[Commlist] Cinema 12 cfp: images of the real. philosophy and documentary film

*/CINEMA /12//CFP: /IMAGES OF THE REAL./ PHILOSOPHY AND DOCUMENTARY 
FILM*____

*Guest Editors*
Stefanie Baumann
Susana Nascimento Duarte ____

*Managing Editor*
Patrícia Castello Branco ____

/Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image/ welcomes 
submissions to its 12^th  issue on */Images of the Real/*/: *Philosophy 
and Documentary Film*/*.*____

Documentary films constitute a challenge for philosophical thinking. 
Relying on reality and addressing it explicitly as well, they raise the 
problem of the encounter between world and images. The indexical images 
they feature do not merely reproduce the real in its immediacy, but also 
constitute, in themselves, a particular relation to it. Rather than a 
pure objective material, they are always a product of a dialogue between 
the visible and its perception, the historically developed reality and 
the meanings ascribed to it. Being at the same time reproductions of the 
empirical world and artistic configurations, documentaries appeal for 
critical reflection rather than blind belief. However, many commercial 
productions, educational formats, or journalistic reportages tend to 
conceal these intricate connections and claim to represent the factual 
world in an accurate way through rather conventional forms. By 
uncritically using strategies such as seemingly neutral voiceovers, 
interviews with experts or victims, live footage or archival images 
contextualized in a coherent, unilateral way, they obscure the fact that 
the topical issues have not only been mediated through framing, editing, 
and sound, but also through the filmmaker’s stance towards her subject. ____

By contrast, examples of the critical awareness of the complex relation 
between filmic images and the reality they address can be found in the 
work of independent**filmmakers and theorists. Trinh T Min-Ha, for 
instance, not only problematizes the confusion of the notion of truth 
with that of meaning along with the authoritarian attitude of 
traditional ethnographic film, but she also develops a particular 
“method” (“speaking near-by”) for her own films. Werner Herzog opposes 
to what he calls the “truth of accountants” his own notion of “ecstatic 
truth”, which intertwines understanding and experience, and thus needs 
to be fabricated rather than recorded. Hartmut Bitomsky considers that 
making an image always means to extract it from an original context, and 
uses the notion of “ready-made” when he speaks of his own images as 
quotations of reality. Jean Rouch advances the idea of /ciné-transe/ as 
a means to penetrate into deeper strata of the real by partaking in the 
action, and recently, Pooja Rangan points to the authoritarian attitude 
concealed under the label of humanitarianism in many documentaries. In a 
similar vein, many artistic documentaries, as we came to call them, and 
essay films by committed filmmakers implicitly criticize the existing 
power structures and rhetoric in which assertions about objectivity 
operate. Through aesthetic means they problematize standardized 
perception and deflect the focus in order to allow for a critique of 
images and common sensical norms. These can be as various as 
distanciation, separation between sound and image, slow motion (Wang 
Bing, S. Loznitsa), meta-cinematic gestures disrupting the film’s 
indexical connection to the real (J-L. Godard), reflective voiceover 
commentary and creative use of found footage (C. Marker), experimental 
or archeological approaches (H. Farocki), combination of observational 
techniques with expressive montage (F. Wiseman), specific devices (M. 
Rau, L. Castaing-Taylor, and V, Paravel), alternative perspectives on 
history (J-M Straub, C. Akerman, P. Costa, R. Panh), strategies of 
/détournement/ and of poetic deconstruction of viral media (G. Thomson 
and S. Maglioni), use of second hand images and radical editing (D. 
Gagnon), recourse to fiction (E. Morris, N. Perada), and the list is not 
exhaustive. These attempts show that aesthetics and politics, society 
and its representation, knowledge and its embedding in institutional 
forms, are interrelated on many levels, and this is why they allow for 
complex philosophical investigations into ethical, political, 
epistemological, and aesthetical aspects of reality today.____

This issue of /Cinema - Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image/ aims 
at exploring the complex ways in which documentary films, as both an 
artistic form and a representation of the social, material, political, 
and medial reality, intersect with philosophical thinking. ____

Submissions are accepted in English, Portuguese, and French and should 
be sent to (cjpmi /at/ fcsh.unl.pt) <mailto:(cjpmi /at/ fcsh.unl.pt)>*____*

Prospective authors should submit a short CV along with the abstract.____

Abstract proposals (max. 500 words) are due on*April 1st*, 2020, and a 
notice of acceptance will be sent to the authors on April 15, 2020.____

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

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

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