[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. In his 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 ask which 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 visuality and 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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