[ecrea] CFP: Experimentation, Avant-garde, and Deviation from the Norm in Classical Hollywood Cinema

We are pleased to announce the call for papers of the next issue of 
/L’Atalante. Revista de Estudios Cinematográficos/ which, under the 
title of “Experimentation, Avant-garde, and Deviation from the Norm in 
Classical Hollywood Cinema”, is open to contributions. You can find 
detailed information at: 
http://www.revistaatalante.com/index.php?journal=atalante&page=announcement&op=view&path%5B%5D=51 


The deadline for article proposals for the “Notebook” section is April 
30th 2018. The issue will be published in January 2019.

We sincerely hope that this information may be of your interest. Please 
feel free to share this call among your contacts. Thank you in advance.

/L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos/
//

http://www.revistaatalante.com <http://www.revistaatalante.com/>

(info /at/ revistaatalante.com) <mailto:(info /at/ revistaatalante.com)>

*EXPERIMENTATION, AVANT-GARDE, AND DEVIATION FROM THE NORM IN CLASSICAL 
HOLLYWOOD CINEMA*

**

Acceptance of articles for the section “Notebook”:*from March 15^th to 
April 30^th *

Classical Hollywood cinema is one of the better-defined periods with 
regard to style and mode of production. Its greatest achievement was its 
largely unproblematic conciliation between art and industry and between 
quality and commercial viability. That was precisely what allowed its 
world dominance and its conversion, in the cinephile imaginary, into an 
almost mythical Golden Age, an age that is less and less known and 
understood by younger generations (even in academia). Even if critics 
from /Cahiers du Cinéma/ insisted on defining “authors” (specially in 
the figure of directors) in classical Hollywood, the pictures produced 
under the studio system were primarily a collective art, made under a 
strongly specialized and hierarchized organization. That is what makes 
defining who is responsible of each contribution inside a film such a 
difficult task.

Classical Hollywood cinema’s style was very uniform and stable in 
essence, even after all the mutations suffered from the mid-1910s to the 
end of the 1950s (or even the beginning of the 1960s). Obsessed with the 
mass influx of people into the theatre so as to obtain the highest 
profits possible, and focused on the narrative, everything in these 
films concentrates on two key principles: do not bore the audience, and 
tell the story in the simplest way possible. Lighting, mise-en-scène, 
editing, camera movements, sound processing, etc.—everything was 
designed to serve the narrative structure. That is precisely what has 
been called transparency: nothing can distract the attention from the 
most important thing, the story.

But, at the same time, this well-defined and delimited system was less 
rigid and more flexible than it seemed and than has frequently been 
asserted. In fact, it always allowed for experimentation in all the 
elements of the creation of cinema, ever since the silent film era. Let 
us consider, for example, D. W. Griffith, who contributed to the 
development and settlement of the language of narrative continuity (what 
has been defined by Noël Burch as IMR), thanks to innovations that would 
influence all other national cinemas. Griffith himself would experiment 
beyond the allowed limits in /Intolerance/ (1916), leading to the 
public’s rejection and to the financial collapse of the project.

Many of the original solutions of classical Hollywood cinema still 
surprise us, seeming very modern and fresh even today. These experiments 
were almost always designed for the narrative structure, adapted to work 
in its favour. In other cases, though, they were devices that emphasized 
a certain self-consciousness of film language, including complex 
artifices. Even in those cases, these examples were deviations within 
the norm, and never radical departures or real alternatives to the 
system. That is, (almost) everything was permitted, since everything was 
perfectly integrated inside Hollywood’s characteristic style, a machine 
able to devour (in the good sense) all the filmic novelties from other 
other national cinemas, assimilating them and making them its own 
without remorse.

Hollywood, while influencing all the film industries in the world, has 
always paid attention to what was happening in other countries, being 
very receptive to their contributions, even when they seemed like 
alternatives to its own system. Hollywood has also tried to hire the 
most successful international filmmakers, as it happened —with varying 
results— during the 1920s with Ernst Lubitsch, Victor Sjöström, Mauritz 
Stiller, F. W. Murnau, E. A. Dupont, Paul Leni, and Jacques Feyder. In 
addition to this, the European diaspora due to the ascendance of Nazism 
in Germany made a little town in California the centre in which some of 
the most privileged minds in the History of Cinema gathered. These 
foreigners both adapted (with fewer or more difficulties) to the 
Hollywood mode of production and introduced some of their own ideas 
about filmmaking; ideas that most of the time were very different from 
the style of American cinema. As Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson explain 
(2005 [1985]: 74): “Hollywood has perpetually renewed itself by 
assimilating techniques from experimental movements”. Thompson (1993: 
188) even asserts that “Hollywood could assimilate, among other things, 
aspects of avant-garde art”. Now, “[t]he question, though, is what 
principles governed this search for differentiation. What limits were 
set upon variety?” (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, 2005 [1985]: 72).


Considering all this, some of the themes and proposals for this 
monographic issue are:

·The diversity of experimentalism inside Hollywood’s classicism in any 
part of the film creation process: the technology, the cinematography 
(both illumination and the use of colour), the mise-en-scène (from sets 
to camera movements, including costume design), the editing, the sound, 
the narrative structure, the visual aspects, the treatment of time, the 
acting, the conception and development of the star system, etc.

