Figurations of Intermediality in Film
XV. Film and Media Studies Conference inTransylvaniaCluj-Napoca, October 24-26, 2013.Deadline for proposals: 30 June, 2014.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Intermediality
has emerged as one of the major theoretical issues of contemporary
thinking about film bringing a fresh view upon the ways in which the
moving pictures can incorporate forms of all other media, and can
initiate “dialogues” between the distinct arts. The most important works
on cinematic intermediality so far have targeted the notion of
intermediality both as a general concept and as a specific rhetoric in
the works of individual artists (like Peter Greenaway or Jean-Luc
Godard). Surveying the current cinematic “landscape” we
may encounter some astonishing films that seem to have been designed on
the principle of dismissing a conventional, “self-effacing” style (to
use Bordwell’s term for classical cinema) in favour of forging an
explicitly intermedial visual rhetoric. From the experimental,
avant-garde canon to some current examples of mainstream,
“hypermediated” digital cinema, from painterly movies bordering on installation art (like Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross or The Roe’s Room), to so-called “slow cinema” projects, such films challenge us in finding the adequate theoretical framework for analysis.
By
organizing this conference we would like to initiate a wider discussion
among scholars whose researches may be connected to the idea of
inter-media relations in moving images and are engaged in deeper
explorations into the poetics of intermediality in film. In doing so we wish to bring into the spotlight one of the key aspects of intermediality:the fact that intermediality as such always manifests itself as a kind of “figuration” in film through which medial differences are visibly and self-reflexively “re-inscribed” within the moving image, and
that in general, philosophical terms, intermediality can even be
conceived as belonging to the domain of the “figural” in the sense used
by Lyotard, and elaborated by D. N. Rodowick in his book Reading the Figural (in which he claims the “figural” to be a kind of interface for media relations in film).
In
the past few decades there have been several important theoretical
works that have dealt with the ways in which moving images operate
within a network of interrelated media and with instances in which the
boundaries between individual media and arts have been effectively
blurred through techniques that enable the features of one medium to
resurface within another, and which may offer theoretical vantage points
for analyzing possible figurations of intermediality. We may list here
studies re-evaluating cinema’s connections to traditional forms of
visual arts (e.g. Angela Dalle Vacche’s, Susan Felleman’s, Belén
Vidal’s, Steven Jacobs’s works on cinema and painting, or theoretical
analyses of the figuration of the tableau vivant in cinema in
seminal books by Brigitte Peucker, Pascal Bonitzer, Joachim Paech,
etc.), but also the recent studies referring to the relationship of
cinema and photography (e.g. Damian Sutton, Garrett Stewart, Régis
Durand, David Campany, etc.), and implicitly to the relationship of
stillness and motion within cinema, along with analyses of the
connections between cinema, video and installation art (e.g. Raymond
Bellour, Yvonne Spielmann, etc.).
In
the context of shifting paradigms in film poetics from stylistic
patterns of modern or postmodern cinema towards what we may term as
“post-media cinema,” the figural aspects of intermediality also manifest
new forms that may require a search for further theoretical
perspectives for identifying and interpreting techniques that figurate intermedial relations.
In doing so, perhaps, we should also keep in mind that although
intermediality often occurs as a form of aesthetic detachment or as some
sort of hypermedia ornamentalism, such figurations can also insist on “tangibility,” or, as Brigitte Peucker reminds us in her book, The Material Image. Art and the Real in Film (2007),
on “the merger of representation with reality,” both through
establishing the viewers’ intimacy with the medium and through the
performative potential of such figures to produce an increasingly haptic
cinema, a cinema of “sensual excess” in which the “body” of the medium
and the mediation of bodies and sensations sometimes become intertwined
in ways that may suggest a rethinking of the figurations of
intermediality from the perspective of phenomenology or visual
anthropology, and so on. As such, intermedial figurations may be
conceived as open to a wide range of philosophical, aesthetical,
ideological, historical, and media theoretical interpretations that we hope papers presented at this conference will explore.
Proposals are invited to address (but are not
limited to) the following questions either from a theoretical point of
view or through concrete analyses:
· Intermediality and the figurations of intermediality in film from a theoretical perspective:
a)
theories of intermediality and intermedial figurations (film and media
theoretical, philosophical approaches, psychoanalysis, visual
anthropology etc.);
b) intermediality and the concept of “the figural” and “figuration” as discussed by Lyotard, Deleuze, Rodowick, etc.
· The rhetoric of intermedial cinema, art theoretical and aesthetical considerations: figuration and (dis)figuration, mise-en-abyme
· Intermediality and inter-sensuality in film: figures that merge “hypermediacy” with “immediacy,” the represented and sensed body as a site of intermedial figurations, etc.
· Remediated images as figurations of intermediality and post-mediality: recontextualiz
· Figurations
of intermediality as imprints of (and meditations upon) history and
time, cultural and personal identity or intercultural exchange:
a)
relating the rhetoric of intermediality to the specific personal,
cultural, historical, ideological contexts, ideas and artistic paradigms
in which they occur;
b) the poetics and politics of intermediality in the cinema of Eastern and Central Europe.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
¢ Brigitte Peucker (Yale University, USA), author of Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (1995), The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (2007), currently working on a book titled Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film.
¢ Eivind Røssaak (National Library of Norway), author of The Still/Moving Image: Cinema and the Arts (2010), and editor of the volume Between Stillness and Motion(2011).
We invite both proposals for individual papers and pre-constituted panels. Panels may consist of 3 or 4 speakers. The time for presentations is limited to maximum 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute debate.
Deadline for the submission of proposals: June 30, 2014.
We will notify you about the acceptance of your proposal by: July 7, 2014.
Submission of proposals: please download the submission form from our website, complete and send it as an attachment to the following address:2014.intermedia.
Conference website: http://film.
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Dr. ÁGNES PETHŐ, Head of Department
Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Department of Film, Photography, and Media,
Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Department of Film, Photography, and Media,
Executive editor: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film & Media Studies
