[ecrea] CfP Metafiction and Reflexivity in Cinema

*Metafiction and Reflexivity in Cinema*
*November 14-15, 2019
Université Clermont Auvergne / Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
CELIS / CHEC / CAS
*Reflexivity in art is not a practice that is specific to the postmodern 
period, as a number of critics have noted. Robert Stam reminds us that 
Homer often designates his own enunciation as one of the topics of his 
text. We find similar examples of self-reference concerning the writer 
or the creative process in the writings of Lawrence Sterne, long before 
the reflexive strain that characterized authors from the second half of 
the 20th C (William Gass, Vladimir Nabokov or John Fowles among others). 
Likewise, cinematographic reflexivity does not appear circumscribed by a 
period beginning after 1950. As soon as the silent era, 
self-consciousness in the medium is manifest: the cameraman in The Big 
Swallow (James Williamson, 1901) engulfed by the camera eye testifies to 
this phenomenon, just like, in a different context, Sherlock Junior 
(Buster Keaton, 1924), which uses various innovative devices to stage 
the adventures of a projectionist who falls asleep during a show and 
dreams that he is acting as a great detective. The same reflexive slant 
is visible in documentaries or in experimental films like The Man with a 
Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) or Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch, 
Edgar Morin, 1961) where the filmmakers appear several times on screen 
while they are shooting the film itself—see Bill Nichols’s (2001) 
category of “reflexive documentary.” Because reflexivity is such a 
widespread phenomenon, its motivations and forms beg to be considered 
more precisely.

A first step in this process is to distinguish metafiction from 
reflexivity. In the wake of Robert Stam’s analysis (p. 159), reflexivity 
can be considered as the use of devices meant to draw the reader’s or 
spectator’s attention to the fictional and/or artificial quality of 
representation. Reflexivity may also be found in works that reveal what 
goes on behind the scenes of cinematographic creation. By contrast, 
metafiction—as it was defined by Patricia Waugh—implies the production 
of a critical discourse on a text or a film as a work of fiction, and a 
critical discourse on the medium itself, whether it is film or 
literature. Metafiction thus refers to a more elaborate practice than 
reflexivity, which can be limited to self-referential games around 
fiction or to artificial devices, without opening onto larger questions 
bearing on the medium itself and on the question of fictionality in the 
work itself (or, sometimes, in just any work of fiction). Secondly, we 
must note that the metafictional or reflexive quality of a work appears 
differently in literature and in cinema. In literature, it can take the 
form of a discourse on the text—or on writing in general—and be 
inscribed within the text itself. This calls to mind texts which include 
writers commenting on their own works, but also texts dealing with 
literary influences on the fictional diegesis (such as Madame Bovary and 
Don Quixote). The transposition of a metafictional discourse is often 
more difficult in the cinematographic medium because the representation 
of the cinematic technical apparatus is less realistically integrated in 
a fiction film than in writing, which may use cases of interpretation 
within the diegesis to justify reflexive episodes. Films staging 
directors—such as Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973), 8 ½ (Federico 
Fellini, 1963) and Living in Oblivion (Tom DiCillo, 1995)—resort to 
stories focused on the shooting of a film and not only on the influence 
of fiction within fiction, as this may be the case in literary 
metafictional works. This statement can be qualified by the fact that 
many films evince their reflexivity through isolated citations of other 
films or audiovisual materials, for instance through the insertion of an 
autonomous sequence, distinct from the first narrative level, and that 
acts as a reference. Yet, in this case, such citations are in themselves 
no guarantee of a metafictional perspective developed in the films, 
since this perspective requires theoretical and topical distance towards 
the medium. More largely, the overlapping of narrative boundaries—which 
Gérard Genette calls metalepses—may function differently from one medium 
to another; it can consist in the passage from one narrative to another 
(as with the play within the play in Hamlet) meant to signify an 
interaction between the initial diegesis and the metafictional text, but 
in cinema this passage needs to be motivated in the story; this occurs 
in The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985) when two narrative 
levels encroach upon one another. Yet again these metalepses may appear 
artificial in cinema due to the uneasy diegetic justification, in a 
realistic frame, of this interaction between narrative levels, whereas 
literary texts may integrate references to other literary discourses 
more unobtrusively and with less constraint as regards the devices used.

Attention should be paid, of course, not only to the forms of 
reflexivity and metafiction in film, but also to its aims. Although the 
term “metafiction” seems to have become a common idiom in contemporary 
fan culture (through the use of the prefix “meta”), what is at stake in 
this issue is diversely regarded, especially if we consider recent 
filmic productions. It may be conceived of as a distancing device 
serving to detach the viewer from imaginary identification (as in Stam’s 
argument, which adopts a Brechtian perspective), or a way to exploit 
avant-garde innovations in commercial form, notably in Hollywood 
productions. The striking changes visible in these practices, starting 
from the first full-length studies focused on the topic in literature 
(notably by Linda Hutcheon and Patricia Waugh), namely the fact that 
reflexivity seems to have spread beyond the limited circle of auteur 
cinema, also suggests that the reception of these devices in mainstream 
cinema was influenced by a more general evolution of forms and practices 
in the medium itself. Filmic self-reference may be more relevant today, 
due to the diversity of modes of consumption and perception of 
films—visible through the popularity of series, the use of VOD and 
streaming, or the production of films direct to internet. This may also 
point to a change in the ontology of film, through the increase in CGI 
and online viewing. This situation makes it all the more necessary to 
question the very nature of cinema and the potential end of cinema 
(Gaudreault and Marion), through this reflexive and metafictional 
discourse. This discourse thus contextually points to an interest in the 
redefinition of the medium itself, but also to a redefinition of the 
spectator’s role in the cinematic apparatus.

