This symposium aims to explore how the issues of borders, identities and solidarities have been tackled by and through film festivals. As a repetitive practice happening in regular intervals and at the same place, film festivals operate as ‘places of memory’ of a particular kind (Nora, 1984 [1997]). As such, they provide an institutional framework for the cultural memories they preserve and produce through their programmes. By the default of cultural memory creation (Assmann, 1995), their influence becomes long-term and wide encompassing, moving far beyond from their actual time and place. In addition, thanks to the engagement of diverse festival actors (journalists, critics, industry representatives, politicians, etc.) the narratives that they create reach diverse categories of society, not limited to those present at the screening. The influence created in such a way becomes especially important in the times of political and military conflicts and social turbulences, when not only various kinds of liberties, but also people’s lives, can be threatened. With this in mind, this symposium aims to bring together scholars working on diverse aspects of film festival studies to discuss interrelations between film festivals and the questions of borders, identities and solidarities. In the current context of political and social upheavals, and social movements for civil rights, the symposium will explore the capacity of film festivals to operate not simply as spaces for cinematic representation related to borders and identities, but how they have (or may become) vehicles for forging solidarities, past, present and future.

We welcome submissions in the following (non-exhaustive) topic areas:

– Film festivals and political propaganda
– Film festivals as places for expression of solidarity
– Film festivals, cultural memory and national identity
– Film festivals and gender identity
– Definitions of film festivals’ identity
– Borderland film festivals
– Borders and boundaries in film festival programmes

Submissions may be individual or for panels of three papers. We are inviting proposals from participants from diverse ranges of career levels, from doctoral students to established scholars.

Please submit your proposals – 250-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations – to cba.trieste.symposium@gmail.com by July 5, 2024. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by August 15, 2024.

The symposium is organized by Dr Dunja Jelenkovic and Prof. Marco Dalla Gassa in the framework of the project CBA TRIESTE (The Cinematic Battle for the Adriatic: Films, Frontiers, and the Trieste Crisis) which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101020692 (MSCA-IF-EF).

For any inquiries, please contact dunja.jelenkovic@unive.it (please put “CBA TRIESTE Symposium“ as the email subject).

CFP: Performance and Experience: A Collection of Essays on Acting by Non-Actors in the Cinema
Proposed by Catherine Russell

Actors without training who play characters in fiction films are usually referred to as non-professionals or non-actors and have come to proliferate in independent cinema and “global art cinema.” Little scholarly work has been devoted to this phenomenon, but the study of non-professional acting can be a rich avenue of investigation into the role of the body in film aesthetics and the human interactions that underpin film production. Beyond neorealism, it can help us understand the role of experience in filmmaking, and the power dynamics implicit in the situation of filmmaking. Walter Benjamin understood film performance as a primal encounter between the human body and the technology of cinema, and thus as an allegory for the people-machine encounter that has subsequently evolved into the digitization of everyday life.

Non-professional acting marks multiple borderlines between fiction film and documentary and between film and the performance arts including dance, music, circus, sports and rodeo. Non-professional acting is a means of giving drama an ethnographic aspect; and also a means of bringing ethnography into the realm of speculation and fiction. Non-professional acting flags the critical question of film labour, not only as an issue of compensation and workplace protection, but equally as an issue of aesthetics and anti-corporate, anti-celebrity being.

The legacy of neorealism established the realist aesthetics of these films, and the discourse of liberal humanism that underpins the discourse around casting and performance style as well. Robert Bresson referred to his non-professional performers as “models” and, like Andre Bazin, felt that they were only useful for one performance. More recently, directors have adopted a more humane and collaborative attitude toward the people cast in their films who are not (yet) movie stars. Sean Baker refers to his actors as “first timers,” leaving a space for them to pursue an acting career should they choose to do so. Others, such as Zacharias Kunuk, work in collaboration with a specific community who perform in his films.

