[Commlist] Conference call: the picturesque: visual pleasure and intermediality in-between contemporary cinema, art and digital culture

THE PICTURESQUE: VISUAL PLEASURE AND INTERMEDIALITY IN-BETWEEN 
CONTEMPORARY CINEMA, ART AND DIGITAL CULTURE
25-26 October, 2019, Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Continuing our series of conferences dedicated to rethinking 
intermediality in contemporary cinema and visual culture, we propose to 
initiate a discussion around aspects of intermediality that may unfold 
from the perspective of the picturesque.
The much-debated notion inherited from the art theories of the late 18th 
century originally denoted both an aesthetic quality (something pleasing 
to the eye situated between the serenely beautiful and the awe-inspiring 
sublime) and a particular visual impression (something that looks like a 
picture in nature). It anticipated and later became deeply entangled 
with many of the ideas of Romanticism, of modernity and postmodernity by 
shifting the appeal of images from knowledge to imagination, sensation 
and mood, by applying the frame of art to life, or the frame of one art 
to another, and emphasising the abstract aesthetic value of a kind of 
pictured vision. Photography appropriated it as a strategy of so-called 
pictorialism and popular culture perpetuated it in various forms of 
spectacularization from the early dioramas and panoramas to today’s 
ubiquitous digital screens through which we continually reframe our 
lives in picturesque images.
The picturesque emerges therefore not only as a transversal concept in 
art history or visual culture, but also essentially connected to issues 
of intermediality and in-betweenness that we would like to bring into 
focus. In a “beautifully circular” dynamics (Rosalind Krauss), in a 
“conjunction of nature, picture, eye” (Geoffrey Batchen) a given moment 
of the perceptual array is connected to recognizable patterns in a 
picture which always reveals the form of one medium perceived in another 
(e.g. painterly tableaux in photography, film, installation art, 
photographic frames in film, photos that look like film stills, etc.). 
As such, the picturesque directs our attention to the sensuous aspects 
of intermediality and their relevance in our so-called postmedia age, 
when the “photographic”, “the cinematic” or the “painterly” can be 
seamlessly merged through digital technologies.
We would also like to address the controversial aesthetics of the 
intermedial picturesque that foregrounds instead of a sublime 
Gesamtkunstwerk-like effect the sheer visual pleasure of imageness, and 
to highlight its range in this respect from the decorative and the 
playful to the contemplative. Keeping in mind the potentially 
“troublesome” aspects of “pretty” images (Rosalind Galt), we encourage 
proposals to consider their “politics” as well, which can either align 
with what John Ruskin described as the “heartlessness of the 
picturesque” (i.e. delighting in images of ruin and decay), or can imply 
a reflexive acknowledgement of their underlying tensions between art and 
life (by engaging Raymond Bellour’s and Laura Mulvey’s “pensive spectator”).
Accordingly, we invite proposals to explore the variety of intermedial 
strategies that generate visual pleasures associated with the 
picturesque in a broad sense, and to uncover their intricate relations 
of in-betweenness.

We suggest the following topics (but welcome any relevant approach to 
the issues outlined in the CFP):

The tableau vivant as a visual attraction between high art and popular 
culture, and in-between painting, photography, sculpture, theatre and film
Synaesthetic pleasures: picturesque impressions in conjunction with 
tactility, soundscape and music
Picturesque landscapes in slow cinema, slow TV and experimental films
Media reflexivity and the picturesque in contemporary documentary and 
essay films
Moving image installations and the immersiveness of picturesque images
The picturesque world and the ruins of civilization: nature versus 
culture in images of the anthropocene
Painterly images and remediations in heritage films and bio-pics
Gender and postcolonial perspectives of the picturesque intersecting 
with intermediality
The picturesque in-between the analogue and the digital, the natural and 
the artificial
Theorising what “looks like a picture” today
The intermedial visual pleasures of VR
The picturesque and the spectacular in video games

Confirmed keynote speakers:

STEVEN JACOBS (Department of Art History, Ghent University), an art 
historian specialized in the relations between film and the visual arts. 
His research interests include the visualization of architecture, 
cities, and landscapes in film and photography. He is the author of: The 
Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (2007), Framing 
Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (2011), The Dark Galleries: A Museum 
Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir (2013, with Lisa Colpaert) as 
well as the co-author of Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (2017), 
and The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity 
Between the Wars (2018).

LAURA MULVEY (Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, 
University of London), one of the most influential film theorists of our 
time. Her major works include: Visual and Other Pleasures (1989/2009), 
Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye (1996/2013), Citizen 
Kane (BFI Classics series 1992/2012), Death 24x a Second: Stillness and 
the Moving Image (2006), together with groundbreaking articles on 
narrative film, feminist film theory, the aesthetics of stillness in the 
moving image, etc. She is also an avant-garde filmmaker who co-wrote and 
co-directed with Peter Wollen and Mark Lewis several experimental essay 
films.

Submission of proposals:
We invite proposals both for individual papers and for pre-constituted 
panels. Panels may consist of 3 speakers.

Deadline for the submission of proposals: July 15, 2019.

Please fill in one of the SUBMISSION FORMS:
INDIVIDUAL SUBMISSION: https://goo.gl/forms/9rvw9Ne6yCL090o33

PANEL SUBMISSION: https://goo.gl/forms/bMxYFJqvqCIpb3ja2

The official language of the conference is English. The time for 
presentations is limited to maximum 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute 
debate.

Conference fee (which includes participation, conference buffet and 
banquet): 120 EUR, special fee for participants from 
post-communist/communist countries: 70 EUR.

A selection of papers based on the conference presentations will be 
published in our department’s international, peer reviewed journal (Acta 
Universitatis Sapientiae. Film & Media Studies) indexed in several 
international databases.

You can contact the organizers at this e-mail address: 
(2019.picturesque /at/ gmail.com)

For further information and updates see the official website: 
http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/the-picturesque-visual-pleasure-and-intermediality

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