Call for papers: Untimely cinema: cinema out of
time ? a special Issue of Screening the Past (2011)
Guest Editors: Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis
?Untimeliness deployed as an effective
intellectual strategy, far from being a gesture
of indifference to time, is a bid to reset time.? Wendy Brown, Edgework p.4
Over the last few years untimeliness has become
an area of increasing interest across a number
of disciplinary fields from political theory to
performance studies. The work of Wendy Brown on
untimeliness and critical theory, Jacques
Derrida?s Spectres of Marx, and some of Jacques
Rancière?s work have played an important role in
this turn to the untimely. Film, which arguably
has a privileged relationship to untimeliness,
has often made an appearance in recent critical
work on the untimely though this has primarily
been in work from disciplines other than film
theory. This special issue of Screening the
Past sets out to explore some of the various
ways in which untimeliness underlies and informs
cinema. We are interested in papers that explore
films and/or cinema as ?out of time? in any of
the various meanings of the phrase: out of time
in the sense of running out of time (as for
instance when, in the post-celluloid
era, cinema is understood as operating on
?borrowed time?); out of time in the sense of
being out of step (films or film practices that
perform or summon an aesthetics of
untimeliness); and out of time in the sense of
being (seemingly) disconnected from the present,
or out of history (as in film practices
considered too marginal, too local, to be ?in?
history, film practices that have been
understood as belated, too early or too late, as out of step with history).
Paper proposals for papers of 5000-7500 words
are sought on any of the following topics:
· Aesthetics of untimeliness in particular films and/or film practices.
· Films that have, or have had, an ?untimely? reception.
· Untimely spectatorship/untimely
spectatorial practices (including papers
addressing the ways that changing forms of
exhibition and distribution can produce untimely spectatorial practices).
· The ways in which cinema shapes/has
shaped our experiences of?and understandings of?untimeliness.
· The ways that film might offer what Brown
calls ?a different sense of the times and a
different sense of time? (Brown 15), including
both the current political times and the times
of this particular moment in cinema?s history.
· Film?s residues and returns through
various forms of media convergence and/or
through new sites and forms of exhibition.
We are also interested in papers that examine
the discipline of film theory itself in relation to ideas of the untimely.
This issue aims to generate different ways of
thinking about film and politics both by looking
at how film, and indeed how film theory, can
?reset? time and by looking at how cinema?s
place in ?our times? is being proposed and understood.
Please send abstracts of 500 words to Dr Jodi
Brooks
(<mailto:(j.brooks /at/ unsw.edu.au)>(j.brooks /at/ unsw.edu.au))
or Dr Therese Davis
(<mailto:(therese.davis /at/ arts.monash.edu.au)>(therese.davis /at/ arts.monash.edu.au))
by November 30th. Papers selected for publication will be due July 4th 2011.
Screening the Past is a refereed journal and is
ranked an A* journal in the ARC-ERA rankings of
international scholarly journals in both the
Film, Television, and Digital Media category and
the Historical Studies category.