While film acting has received a great deal of scholarly attention, the bulk of this work has been devoted to star studies, and the performances of well-known actors. Some work on film labour has begun to address issues of non-professional film performance, and in 2024, two monographs on the topic were published by Catherine O’Rawe (The Non-Professional Actor (Bloomsbury) and Miguel Gaggiotti Nonprofessional Film Performance (Palgrave-MacMillan), laying the groundwork for more considered discussion of the aesthetics, politics and effects of non-professional film performance. While the most innovative filmmaking defies boundaries between fiction, documentary, experimental and essayistic modalities, this collection will emphasize the roles of untrained actors in dramatic fiction, looking at actors performing characters who are not necessarily “themselves,” no matter how closely aligned their characters and themselves may be.

In 2017 Film at Lincoln Centre programmed a series of films featuring non-professional actors. While it is by no means an exhaustive list of all the relevant films, it may be a good starting point to consider the scope of the topic. https://www.filmlinc.org/daily/the-non-actor-a-historical-survey-spanning-over-40-films-begins-november-24/

Proposals for films and performers who are women, Black, Indigenous or racialized, or from the Global South are especially welcome, although all proposals will be considered.

Possible approaches to the topic of non-professional film performance include:
1. Discussion of the casting and aftermath of individuals cast in fiction films.
2. Close analysis of performances, including “amalgams” of professional and non-
professional.
3. Relationships between directors and non-professional actors
4. Contracts, legal documents and other labour arrangements
5. Non-professional actors and digital cultures
6. Reality television
7. Ethical issues raised in specific productions
8. Dramatic fiction in amateur filmmaking
9. Dramatic fiction in visual anthropology
10. Philosophical effects of non-professional performance
11. Performance studies and non-professional film acting
12. Non-professional acting and the legacy of neorealism
13. An interview with a director about their work with non-professional actors
14. An interview with a performer in a fiction film who can be considered “non-professional.”

Proposals should be 300 words, accompanied by a short bio and a bibliography.

Please send to katie.russell@concordia.ca by July 15

I have provisional interest from Routledge for a publication. Translation of previously published essays or interviews will also be considered. Please don’t hesitate to contact me for additional information. If all goes well, final essays will be expected in Summer 2025.

CFP: The Neutral Graduate Journal – “INHERITANCE”
*DEADLINE EXTENDED*

The Neutral is a peer-reviewed media studies journal based out of the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. The Neutral is committed to a diversity of disciplinary approaches and media objects of study. It is published online at: www.theneutraljournal.com

For its fourth issue, The Neutral is soliciting contributions for ‘Inheritance‘.

“writing philosophy is for me finding a language in which I understand philosophy to be inherited, which means telling my autobiography in such a way as to find the conditions of that language.”

Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy

“But as for me, who am I (following)?”

Jacques Derrida, The Animal That I Therefore Am

Inheritance is always a live concern in our work: in who and what we choose to inherit, or feel we cannot but inherit, or feel we must struggle to disinherit despite their proximity to us, or not realize we have inherited because of that proximity.Jacques Derrida put this problem at its most foundational, asking “But as for me, who am I (following)?”, tying our very sense of ourselves to those who we come after. Christina Sharpe, in her configuration of The Wake, highlights the insistence of “the past that is not past” as it “reappears, always, to rupture the present.” We live in the long afterlife of slavery and the continued re-entrenchments of colonialism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-blackness, and transphobia, which force inheritances on us while also highlighting the essential inheritances we do not have access to by way of genocide, epidemic, and crisis. For this issue of The Neutral, we invite contributors to take up the theme of inheritance in all its myriad configurations. In doing so, participants are encouraged to consider and confront the ways that we rely on who and what came before us, and how we live out those inheritances in our work through citation, inspiration, or focus.

