Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal: Announcements
type: channel
description: Cinéma & Cie is an international, peer-reviewed academic journal. The research areas of the journal include media history and theory and their relationship; the various intersections between technological, industrial and representational aspects; audiovisual heritage; reception and consumption; the links between different forms of audiovisual narrative, art and communication. Published twice a year (in Spring and Fall), the journal is structured in four different sections: – Thematic issue: usually the largest section, devoted to a specific topic. This section only accepts submissions in response to specific calls for essays that are advertised via the journal website; – Beyond Cinema: a section focused on innovative perspectives on the transformations in the field of film studies. Submissions are accepted only in response to the permanent call for essays advertised on the website; – Projects & Abstracts: the section details international research and noteworthy Ph.D. thesis projects or abstracts, recommended by supervisors; – Reviews: the section consists of significant essays, festivals, exhibitions, conferences and related content.
language: en-US
items: Call for papers: CfE 48 - Ageing on Contemporary European Screens: Dialogues Between Film Studies and Cultural Gerontology
items: Call for papers: CfE 47 - The Populist Screen: The Poetics, Production and Circulation of Populism in Contemporary European Audiovisual Media
items: Call for papers: CfE 46 - Reimagining Access: Crip Media Aesthetics and Infrastructures
items: Call for papers: CfE 45 - For a Multipolar History of the Film Industries: Centre-Periphery Relations in the Cold War Years
items: Call for papers: CfE 44 - World Cinemas of Resistance: Cinematic worlds as decolonial practices
items: Call for papers: CfE 42 - Guerrilla Images. Aesthetics and Politics of Moving Images in Contemporary Uprisings
items: Call for papers: CfE 41 Extended Deadline - Cinematic Continuities, Changes and Challenges in Europe: Reflections on Recent Shifts in European Cinema Cultures
items: Call for papers: CLOSED CfE 40 — Archaeologies of the Virtual. Attractions, Senses, Narratives
items: Call for papers: Permanent CfE — Beyond Cinema
items: Call for papers: CLOSED CfE 39 — The Representation and Care of Illness. Visual Culture, Trauma and Medical Humanities
items: Call for papers: CLOSED CfE 38 — Gestalt Filmology. Insights on Form and Embodiment in the Film Experience

Call for papers: CfE 48 - Ageing on Contemporary European Screens: Dialogues Between Film Studies and Cultural Gerontology
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description: Over the last two decades, scholars from different disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds have devoted increasing attention to representations of advanced age and the ageing process in film and other audiovisual media: e.g. Robinson et al. 2007; Chivers 2011; Wearing 2013; Cohen-Shalev 2012; Jermyn & Holmes, 2015; Swinnen 2015; Bolton & Lobalzo Wright 2016; Shary & McVittie, 2016; Courcoux, Le Gras & Moine, 2017; Dolan 2017; Ureczky, 2018; De Rosa, Mandelli & Re 2021; Tracy & Schrage-Früh 2022. The growing interest in later life and its onscreen configurations speak, on the one hand, to “the cultural turn [that] came relatively late to gerontology” (Twigg and Martin 2015: 1) and contributed to the expansion of its theoretical-epistemological frameworks as well as the socio-historical questions that this discipline addressed. On the other hand, it reflects the renewed centrality that later life has acquired in public and political debate, following the ongoing trend of demographic ageing, which is projected to affect countries worldwide soon, regardless of income level (World Health Organization 2025). Europe has been the first region in the world to experience a shift in the composition of the population towards older age groups: between 1950 and 2025 the median age of the population in Europe has increased by 65% (United Nation 2024), and today, with more than one fifth of its population aged 65 or over (up 16% since 2014), most of whom women, Europe is the “oldest” continent in the world (Eurostat 2025). Although an extended lifespan is viewed positively at the individual level, the “graying of Europe” (McKinsey Global Institute 2005) has largely evoked concern, if not catastrophist reactions – epitomized by the “silver tsunami” metaphor (Tragaki 2024) – due to its anticipated disruption of national economies and welfare systems. However, the issue of ageing cannot be approached solely from an economic or demographic perspective. Cultural gerontology provides a …
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2026-03-27

Call for papers: CfE 47 - The Populist Screen: The Poetics, Production and Circulation of Populism in Contemporary European Audiovisual Media
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description: Call for Essays for the thematic section of Cinéma & Cie no. 47, edited by Luana Fedele, Dom Holdaway and Thomas J. J. Scherer. Deadline for abstract proposals: January 30th, 2026. With the sweeping growth and electoral successes of populist movements over the past two decades, challenging the legacy of liberal democracies, this political form is a consolidated reality of our times. The use of polarizing narratives of nationhood, leadership and the people by many European parties – from Fratelli d’Italia and Vox to Alternative für Deutschland, from Prawo i Sprawiedliwość to the Partij voor de Vrijheid and Reform UK – have consolidated the importance of these techniques. The populist phenomenon is currently expanding globally, though it is only directly transferrable to a limited degree, shaping itself in relation to specific local forms and cultural impulses. With ideological flexibility, these different political actors hegemonize the understanding of diverse and complex “crises” through a pattern of recurring images (intended here in multimodal terms) bearing tropes that commonly emphasize definitions of a nation or a community in ethnic-reductive terms, or exclusionary societal views (Moffit, 2017), transmitted via screens. While scholarship on populism has varied in its definitions – from the discursive (Laclau, 2005) to ideational (Mudde, 2004), to mention just a couple – a majority of this work emphasizes the importance of narrative and persuasion, through multimodal forms of meaning making. Indeed, populists provide cues that dictate not only a vision of the people, as custodians of sovereignty, but, for example, also the political leader as “unmediated” and charismatic or the enemy, a corrupt elite, a migrant “invasion force”, or an unruly trans body that troubles typecast notions of normative gender. What kind of role do film, series and hosted video (Lotz & Lunardi, 2025) play in the creation, promotion or disputing of these populist narratives? In which f…
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2025-12-07

