[Commlist] CFP Elemental World Cinema

Deadline approaching! 31 Jan for abstracts

**CFP: Elemental World Cinemas**

If you are interested in pursuing the connections between world cinema 
and the elements (earth, air, fire, water), please consider submitting 
an abstract for a Special Issue of Studies in World Cinema, ‘Elemental 
World Cinemas’, edited by myself and Tiago de Luca.
Proposals, consisting of a title and a 3/400-word abstract + a short 
author’s bio, should be sent to (t.de-luca /at/ warwick.ac.uk) and 
(matilda.mroz /at/ sydney.edu.au) prior to 31 January 2022. Notifications of 
acceptance or non-acceptance will be sent out in late February.
The submission deadline for accepted, full articles (max 8,000 words) is 
1 August 2022. All contributions will undergo double-blind peer review. 
Publication is planned for late spring 2023.
Studies in World Cinema
  CALL FOR PAPERS

Elemental World Cinema
Guest editors: Tiago de Luca and Matilda Mroz

Recent strands of ecocriticism have stressed the urgency in thinking 
about the environment on the basis of its elemental constitution rather 
than an amorphous ‘nature’ supposedly separate from humans (Macauley 
2010; Cohen & Duckert 2015; Peters 2015). Superseded by atomism and 
particle physics, the four elements – air, earth, fire and water – 
reappear in these accounts as more concrete entities with which to 
recalibrate our interaction with the natural world in the so-called 
Anthropocene. This is the case especially as such elements have become 
the harbingers and carriers of ecological catastrophe in the form of 
atmospheric pollution, water contamination, uncontrollable mega-fires 
and land devastation. Inspired by this research, this special issue of 
Studies in World Cinema will investigate cinema’s interaction with the 
natural elements, and in so doing forge a much needed conversation 
between the fields of world cinema and ecocinema (Willoquet-Maricondi 
2010; Rust et al. 2013; Ivakhiv 2013).
Cinema and the elements are indissolubly entwined. As John Durham Peters 
(2015) notes, the current concept of media as informational and 
communicational technologies obscures the fact that, up into the 
nineteenth century, the word medium was used to describe the natural 
elements as dynamic vessels and environments that sustain existence. The 
elements are always moving. For this very reason, when the first 
technological mass medium emerged at the end of that century – that is 
to say, cinema – it immediately nurtured an obsession with recording 
elemental shapes and forms: rippling waves, swirling dust, swaying 
foliage, as well as tornados, floods, cyclones and earthquakes. Whether 
in its gentle or ferocious manifestations, elemental vitalism asserted 
cinema’s medium-specific ability to capture the infinitely 
shape-shifting vagaries of motion (Schonig 2018; Beugnet 2017).
But cinema, as we know, would not be content with merely recording the 
world. Swiftly turned into a medium that builds story worlds, it began 
to artificially recreate the environment in purposefully built studios, 
channelling elements as resources for artificially created weather 
systems (McKim 2013; Fay 2018) and leaving its own ‘cinematic footprint’ 
(Bozak 2012) behind. This oscillation between capturing and fabricating, 
depending and acting upon the elements underpins the entire history of 
cinema, and yet an elemental history of world cinema is yet to be written.
This special issue hopes to contribute to such a task. It proposes to 
bring to the fore elements often deemed peripheral or ‘incidental’ 
(Vaughan 1999) to human action, a figure-ground reversal that can help 
us decentre humanity within the cinematic sensorium and imaginary. On 
the other hand, world cinema history is replete with films that have 
foregrounded and/or thematised the four elements, whether separately or 
combined. From Joris Ivens’s Rain (1929) to Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth 
(1930), from Amir Naderi’s Water, Wind, Dust (1989) to Deepa Mehta’s 
elemental trilogy (Fire, 1996; Earth, 1999; Water, 2005), from Andrei 
Tarkovsky (Bird 2008) to Naomi Kawase, from contemporary ‘slow cinema’ 
to ‘green’ documentaries, the elements make themselves present in 
cinematic world-making in a variety of utopian and dystopian 
configurations, and through diverse modes, genres and traditions. In its 
call for a rewriting of film history from an elemental standpoint, this 
special issue hopes to reconfigure the often abstract worldhood of world 
cinema into the very physical world we inhabit and upon which we – and 
cinema – depend for elementary survival.  We invite contributions 
related, but not exclusive to, the following topics:
•	Early cinema and the four elements
•	Cinema’s extraction of elemental resources
•	Cinema’s recording of elemental manifestations
•	Cinema’s fabrication of elemental processes
•	Philosophical approaches to elemental figurations in the cinema
•	The elements as harbingers of environmental collapse
•	Elemental activism and environmental (in)justice
•	Material feminisms and eco-feminist theory and filmmaking
•	Indigenous ecocinemas and philosophies
•	The elements and the Anthropocene in world cinema

Timeline for contributions:
Proposals, consisting of a title and a 3/400-word abstract + a short 
author’s bio, should be sent to (t.de-luca /at/ warwick.ac.uk) and 
(matilda.mroz /at/ sydney.edu.au) prior to 31 January 2022. Notifications of 
acceptance or non-acceptance will be sent out in late February.
The submission deadline for accepted, full articles (max 8,000 words) is 
1 August 2022. All contributions will undergo double-blind peer review. 
Publication is planned for late spring 2023. Any queries should be 
addressed to Tiago de Luca and Matilda Mroz ((t.de-luca /at/ warwick.ac.uk) and 
(matilda.mroz /at/ sydney.edu.au)).

Works cited
Beugnet, Martine (2017) ‘Introduction’ in Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron 
and Arild Fetveit (eds) Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions 
of Uncertainty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1-13.
Bird, Robert (2008) Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema. London: 
Reaktion Books. Bozak, Nadia (2012) The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, 
Camera, Natural Resources. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers 
University Press. Cohen, Jerome Jeffrey and Duckert, Lowell (eds.) 
(2015) Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and 
Fire. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Fay, 
Jennifer (2018) Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the 
Anthropocene. New York: Oxford University Press.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------