For inspiration in cinema studies, we may look to the work of Jane Gaines and Monica Dall’asta, which demonstrates how evoking the image of women in early cinema requires inheriting the signs and traces they left through their labour. Or we could look to Tom Gunning, who, in inheriting cinema’s “forgotten futures,” finds possibilities for imagining new futures for cinema today. Stanley Cavell configured his theory of genre precisely as a problem of inheritance, “the members of a genre share the inheritance of certain conditions, procedures and subjects and goals of composition… something I think of as bearing the responsibility of the inheritance.”

In light of this, we seek submissions that investigate both the historicity of the media we study as well as our own historical position and what it means to bear responsibility for our inheritances. What keeps us returning to and drawing from certain thinkers, certain traditions, certain films? How do we take up the inheritances of those we are indebted to? What is at stake when we make our inheritances explicit and thus bring ourselves into our work? What does it mean to be indebted to that which we want to disavow, but feel we cannot?

In the simplest terms, for this issue we seek work that takes every citation seriously. How does the act of looking backward help us to look forward?

Please submit completed essays between 5000-7000 words in length, including endnotes and citations as a Word document in Chicago style to theneutralcinemajournal@gmail.com with the subject line “Inheritance Submission” and with your name and affiliation included in the body of the email by July 19, 2024.

Synoptique is soliciting proposals for book reviews for our upcoming issue 11.1, which is a special issue with the topic “Teaching Media Archives.” We invite reviewers to propose reviews for both the themed and general review sections. If you are interested in writing a review for this issue, please contact book.reviews@synoptique.ca with a short proposal (maximum 250 words) outlining the title, author, and publication information for your proposed book as well as your qualifications for reviewing it.

We are particularly interested in receiving proposals for the following books:

• Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Stefanie Shulte Strathaus. Meson Press, 2023. Online.
• Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital, by Grazia Ingravalle. Amsterdam University Press, 2023. 240 pages.
• Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution, by Eleanor Patterson. University of Illinois Press, 2024. 208 pages.
• Le cinéma dans l’oeil du collectionneur, edited by André Habib, Louis Pelletier, and Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan. University of Montreal Press, 2023. 344 pages.
• The Documentary Filmmaker’s Intuition: Creating Ethical and Impactful Non-fiction Films, by Shannon Walsh. Routledge, 2023. 256 pages.
• Exploring Past Images in a Digital Age: Reinventing the Archive, edited by Nezih Erdogan and Ebru Kayaalp. Amsterdam University Press, 2023. 258 pages.
• How Film Histories Were Made: Materials, Methods, Discourses, edited by Malte Hagener and Yvonne Zimmermann. Amsterdam University Press, 2023. 530 pages.
• Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, edited by Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon. University of California Press, 2023. 374 pages.
• Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification, by Camille Blot-Wellens. Indiana University Press, 2022. 336 pages.
• Recollecting Lotte Eisner: Cinema, Exile, and the Archive, by Naomi DeCelles. University of California Press, 2022. 238 pages.
• Reel Change: A History of British Cinema from the Projection Box, by Richard Wallace and Jon Burrows. John Libbey Publishing, 2022. 256 pages.
• Sustainable Resilience in Women’s Film and Video Organizations, by Rosanna Maule. Routledge, 2023. 264 pages.
• Tales from the Vaults: Film Technology over the Years and across Continents, edited by Louis Pelletier and Rachael Stoeltje. International Federation of Film Archives, 2023. 342 pages.
• Teaching Through the Archives: Text, Collaborations, and Activism, edited by Tarez Samra Graban and Wendy Hayden. Southern Illinois University Press, 2022. 354 pages.

We will also consider proposals for other recent scholarly books related to the discipline of Film and Media Studies, so long as they have not been reviewed in a previous issue of Synoptique. Proposals are due no later than Friday, April 26 and should be sent to book.reviews@synoptique.ca.

We accept submissions in both English and French. Final reviews must conform to the specifications outlined in our Submission Guidelines.

Jared Aronoff and Thomas Gow
Co-Editors-in-Chief

Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies
www.synoptique.ca