[ecrea] Call for Papers: Cine-Ethics

Call for Papers: Cine-Ethics

Editors: Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey


It can be argued that film studies has seen an “ethical turn” over the past decade, as emerging trends in film theory and criticism have shifted focus from ontological and epistemological realms to ethical domains. There have been efforts to bridge these apparently distinctive concerns by foregrounding the ethical implications of the medium’s mechanisms and structures of engagement.  In his discussion of Stanley Cavell, David Rodowick examines the way the viewer regains the “contact” with the profilmic world despite its spatial and temporal displacement and how film enables the viewer to recognize the “deep connectedness with a way of being in the world”.  In a similar vein, Vivian Sobchack situates the intersection between aesthetics and ethics in the way the viewing subject “connects” with other subjects and body-objects.  The film screen, for Sobchack, constitutes a Merleau-Pontian “flesh” that links and mediates the film subject(s) and objects of perception.  Continental philosophers and thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou further provide theoretical frameworks for film criticisms that focus on the relationship between the self and the other as forged through the film medium.

Following a successful symposium at the University of Kent, we have submissions of original essays for the anthology written by leaders in the field. In order to round out the volume, we invite essays that expand, recast, and critically engage with some of these discussions.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

(1) the disciplinary turn to “ethics” and other forms of moral philosophy
-To what extent does the relationship between film (and/or new media) and profilmic reality (the world) pose ethical questions and dilemmas?
-Is the marriage between film studies and philosophy, especially ethics, fruitful?
-What do film scholars mean by “ethics”?
-Is the ethical turn an old form of ideological criticism in disguise?

(2) innovative case studies that show how moral philosophy can be productively
brought to bear on film culture
-Discourses of ethics as configured in film criticism and marketing
-Filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke and others
-Movements and trends such as Italian Neo-realism, Dogme 95, exploitation films, and contemporary extreme cinema
-Documentaries and documentarists such as Werner Herzog, Patrick Keiller, Michael Moore, Errol Morris, Ulrich Seidl, Frederick Wiseman and others

(3) the ethics of engagement and spectatorship:
	-To what extent does the film mechanism foster a distinctive viewer’s moral or ethical engagement with others?
	-To what extent is such an engagement of the self with others moral or ethical?
	-What is the relationship or a difference between the moral and the ethical?

Please send a short abstract (300-500 words) with a brief author biography to Dr. Jinhee Choi ((j.choi /at/ kent.ac.uk)) and Dr. Mattias Frey ((m.j.frey /at/ kent.ac.uk)) by 1 September 2011.   The editors are currently in contact with university and other major presses for this anthology, and contributors are expected to submit the completed essays by 1 June 2012.



Dr. Mattias Frey
Lecturer in Film Studies
University of Kent
School of Arts, Jarman Building 2-26
Canterbury CT2 7UG
UK

++44 1227 827132

http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/staff/mattias_frey.html



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