Call for papers: CfE 46 - Reimagining Access: Crip Media Aesthetics and Infrastructures
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description: Call for Essays for the thematic section of Cinéma & Cie no. 46, edited by Domenico Napolitano, Annalisa Pellino, and Pooja Rangan. Deadline for abstract proposals: June 30th, 2025. What does it mean to make film and media accessible at a time when access itself is increasingly commodified, manipulated, and surveilled? As generative AI, predictive algorithms, and automated access tools become central to audiovisual production, accessibility is framed as a technological fix—an inclusive feature that erases the labor, activism, and politics from which it emerged. In this context, access becomes a site of struggle: a force that can reimagine media aesthetics—or be weaponised to exclude, debilitate, and control. This special issue explores two interconnected terrains. First, we consider sensory access as an aesthetic and ethical intervention—a means of cripping cinematic time, space, narrative, and authorship. Dismedia artists like Carolyn Lazard (A Recipe for Disaster, 2018), Jordan Lord (Shared Resources, 2021), and Alison O’Daniel (The Tuba Thieves, 2024), treat access features like captions and audio description not as an afterthought but as creative media that inform the look, feel, and structure of a work from the outset. Their work foregrounds disability as a generative force in media form and theory, challenging ableist assumptions embedded in dominant understandings of perception, representation, and spectatorship. Second, we examine disability and access within media infrastructures and political economies. From auto-captioning to platform self-branding, accessibility is increasingly marketed as innovation, all the while masking extractive logics that displace crip knowledge, labor, and needs. Furthermore, in the contexts of militarised surveillance, settler occupation, and carceral confinement, access is not merely withheld but strategically denied and brokered, producing forms of infrastructural debility. These dynamics require us to reframe accessibility as…
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2025-05-14

Call for papers: CfE 45 - For a Multipolar History of the Film Industries: Centre-Periphery Relations in the Cold War Years
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description: Call for Essays for the thematic section of Cinéma & Cie no. 45, edited by Giorgio Avezzù, Francesco Di Chiara and Paolo Noto. Deadline for abstract proposals: September 30, 2024. In a groundbreaking study of European cinema, Thomas Elsaesser reflected on how European cinema has often been defined by comparison with Hollywood (Elsaesser 2005). Taking the Hollywood studio system as the only term of comparison has affected not only the symbolic and aesthetic forms, but also the ways in which historiography has conceived the study of film industries. This comparison has been especially true since the publication of Janet Staiger’s pioneering work on classical Hollywood’s modes of production, which provided a blueprint for understanding national film industries in terms of evolution toward a standard model of vertical integration revolving around the role of producers to systems built upon specific unit packages of production. Recent comparative studies of film industries and networks, influenced by new cinema history, have revealed that many peripheral cinemas, from India to Turkey, from Italy to Sweden, from Poland to Mexico, share many more elements with each other than they do with the standard supposedly identified with the Hollywood studio system. These commonalities include whether that be in terms of protectionist measures, state intervention, fragmented industrial landscape, or reliance on independent regional distribution (e.g., Sedgwick 2022; Mehta & Mukherjee 2020). Even the supposed dominance of Hollywood, which is most evident in runaway productions, sometimes resulted in a system of exchange in which national industries were both exploited and benefited by American capital (Steinhart 2019). Recent research on the subject has thus prompted further questions. How do peripheral industries relate to each other? Do they connect autonomously, and/or via the “center” of the system? What formal and informal arrangements are made between them? How does an image of…
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2024-07-03

Call for papers: CfE 44 - World Cinemas of Resistance: Cinematic worlds as decolonial practices
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description: 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 is…
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2024-04-12

Call for papers: CfE 42 - Guerrilla Images. Aesthetics and Politics of Moving Images in Contemporary Uprisings
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description: 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 …
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2023-06-19

Call for papers: CfE 41 Extended Deadline - Cinematic Continuities, Changes and Challenges in Europe: Reflections on Recent Shifts in European Cinema Cultures
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description: 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 …
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2022-10-24

Call for papers: CLOSED CfE 40 — Archaeologies of the Virtual. Attractions, Senses, Narratives
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description: 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 19th 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 20th 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 …
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2022-07-07

Call for papers: Permanent CfE — Beyond Cinema
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description: 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, hybridiza…
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2022-01-24

Call for papers: CLOSED CfE 39 — The Representation and Care of Illness. Visual Culture, Trauma and Medical Humanities
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description: 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 l…
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2021-11-10

Call for papers: CLOSED CfE 38 — Gestalt Filmology. Insights on Form and Embodiment in the Film Experience
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description: 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 p…
creator: Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
date: 2021-10-04