Cinephile 16.1 — Constant/Change

The past year has been a time of unprecedented change, but it has also led to important engagements with some long-standing ideological lived material practices. The film industry is no exception to these considerations, as media production, consumption, and criticism are constantly redefined by the evolving political, economic, social, industrial, and technological contexts in which they inhere. Some key historical shifts include, but are evidently not limited to, the advent of sound, colourized film, censorship, the Red Scare, feminist and civil rights movements, television, the multiplex, and the rise of the Internet. Some very recent radical changes include the COVID-19 pandemic and its temporary worldwide disruption of film production, distribution, and exhibition (as well as some of the unique opportunities that the pandemic presented to many independent producers and artists); global movements for social justice, which have uniquely highlighted the relationship between film production and the communities with which filmmakers engage; the meteoric rise of streaming services and social media platforms; global pop culture powers like South Korea, Japan, and Mexico increasingly influencing mainstream Western culture; and the unique existential threat of climate change, which will impact the creation of media in ways yet to be seen. With a focus on change, this issue of Cinephile hopes to interrogate the link between social and industrial development.

However, while it is tempting to focus exclusively on these crucial changes and shifts, film and media practices are also shaped by myriad long-standing ‘constants’ that inform their artistic, technological, and industrial components. These include studio systems, the ‘standardization’ of film form and language, the stylistic supremacy of Hollywood classical style, ongoing formal challenges posed by global New Wave cinemas, the technological obsession with creating ever-more faithful and perfect replications of reality, mainstream cinema’s elision of marginalized communities and experiences, and even the persistence of the the medium itself, despite innumerable predictions forecasting the ‘death of cinema’. While the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a major disruption to media production and distribution, the ensuing lockdown and social distancing measures also created a unique sort of stasis wherein many groups found themselves unsure of how to proceed on both the practical and philosophical levels of filmmaking. The Wall Street Journal reported that worldwide online video streaming subscriptions reached 1.1 billion while movie theatre revenues dropped by $30 billion, revealing how the pandemic exacerbated a pre-existing tension between the two exhibition models. The tension between theatrical and online exhibition practices functions not only on the level of varying economic concerns between studios and artists, but also fundamentally impacts the nature of cinema as a shared experience. 

This issue of Cinephile welcomes submissions that consider how new technologies, practices, and social, political, and economic contexts inform media production, scholarship, and consumption – as well as works that can account for the aforementioned and other constants in media practices. Our aim is to account for longstanding constants in a medium so heavily defined by key changes and innovations, while simultaneously exploring how these seemingly fixed constants shift and evolve as they absorb new changes.

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• The influence of technological development on film form
• Changing approaches to race, gender, sexuality, and disability in film production and scholarship
• Encounters between classical and experimental cinematic forms
• The stability of classical and experimental forms across various eras of film history 
• The impact of COVID-19 on film production, including production stoppages, new safety protocols, and “pandemic productions”
• Non-theatrical distribution models including streaming services and pay-per-view releases. 
• The evolution of home entertainment 
• Globalization and media
• The proliferation of short, online video content via TikTok, Quibi, Snapchat, etc
• Film production and climate change

We encourage submissions from graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and established scholars. Papers should be between 2,000-3,500 words, follow MLA guidelines, and include a detailed works cited page, as well as a short biography of the author. Submissions should be directed toward SUBMISSIONS@CINEPHILE.CA and general inquiries toward INFO@CINEPHILE.CA.

Submissions are due by October 23rd, 2021.

ReVisions: Speculating in Literature and Film in Canada (essay collection)

Edited by Wendy Roy, University of Saskatchewan

During a global pandemic, the ways that speculative fiction, film, and television comment on the present as well as the future have become acutely evident. These genres ask readers to consider environmental, health, technological, and political events and developments in the world today, and the impacts these may have on the world of the future. They are often used by their creators to represent and speculate on key societal issues, such as relations of class, gender, and race, as well as issues of health safety, environmental destruction, and political conflict. In Canada, speculative writing has become a tool to interrogate colonial systems and histories, and to open up spaces for members of often marginalized groups, including women, Indigenous peoples, members of LGBTQ2S+ communities, and others whose lives are inflected by cultural difference. A variety of speculative worlds have achieved popularity through films and television/internet series, some of which are adapted from other genres. 

We invite submission of academic papers and creative works that explore or put into practice the re-envisioning/revision of futures and societies in or relating to Canada. What do speculative texts tell us? Which visions of “Canada” do we find in speculative texts? How do these visions reflect our own perceptions of the world? Does this kind of literary and/or visual imagination offer space for grief, resilience, and hope? Does it help us respond constructively to crises or achieve social change?  