·The influence of the avant-garde and other national cinemas in the 
innovations made in Hollywood. German cinema from the Weimar Republic 
and early Soviet cinema were, of course, the most influential, 
especially in regard to camera movements, editing, and cinematography. 
Likewise, the impact of Italian Neorealism was decisive in achieving the 
higher degree of realism demanded by the American audience after WWII. 
At the same time, the enormous amount of foreign professionals working 
in Hollywood allowed the studio system to be receptive to other national 
film industries.

·The controversial role of authorship in the innovations inside of the 
system. Are these experiments attributable to a few very creative 
filmmakers or should we take other professionals into account?

·The role of the studios, the producers, and the production team in the 
experimentation: between freedom and the limits to creativity. Or, 
better said, who could be creative and to what degree? And, of course, 
we must not forget that some of the most original innovations in 
classical Hollywood were due to producers such as Irving Thalberg, 
Samuel Goldwyn, David O’Selznick, Walt Disney, Walter Wanger, Val 
Lewton, or Arthur Freed.

·Differences in the experimentation depending on the different decades 
of classicism. The cinema of the 1930s is not the same as it was in the 
1920s, nor is the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. And yet, they are all 
part of classical Hollywood cinema. Therefore, we will accept texts that 
analyse the modes of experimentation in classical cinema during the 
whole period, but we will primarily value those proposals that focus on 
the presence of deviations from the norm in the first decades of 
classicism (including silent cinema), and not only those that resulted 
from the crisis of the classical model in its last years.

·Experimentalism in silent films and experimentalism in sound films. The 
possibility of establishing differences between both types.

·Differences in the innovations depending on genre. Are there genres 
that are more creative than others?

·In relation to the previously mentioned, we encourage the consideration 
of the possibilities inherent in B-pictures. Sometimes lower budget 
films were the ones that, due to a less economically risky mode of 
production, allowed for greater expressive audacity.

·The integration of experiments in the narrative structure of classicism.

*
*
*References*

Bordwell, D., Staiger, J., Thompson, K. (2005 [1985]). /The Classical 
Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production until 1960. /London: 
Routledge

Thompson, K. (1993). The Limits of Experimentation in Hollywood. 
/Archivos de la Filmoteca/, /14/, 186-201.

/L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos /accepts submissions 
of unpublished essays on topics related to film theory and/or praxis 
that stand out for their innovative nature. Articles should focus on 
approaches to the cinematographic fact made preferably from the 
perspectives of historiography or audiovisual analysis. Those texts that 
approach novel objects of study with rigorous and well-evidenced 
methodologies will be appreciated. Articles that take as their main 
reference the processes of signification through the analysis of the 
audiovisual form and/or the narratological elements specific to our 
field, focusing on methodologies specifically related to the treatment 
of the image will be favoured in the selection process. Although we 
accept works with other methodologies that approach the filmic fact from 
transversal perspectives (Cultural Studies, philological approaches, 
etc.) we consider that the main interest of the journal is located on 
the studies that take the specifically cinematographic expressive tools 
as the main elements of discourse. Likewise, texts that are not limited 
to describing, enumerating or summarizing details of the plot, but that 
rigorously apply a specific and well-evidenced analysis methodology, 
reaching particular and novel results, will be given priority.

Below are a few aspects to keep in mind:

·Submissions must be original and must conform to the submission 
guidelines of the journal 
<http://revistaatalante.com/index.php?journal=atalante&page=about&op=submissions> and 
to the standards and scientific rigour expected of an academic publication.

·Submissions will be evaluated for the originality of the topic 
explored, especially if it relates to an issue not previously addressed 
in the publication. Submissions dealing with topics previously addressed 
in the journal may be rejected. The content of the issues published to 
date can be consulted on the journal's website 
<http://revistaatalante.com/index.php?journal=atalante&page=issue&op=archive>.

·All submissions will undergo an external peer review process that will 
respect the anonymity of both authors and reviewers (double blind peer 
review) in an effort to prevent any possibility of bias. In the event of 
a very high number of submissions, the Editorial Board will make a prior 
selection of the articles to be peer reviewed, choosing the articles 
deemed the most appropriate for the issue. Failure to observe the 
submission guidelines and/or standards of originality and academic 
rigour will result in rejection of the submission by the Editorial Board 
without external review.

·Authors of accepted submissions will be contacted within six months.

·Articles (which should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words including all 
sections) must be submitted via the website of the journal as .rtf, .odt 
or .docx files, using the template provided for the purpose. Files 
containing the author's statement (.pdf) and any images (.psd, .png, 
.jpg, .tiff) must be uploaded to the website as complementary files. A 
detailed version of the submission guidelines can be found at the 
following link 
<http://revistaatalante.com/index.php?journal=atalante&page=about&op=submissions>. 
Any articles that fail to meet these requirements will be rejected 
automatically.

/·/If the /L'Atalante /team decides to publish the “Notebook” section of 
the present issue in a bilingual edition, authors will be required to 
provide the translation and cover the costs of translating or 
proofreading the text (in some cases, this cost may be waived for 
students and unemployed researchers who provide proof of status).//

·/L'Atalante/ does not offer any compensation for published articles. 
For more information: (info /at/ revistaatalante.com) 
<mailto:(info /at/ revistaatalante.com)>

<mailto:(info /at/ revistaatalante.com)>


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