[ecrea] CFP : Painting, Moving Images and Philosophy

*/Cinema/**10: Call for Papers*

*PAINTING, MOVING IMAGES AND PHILOSOPHY*

Edited by Susana Viegas (IFILNOVA and Deakin University) and James 
Williams (Deakin University)

/Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image /(cjpmi.ifilnova.pt/ 
<http://cjpmi.ifilnova.pt/>) invites submissions for its issue on 
*Painting, Moving Images and Philosophy*.

This issue will be dedicated to exploring the relationship between 
painting and film, their irreducible heterogeneity, and the idea of 
establishing a philosophical propaedeutic to better understand the way 
the visual arts matter to us. It aims to question the limits, the 
adaptation and the irruption of the traditional styles and categories of 
romanticist and impressionist painting into the moving image; how they 
are challenged and how they are reworked.

The issue will address the following questions. Why is the relationship 
of painting to film an aesthetic issue? Why is it important not only to 
experience their differences and what they have in common, but also to 
reflect upon the implications of their difficult relations?

Film is not a pure art. Its impurity has been one of its main weaknesses 
in the philosophical debate about film as art, but also, we 
counterargue, its strongest quality and distinctive sign. The aesthetic 
answer to the iconic dialogue between painting and moving images has 
been manifold, as film borrows, eludes or reinvents plastic values and 
the static nature of painterly images. It is tempting to say that most 
filmmakers/cinematographers borrow their film’s visual composition from 
painting. Painting is then in the creation of a mood or in the presence 
of certain motifs and figures (for instance, where the /tableau vivant 
/becomes///plan-tableau/). However, to keep following this citation 
method, already criticized by Jacques Aumont, is a way of suspending the 
heterogeneity of painting and moving images. More importantly, it is to 
fail to think about their differences.

The debate around the quality and the suitability of films about art is 
longstanding. It is a debate where film, with its automatic techniques, 
is seen as a betrayal of the spiritual, unique and subjective effort of 
the painter. Painting does not need to legitimise film as an art. Inhis 
most famous essay on the topic, “Painting and Cinema”, André Bazin 
separates the two pictorial spaces - the centripetal screen and the 
centrifugal frame - but he is still limited by an essentialist point of 
view that, in practice, painters such as Degas and Monet had already 
challenged. Subsequently, painting reinvented itself with abstraction 
and suprematism, but how could film respond to this artistically? With 
its hyper-realistic images (/tableaux vivants/), film also exceeds the 
economy of the narrative. Its purpose is contemplation: without 
narrative, without plot, not coping with or representing a certain 
reality, just being … visually stunning. But can we say that 
experiencing this beauty make us any better as human beings? Maybe it 
makes us worse?

  Setting aside the orthodox /paragone/ debate ( while recognising the 
interest in discussing quotation in art documentaries, for example), 
what interests us most is Bazin’s statement that the encounter of the 
two art-forms creates a “new-born aesthetic creature” and that films 
such as Resnais’ /Van Gogh/ and Kast’s /Goya, Disasters of War/ “are 
works in their own right. They are their own justification.” Can we say 
that the imitation (film) has the same value as the original (painting)? 
Or do the terms not apply in this case? What then should we make of the 
aesthetic symbiosis of Clouzot’s /The Mystery of Picasso/?

For Gilles Deleuze, it is important to askwhich artistic problems film’s 
audio-visual sensations answer. Within his nonrepresentational thought 
of the visual arts, images do not simply illustrate or narrate 
something; painting and film are not even in the present. The key 
question becomes: how to unfold the virtual movement, the forces of 
visibility, created with the expansion of space and the stretching of time?

Thus, for the 10^th issue of /Cinema/, we wish to pay attention to 
cinematic images and to question them in their iconic status: how to 
create sensations with a certain visual tone and a visual rhythm; how to 
imagine (to create) moving images? We wish to put the technological 
concept of montage aside, as a secondary aspect, and focus on a 
phenomenological approach to the cinematic plan, to its duration, and 
also to its pictorality.

Particular themes of interest include the following subjects:

§Revisiting Malevich, Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Jarman, Malick, John Alcott, 
Robert Burks, Kant, Bazin, Merleau-Ponty, Aumont, Deleuze, Bonitzer, and 
Lyotard…

§Aesthetic thoughts about the sublime, excess and absence, /aisthesis/, 
the pregnant instant, the use of colour/black and white/shadows, 
/plan-tableau/, …

§Questioning Godard’s claim that Lumière was the last of the 
Impressionist painters (/La Chinoise/).

§Analysing Merleau-Ponty’s rendering the invisible visible: how to 
express and film the invisible forces, the unseen, the spiritual, the 
suprasensible?

§Comparing Benjamin and Epstein’s opposite perspectives on film’s 
metaphysics.

§Film, the iconic turn and criticism of /mimesis/. Examining Tarkovsky’s 
claim that the metaphor is an image.

§Film’s excess of visualityand the hyperrealism in moving images in 
dialogue with a criticism on the limits of aestheticism, mannerism and 
the abundance of clichés.

§Film’s temporal ecstasies: the depth of field, the slow motion, 
distorted and blurred images, the sublime of the now.

§The crisis of framing, double frame, /mise en abyme/, the screen as a 
canvas, from the diptych/tryptic to multiple screens.

*   *   *   *

Submissions are accepted in English and French and should be sent to 
Susana Viegas: (s.viegas /at/ deakin.edu.au) <mailto:(s.viegas /at/ deakin.edu.au)>. 
Prospective authors should submit a short CV along with the abstract. 
Abstract proposals (max. 500 words) are due on *February 1^st , 2018*, 
and a notice of acceptance will be sent to the authors in the second 
week of February.

A selection of authors will be invited to submit full papers according 
to the journal guidelines. Acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee 
publication, since all papers will be subjected to double blind peer-review.

*   *   *   *

For further information or questions about the issue, please contact 
Susana Viegas: (s.viegas /at/ deakin.edu.au) <mailto:(s.viegas /at/ deakin.edu.au)>.

/Cinema/also invites submissions to its other sections: /Interviews/, 
/Conference/ /Reports/ and /Book Reviews/. Please consult the web site 
<http://cjpmi.ifilnova.pt/about/>of the journal for further details.


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