Contributions can take a range of approaches related to speculative writing in Canada, including:  

• Speculations on global pandemics and other health crises
• Indigenous and decolonizing speculations
• Environmental and/or technological changes and developments in speculative writing
• Speculations on language and power
• Gender and sexuality in speculative writing
• Disability in speculative writing
• Geographical speculations in the real or virtual world
• Speculative writing for children
• Speculative poetry
• Speculation and interdisciplinarity
• Dystopian, utopian, and anti-utopian worlds
• Apocalyptic scenarios and post-apocalyptic futures
• Speculations on the screen: movies, documentaries, television and internet series, video games
• Speculative adaptations
• Speculative creations, including short works of speculative fiction or poetry

Submissions should be original and previously unpublished, and should include the following:

1. A maximum 8,000-word essay or creative work, double-spaced. (Note that expanded and revised versions of presentations at the 20/21 Vision: Speculating in Literature and Film in Canada conference in August 2021 may be part of the collection.)
2. Academic essays should be 6,000-8,000 words, in MLA Handbook 9^th edition style, with the word-count including endnotes and works cited.
3. Your name, contact information (including mailing address, email address, and telephone number), and institutional or other affiliation.
4. A 50-word biographical statement. 

Please e-mail your proposal in a Word document to Wendy Roy of the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan, 2021vision@usask.ca, by February 1, 2022. Contact Dr. Roy if you have questions.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The term posthumanism has, throughout its relatively short lifespan, swelled to encompass any number of definitions and permutations, ranging from a descriptor for a technological afterlife of the “human” to a critical look at ways of being within a wider ecology. The immediate quandary that any scholar of the posthuman faces is the wrangling of a proper definition for such an expansive yet timely topic. It is precisely this ambiguity that we hope to engage with in this issue of Synoptique, as the amorphous idea of the posthuman offers us the chance to re-examine the “human.”

Traditionally, posthumanism has remained “committed to a specific order of rationality, one rooted in the epistemological locus of the West” (Jackson 2013, 671). By building upon such legacies of radical perspectives that decentre traditional Western humanist paradigms, such as deanthropocentrism, decoloniality, feminist, and Queer lenses, we aim to place posthumanism in conversation with film and media studies, with the goal of highlighting the historically marginalized perspectives central to this intersection. We believe that film and other new media are uniquely situated to address these sets of questions due to the breadth of disciplines they intersect with, as well as their positions between the technological and the cultural. We invite submissions to consider how different forms of media may challenge, transform, and transcend traditional paradigms of the posthuman; we especially invite submissions of alternative media such as video essays, zines, or other art pieces.

In the midst of a pandemic that has both exacerbated our differences and underscored our interconnectedness – particularly through widespread digital platforms – we might ask how the posthuman may act as a remapping of humanity away from Eurocentric individualism and onto one woven through with networks of relationality first expressed by marginalized communities. This issue of Synoptique looks to re-evaluate the notion of “moving beyond” the “human,” identifying the limitations of the posthuman movement in critical academic discourse – what we are moving away from, who is permitted to be seen as posthuman, what a posthuman world may entail – as well as reframing and renegotiating the normative, hierarchical configurations of the “human” that we wish to transcend (Muñoz 2015).

Drawing on recent work by scholars such as Kathryn Yusoff, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, this issue centres marginalized perspectives and stewardship, and departs from Western notions of linear time, uninhibited technological advancement, and individualism. In countering these traditions, we can instead expand upon the posthuman as it pertains to: postcolonial visions and our different places within those futures, technological futures and bodily enhancements, communal networks and infrastructures, ontological reconfigurations of the “human,” and temporal disruptions as decolonial knowledge production, among a vast array of other research areas. In mapping these points of tension, we hope to examine the renewed posthumanist perspectives and pathways forged by their interaction and intersection, which can be seen in works such as Asinnajaq’s “Three Thousand” and her reading of Inuit futurism, as well as Janelle Monáe’s ‘emotion picture’ “Dirty Computer,” which interrogates and queers the idea of cyborg. Through a multiplicity of such approaches including historical surveys, textual analyses, and more, we want to reassess film and media’s place in this conversation in conjunction with new ideas of what posthumanism can do, and it is our hope that you will explore these possibilities alongside us.

We are inviting submissions from scholars of all disciplines to submit works that interrogate the intersection between posthumanism and film and media, and that centre critical lenses including, but not limited to, the following:

·         Critical race and/or postcolonial theory

·         Afro and/or Indigenous futurisms

·         Queer studies

·         Trans studies

·         Feminist and gender studies

·         Disability studies

We ask how classic sites of interrogation for posthumanist discourse, such as the cyborg and the (post-)apocalyptic, might be re-examined in a new light through these richly vibrant and still under-explored critical formulations. Essays submitted for peer review should be approximately 5,500 – 7,500 words and must conform to the Chicago author-date style (17th ed.). Video essays submitted for peer review are also accepted. All images must be accompanied by photo credits and captions.

We also warmly invite submissions to the review section, including conference or exhibition reports, book reviews, film festival reports, thought pieces and interviews related to the aforementioned topics. All non-peer reviewed articles should be a maximum of 2,500 words and include a bibliography following Chicago author-date style (17th ed.).

