Call For Papers: This is the Sea: Cinema at the Shoreline
Edited by Brady Hammond, Victoria University of
Wellington, and Sean Redmond, Deakin University, Melbourne
We would like to propose a collection that looks
at those films in which the relationship between
the sea, shoreline and beach are of particular
narrative, aesthetic, and ideological
significance. This is the Sea: Cinema at the
Shoreline will explore the ways in which the
meeting places between land and sea offer up
sites where complex issues around identity,
belonging, otherness, nomadism, death, and
renewal are played out. For the editors of this
collection, the shoreline holds particular
significance for understanding the way in which
the relations between sea and land can create
liminal, often transgressive, possibilities for
representational and phenomenological encounters
between people who ?find themselves? at the water?s edge.
In recent years, the question of space and place
in cinema has provided fertile ground for
analysis and discussion. For example, exciting
work has emerged on; the rural in cinema
(Fowler, Helfield, 2006); landscape and heritage
(Higson, 2003); the geographies and trajectories
of the city (Abbas, 1997, Clarke, 1997, Mennel,
2008); and on the complex, multi-relational,
visual-mobile spaces of cine architecture
(Bruno, 2002). However, little sustained work
has taken place on this specific (?non?)
location, on this dry and wet landscape where
key transformations and happenings take
place. The editors intend for This is the Sea:
Cinema at the Shoreline to be an exciting
addition to the literature on cinema landscapes,
offering valuable new insights into the way this
location or site of transformation can be read and experienced.
Indicative Themes
Disaffected youth at the shoreline
Suicide at the beach, at the water?s edge
Death (physical, existential, symbolic)
Birth (physical, existential, symbolic)
Love and romance at the beach
The journey down stream
The watery arrival of the monster/creature/alien
The ?blockbuster? shoreline, beach
The conquest/landing/occupation
The harbour
Ecology at the water?s edge
Deterritorialisation
The beach as escape, hideout, prison, body
Class, race, gender, sexuality and the beach
The shoreline, beach, harbour as heterotopia of compensation and/or illusion
Purification, renewal, and re-birth at the beach
The beach, shoreline as national myth
The sea as limit
The beach as a site of nostalgia, play, innocence lost or regained
Transgression, hedonism, at the water?s edge
The beach as a space, a location, a time of subtraction, of negative space
Contemplation the cerebral shoreline
Colour sensation the aesthetics of the beach, harbour.
Indicative Films
The Seventh Seal
Jaws
Planet of the Apes
The 400 Blows
Road to Perdition
The Warriors
Hana-bi, A Scene at the Sea, Sonatine, Kikijuro,
From Here to Eternity
Ponyo
A Ma Soeur!
Bhaji on the Beach
Les Vacances de M. Hulot
Coming Home
8 1/2
Cast Away
Saving Private Ryan
Blue Hawaii
300
Y Tu Mamá También
Maborosi
Dark City
Blue Lagoon
The Piano
Rain
On the Waterfront
Brighton Rock
Point Break
The Big Wednesday
Godzilla/Gojiro
The Woman of the Dunes
The Beach
Rumble Fish
The Secret of Roan Inish
Floating Weeds
Jason and the Argonauts
Whale Rider
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Submission guidelines and time line
Enquiries and 500 word abstracts (attached as a
word document) should be sent to Brady Hammond
at (Brady.Hammond /at/ vuw.ac.nz) and Sean Redmond at
(sean.redmond /at/ deakin.edu.au) by the 1st April 2011.
Accepted abstracts/contributors will be notified by the 1st May 2011
Articles of between 6,500-7,000 words due by 1st November 2011
Final Drafts by 1st February 2012
Brady Hammond is a completing PhD candidate in
the Film Programme at Victoria University of
Wellington, looking at violence and negative
peace in the pre and post 9/11 blockbuster film.
Sean Redmond is Associate Professor of Media and
Communication at Deakin University, Melbourne,
and editor of the journal Celebrity Studies and
author of Flowering Blood: the Cinema of Takeshi
Kitano (Forthcoming, Columbia University Press)