These avenues eventually suggest a possible link with a poetics of 
cinema, as explored by Christian Metz. The specific way reflexivity 
manifests itself in cinema can thus be related to some features in film 
aesthetics determined by a form of reflexivity at work in the medium 
itself and thus beyond the narrative discourse, as Christian Metz 
suggested in Impersonal enunciation or the site of film.
This conference thus invites talks on the following topics:

* The evolution of reflexive and/or metafictional devices in the history 
of cinema, notably in relation to technological (r)evolutions (sound, 
Internet, digital, etc.)
* The labeling and conceptual differences between reflexivity, 
metafiction, metafilm, metacinema, frame narratives
* The role of reflexivity and/or metafiction in defining an artist’s 
aesthetic identity, and thus in her/his poetics
* The reception of reflexive devices or metafictional discourses
* The narrative and structural outcome of reflexive or metafictional 
strategies in a given work
* The specificity of reflexive devices according to cinematic forms 
(feature films or short films), modes (documentaries, fictions, 
experimental cinema) or genres (slapstick, film noir, melodrama, social 
drama, epics, romances, etc.)
* The practices, techniques and implementation of metafiction in cinema
* The emergence of metafiction determined by a cultural context

We shall have the pleasure to welcome Dr. Daniel Yacavone, from the 
University of Edinburgh, who will be our keynote speaker 
(https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/dan-yacavone).

The conference will take place at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in 
Clermont Ferrand, central France. Registration fees are 40 euros for 
lecturers, professors or independent scholars and 20 euros for students. 
Accommodation will be provided freely for the participants by the 
research centres. The conference organizers will welcome proposals from 
confirmed scholars as well as from doctoral students. A publication of 
peer-reviewed texts will be proposed by the organizers. Proposals should 
include a 300-word abstract with a bibliography and a short biography. 
Thank you for sending your proposals to all three following addresses by 
1st April 2019: (Caroline.Lardy /at/ uca.fr) <mailto:(Caroline.Lardy /at/ uca.fr)>, 
(Christophe.Gelly /at/ uca.fr) <mailto:(Christophe.Gelly /at/ uca.fr)>, 
(mudrockca /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(mudrockca /at/ gmail.com)>
_Scientific commitee_
Julien Achemchame (Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier)
Zachary Baqué (Université Jean Jaurès, Toulouse)
Alain Boillat (Université de Lausanne)
Fatima Chinita (Lisbon Polytechnic Institute)
Robert von Dassanowsky (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs)
Sarah Hatchuel (Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier)
Sébastien Lefait (Université Paris 8)
Shannon Wells-Lassagne (Université de Bourgogne, Dijon)


_Bibliography_
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Berkeley : University of California Press, 1975.
BOILLAT, Alain, “Stranger than Fiction : Métalepse de Genette et 
quelques univers filmiques contemporaines,” Cinéma & Cie, vol XII, no. 
18 (Spring 2012): 21-31.
BOYD, Michael, The Reflexive Novel: Fiction as Critique, London: 
Associated Presses, 1983.
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films : l’exemple des métafilms américains, Paris, éd. des Presses de la 
Sorbonne Nouvelle, coll. « L’œil vivant »,  Paris, Presses de la 
Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2001
DÄLLENBACH, Lucien, « Mise en abyme », Dictionnaire des genres et des 
notions littéraires, Paris, Encyclopedia. Universalis et Albin Michel, 1997.
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Paris, éd. du Seuil, coll. « Poétique », 1977.
DIKA, Vera (2003). Recycled Culture in Con- temporary Art and Film. 
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
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petit écran. Essais », 2000.
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crise à l’ère du numérique, Paris, Armand Colin, 2013.
GENETTE, Gérard, Métalepse, Paris, Le Seuil, coll. « Poétique », 2004.
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contemporain: Pour une distinction de termes trop sou- vent confondus. 
Les Actes de la Sesdef (La Société des études supérieures du Département 
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éd. Méridiens Klincksieck, 1991.
MOUREN, Yannick, Filmer la création cinématographique : Le film-art 
poétique, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009.
NICHOLS, Bill, Introduction to Documentary 3rd edition. Bloomington: 
Indiana UP, 2017 [2001].
ROCHE, David, Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic 
Metafiction. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2018. 352 p.
ROSE, Margaret A., Parody/Metafiction : An Analysis of Parody as a 
Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction, London : Croom 
Helm, 1979.
SIEGLE, Robert, The Politics of Reflexivity, Baltimore & London : Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 1986.
STAM, Robert, Reflexivity in Film and Literature : from Don Quixote to 
Jean-Luc Godard, Michigan, UMI Research Press, coll. « Studies in cinema 
», 1985.
TAKEDA, Kiyoshi, « Le cinéma auto-réflexif : quelques problèmes 
méthodologiques », Iconics, The Japan Society of Image Art ans Sciences, 
1987.
WAUGH, Patricia, Metafiction : The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious 
Fiction, London & New York : Routledge, New Accents, 1985.

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