[ecrea] CFP: Cars and screens: cinematic automobilities. A special issue of Film Studies

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

*Cars and screens: cinematic automobilities*

A special issue of /Film Studies/

Co-edited by Elizabeth Parke and Will Straw

Scholarship on the relationship of film to “automobility” has traced the 
historical and technological interweaving of film and cars. Much of this 
work has focused on American cultural inflections of these two 
technologies, from the genre of the road movie through those films 
documenting southern California hot rod subcultures. In the years since 
volumes like /Autopia/(Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr, 2002), /Crash/(Karen 
Beckman, 2010), and /Zoomscape /(Mitchell Schwarzer, 2004) explored 
analogies between automobility and the experience of cinema, the growth 
of in-car display screens, dash scams and other technologies has 
rendered that relationship more complex. So, too, has the use of 
personal screens in automobiles, the rise of driver-less and 
rider-sharing automobiles and a growing tendency to view the automobile 
as a challenge to doctrines of the pedestrian city. Elsewhere, in chic 
European films like /Un homme et une femme/(1966) or the opening 
sequence of /The Italian Job/(1969) the elegance of the modern 
automobile and picturesque character of European landscapes have fueled 
exercises of stylistic cinematic bravura.  Cinema and cars (and their 
attendant infrastructures, e.g., roads, bridges, gas stations, parking 
lots) have shaped our built urban environments, forming a symbiotic 
dyad, with the history of each marked by innovations that influence the 
other, leaping back and forth from screen to road. Both cars and films 
have changed our relationship to visuality, inflecting the ways we 
perceive the world, move through space and time, and in turn, experience 
(or expect to experience) distance and duration.

This special issue of /Film Studies/seeks to expand on the existing 
scholarship on film and automobility.  We invite articles that explore, 
in a theoretical sense, the historical relationship of the automobile to 
cinema.  We hope, as well, to expand the geographical and temporal frame 
through which this relationship might be understood, with articles 
exploring cinematic automobility from transnational perspectives or in 
non-Western contexts and proposals that consider this phenomenon in 
relation to a variety of audiovisual formats and vehicle types. Topics, 
for a 6000-8000 word essay to be delivered by 1 February 2019, may 
include (but are not limited to):

- business relationships between cars and film (e.g., studios’ ownership 
of car parks and petrol stations)

- car company industrial films and investments in filmmaking

- car-film aesthetic challenges and solutions (e.g., shooting in moving 
cars; auto-mobile production techniques)

- ‘smaller screen realities’ which form part of the automobile 
experience: e.g., the small mobile screens of smartphones, built-in car 
interfaces, backup cameras, and dashcams

- case studies of car-film relationships that involve specific vehicle 
types (e.g., passenger cars, specific car models/brands, buses, taxis, 
motorcycles, mopeds, ride-sharing vehicles or autonomous cars)

- case studies of specific films, genre formats or cycles that hinge on 
motor vehicles

The editors will be contributing an introduction essay to the special 
issue outlining the major themes and research questions brought to light 
by the contributors.

Please send abstracts (250-300 words) by 15 November 2018 to Elizabeth 
Parke (elizabeth.parke /at/ utoronto.ca) <mailto:(elizabeth.parke /at/ utoronto.ca)> 
and Will Straw (william.straw /at/ mcgill.ca)


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