission of full articles: April 30, 2022
Publication: November 2022

Call for papers: CLOSED CfE 38 — Gestalt Filmology. Insights on Form and Embodiment in the Film Experience

2021-10-04T08:56:32+00:00

An open access special issue edited by Adriano D’Aloia (Università degli Studi di Bergamo) and Ian Verstegen (University of Pennsylvania)

Deadline for abstract proposals: September 5, 2021

An incipient neurofilmological turn in film and media studies promises to reframe the study of the film experience into a post-cognitive episteme that stresses the idea that the perception of visual and acoustic stimuli implies the activation of embodied forms of simulation. According to the “embodied simulation” hypothesis, the significance of the film experience emerges from the interactive mutuality of an agent (or organism) and environment, and perception evokes internal forms of action that support an empathic understanding of the character’s gestures, intentions, and emotions. These dynamics can be extended to the film’s low-level features (e.g. cinematography, camera movements, editing) and allow one to rethink the aesthetics of the film experience in the light of multimodal sensory perception.

Although the theoretical references of the embodied and enactive approach are patent (e.g. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and James Gibson’s ecology of perception), the endless appearance of new ideas risks losing one’s bearings in the traditional commitments of the field. For example: the internal re-production of the observed movements, the empathetic nature of the film-spectator relationship, and the understanding of the external world through imitation recall the principle of isomorphism – one of the central (and debated) ideas of Gestalt psychology; the so called body-mind problem and the enactivist claim that the body in as inseparable part – if not the very origin – of perception and cognition, remind one of the gestaltist fundamental claim that the human subject is able to organize local features into a larger and coherent whole; the centrality of the organism-environment coupling recalls Gestalt figure-ground reversibility and Kurt Lewin’s field theory. A number of theories proposed that are influenced by Gibson’s ecological theory but open to brain research do not countenance that such an approach would be contrary to his theorization.

As a result, their theoretical commitments of phenomenal realism and naturalistic reduction appear a lot like Rudolf Arnheim’s gestalt approach while eschewing or ignoring it. Authors are invited to go beyond Arnheim the situated author (who effectively stopped writing about film in the 1940s) to his grounding theoretical commitments. These come of course from Gestalt psychology and involve phenomenal realism (slippage between live action and animation), priority of expressive over discursive filmic features, and the value of neuroscientific heuristic reduction.

The call for essays for Cinéma&Cie #38 special issue “Gestalt Filmology. Insights on Form and Embodiment in the Film Experience” asks authors to situate their theories not according to genealogies or stated influences but basic meta-theoretical categories like naturalism (explanation) and representationalism (direct vs mediated).

Among the topics that could be addressed are:

Gestalt affect and film
Gestalt isomorphism and film
Gestalt-oriented research on motion perception
Gestalt as a film-philosophy of mind
Optical illusions and film perception
“Mute” films and visual expression
Gestalt forms of filmic embodiment
Gestalt and phenomenological critiques of mirror neurons and empathy
“Prägnanz” and the future of film and Virtual reality

References

Arnheim, R. (1957). Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Arnheim, R. (1977/1997). Film Essays and Criticism. Edited by Helmut H. Diederichs. Madison – London: University of Wisconsin Press.

Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Back Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. New York: Oxford University Press.

Coëgnarts, M. & P. Kravanja (2015). Embodied Cognition and Cinema. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

D’Aloia, A. & R. Eugeni, eds. (2014). Neurofilmology. Audiovisual Studies and the Challenge of Neuroscience. Cinéma&Cie. International Film Studies Journal XIV(22-23).

Di Paolo, E. A., T. Buhrmann, & X.E. Barandiaran (2017). Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal. New York: Oxford University Press.

Durt, C., T. Fuchs & C. Tewes, eds. (2017). Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture. Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World. Cambridge, MA – London: MIT Press.

Eagle, N. & C. Wakefield (2007). “Gestalt psychology and the mirror neurons discovery.” Gestalt Theory 21(1).

Epstein, W. & G. Hatfield (1994). “Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of mind.” Philosophical Psychology 7(2): 163-181.

Gallagher, S. (2020). Action and Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gallese, V. & M. Guerra (2019). The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience. Translated by Frances Anderson. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gibson, J. J. (2015). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Classic Edition. New York/London: Taylor & Francis.

Guberman, S. (2016). “Gestalt Psychology, Mirror Neurons, and Body-Mind Problem.” Gestalt Theory 38(2/3): 217-238.

Hutto, D. & E. Myin (2012). Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Johansson, G. (1950). Configurations in Event Perception. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.

Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Koffka, K. (1935). Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Köhler, W. (1929): Gestalt Psychology. New York: Horas Liveright.

Köhler, W. (1940). Dynamics in Psychology. New York: Liveright.

Lewin, K. (1936). Principles of Topological Psychology. Translated by F. & G. Heider, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1942/1963). The Structure of Behavior. Translated by A. Fisher. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by D. Landes. New York: Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The Primacy of Perception. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). “The Film and the New Psychology.” In Sense and Non-Sense. Translated by H.L. Dreyfus & P. Dreyfus, 48-59. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

Metzger, W. (1936/2006). Laws of Seeing. Translated by L. Spillmann, S. Lehar, M. Stromeyer & M. Wertheimer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Michotte, A. (1963). The Perception of Causality. New York: Basic Books.

Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Poulaki, M. (2017). “The ‘Good Form’ of Film.” Gestalt Theory 40(1): 29-44.

Thinès, G., A. Costall & G. Butterworth, eds. (1991). Michotte’s Experimental Phenomenology of Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Varela, F.J., E. Thompson & E. Rosch (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Verstegen, I. (2019). Arnheim, Gestalt and Media: An Ontological Theory. Cham: Springer.

Submission details

Please send a 400-word abstract in English, 3/5 bibliographical references, 5 keywords, and a short biographical note to adriano.daloia@unibg.it and verstege@sas.upenn.edu by September 5, 2021. Notifications of acceptance will be emailed no later than September 19, 2021. If the proposal is accepted, a 5,000/6,000-word essay must be submitted for double-blind peer review by November 30, 2021.

Download CfE #38 (pdf)