[ecrea] CFP: 'Materialising Absence in Film and Media'

Call for Papers: 'Materialising Absence in Film and Media'
Guest Editors: Nadine Boljkovac and Saige Walton
Special Dossier of Screening the Past (2017)
www.screeningthepast.com

Over the past decade, film theory has invoked ideas of proximity, 
presence, the haptic sense and the lived body to account for the 
relationship between cinema and sensation. This Special Dossier of 
Screening the Past will investigate the sensuous significance of the 
absent, the spectral and the invisible in film: from haunted imagery and 
sounds to the fascination with ghosts, wraiths and specters; appeals to 
time, memory and the past or elusive properties of film such as mood, 
atmosphere and the role of the imagination.

We ask: how is absence materialised in the cinema? How does absence 
connect with time, affect or the emotions? How does film bring the 
‘invisible’ of death, memory, forgetting or trauma into a vital 
visibility? Is absence figured differently in Hollywood, European or 
World Cinema contexts? How does it connect with issues of politics, 
history, personal and cultural memory? How might longstanding and 
inter-medial concepts such as the sublime correspond with the 
‘un-representable’ of certain experiences, and what are its cinematic 
potentials?

We are particularly interested in theorising the many ways in which 
absence has been materialised at the level of film form and aesthetics 
and how it is in turn experienced at the level of the body and the 
senses. While no one methodological approach or thinker will be favored, 
we ask that all authors address the inter-relationship between absence, 
embodiment and presence that is our central premise. Authors may also 
choose to address the materialisation of absence and the spectral in 
other moving-image media.
Suggested topics include but are not limited to the following:
•  Absence as cinematic or post-cinematic ontology
•  Film-philosophical approaches to the concepts of presence and 
absence, time, affect and subjectivity
•  Cinema and the imagination
•  Sublimity and spectrality
•  Themes of the haunted and the haunting in film
•  Ghost-hunting in film
•  Re-evaluating ‘absence’ in film apparatus theory (Christian Metz; 
Jean-Louis Baudry; Jean-Pierre Oudart)
•  Film-phenomenologies of absence (ghosts; the past; death; history; 
memory)
•  Death, dying, illness and aging
•  The visibility and invisibility of vulnerability, fragility and intimacy
•  Actual and virtual aspects of memory, history and experience (Deleuze)
•  Spectres in film history (including early film history)
•  Haunted narratives and landscapes
•  Filmmakers closely associated with ghosts and spirits such as Guy 
Maddin, Apichatpong Weerasethakul or David Cronenberg
•  Filmmakers associated with haunted and/or traumatic pasts (Alain Resnais)
•  The invisible and film sound (for instance: the acousmatic)
•  Moving-image artists and spectrality (Janet Cardiff, Gary Hill, Bill 
Viola, Tony Oursler)
•  Ethereal moods and atmospheres
•  Gender, sexuality and the spectral
•  Cinematic ruins and cinema as ruin
•  Media archaeologies of the absent, the invisible, the haunted or the 
spectral

Potential contributors are invited to submit an abstract of up to 300 
words that accompanied by 3-5 references and a short biography by: 20th 
December 2016. Please submit your abstracts to the editors at the 
following email address: (materialisingabsence /at/ gmail.com) . On the basis 
of selected abstracts, authors will be invited to submit a full 
manuscript of no more than 8,000 words (excluding endnotes) for the 
journal’s double blind peer review process. This Special Dossier of 
Screening the Past will be published by the end of 2017.

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