[ecrea] CFP: "Figurations of Intermediality in Film" Conference, 24-25 Oct.2014

Dear Colleagues, here is a conference call that may be of interest to 
some of you:

FIGURATIONS OF INTERMEDIALITY IN FILM
24-25.Oct. 2014, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj, 
Romania

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 M
ajewski’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 m
ediation 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 and 
embedding, intermediality and metalepsis, the tableau vivant in cinema, 
possible trans-medial “adaptations” of traditional rhetorical 
figures/tropes (e.g. ekphrasis, hypotyposis, etc.),
·    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: recontextualization as/and remediation, reframing, media 
collage, remix, etc.
·    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:(intermedia.figurations /at/ gmail.com).

Conference website: 
http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/xv-film-and-media-studies-conference-intransylvania

Best regards,
Agnes Petho

................................
Dr. ÁGNES PETHO, Head of Department
Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Department of Film, Photography, and Media,
Executive editor: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film & Media Studies


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