Creative works and interventions in the forms of digital video, still imagery, creative writing, and other multimedia forms are also welcome. These works will be embedded on the Synoptique website, and/or otherwise linked to in the PDF version of the journal. Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions regarding your submission ideas for the non-peer reviewed section.

All submissions may be written in either French or English.

Please submit completed essays or works to the journal editors (editor@synoptique.ca) and the issue guest editors Brianna Setaro (brisetaro@gmail.com), Jess Stewart-Lee (Jess.stewart-lee@mail.concordia.ca), and Marielle Coleman (marielle.coleman@mail.mcgill.ca) by October 4, 2021.

APPEL À CONTRIBUTIONS:

Aux frontières du post-humanisme : De nouvelles représentations
de l’être humain dans les nouveaux médias et au cinéma

À travers sa vie courte mais riche en recherche, le terme post-humanisme a su se développer pour englober un grand nombre de définitions et de permutations, allant d’une conception de « l’être humain » dans un futur défini par la technologie à un regard critique sur les manières d’être au sein d’une écologie plus large. Le dilemme immédiat auquel chaque chercheur.e.s fait face en étudiant le post-humanisme est qu’il est difficile d’établir une définition exacte de ce sujet aussi vaste que d’actualité. C’est précisément cette ambiguïté que nous espérons aborder dans notre numéro de Synoptique ; puisque l’identité du post-humain reste floue, nous pouvons nous interroger sur les multiples définitions de « l’être humain ».

Traditionnellement, le post-humanisme est resté « committed to a specific order of rationality, one rooted in the epistemological locus of the West » (Jackson 2013, 671). En s’appuyant sur l’héritage offert par ce type de perspective radicale, qui a pour objectif de décentrer l’humanisme occidental traditionnel, il devient possible de mettre en avant les théories avancées dans le domaine des études décoloniales, féministes et queer. Cela nous permet de faire entrer le post-humanisme en conversation avec les études cinématographiques et médiatiques, dans le but d’éclairer les multiples perspectives historiquement marginalisées dans cette discussion. Nous pensons que le cinéma et les nouveaux médias sont particulièrement bien placés pour répondre à ces problématiques, en raison de l’étendue des disciplines avec lesquelles ils interagissent, ainsi que leur position entre le technologique et le culturel. Nous invitons les autreur.ice.s souhaiteraient répondre à cet énoncé à examiner comment différentes formes de médias peuvent remettre en question, transformer et surpasser les formulations traditionnelles du post-humanisme. Nous invitons également les contributions à prendre des formes alternatives, telle que des essais vidéo, des magazines ou d’autres œuvres d’art.

En sachant que cette pandémie a à la fois exacerbé nos différences et souligné notre interconnectivité – notamment par le biais de plateformes numériques généralisées – nous pouvons nous demander comment le post-humanisme peut être redessiné pour promouvoir une idée de l’humanité loin de l’individualisme eurocentrique. De plus, comment pouvons-nous baser cette nouvelle conception sur des réseaux de relations tissés par les communautés marginalisées ? Ce numéro de Synoptique cherche à réévaluer la notion de « dépassement » de « l’être humain », identifier les limites du mouvement dans le discours académique critique – ce dont nous nous éloignons, qui ou quoi peut être considéré comme post-humain, ce qu’un monde posthumain pourrait impliquer – ainsi que le recadrage et la renégociation des normes hiérarchiques de la définition de « l’être humain » que nous souhaitons transcender (Muñoz 2015).

En s’inspirant du travail des chercheur.e.s tels que Kathryn Yusoff, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, et Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, cette publication se centre sur les perspectives offertes par une directive marginalisée, et s’écarte des conceptions occidentales du temps linéaire, du progrès technologique démesuré et des phénomènes d’individualisme et d’anthropocentrisme. En allant à l’encontre de ces traditions académiques, nous pouvons nuancer le terme de post-humanisme pour qu’il comprenne des sujets variés tels que les visions postcoloniales, les modifications corporelles liées à la technologie, les réseaux et infrastructures communes, les multiples reconfigurations de « l’être humain » ; ainsi que de créer du savoir décolonialisé en renouvelant certaines conceptions partiales du temps. Nous espérons examiner les points de tension qui émergent à l’intersection de toutes ces idées, permettant ainsi une exploration d’une vision du post-humanisme renouvelée. Ces points d’intersection sont particulièrement visibles dans des œuvres telles que « Trois mille » d’Asinnajaq et son interprétation d’un futurisme inuit, ainsi que le film « Dirty Computer » de Janelle Monáe, qui interroge et bouleverse l’idée du cyborg. En se basant sur une variété de méthodologies, y compris enquêtes historiques et analyses textuelles, nous souhaitons réévaluer la place du cinéma et des médias dans cette conversation tout en considérant le rôle du post-humanisme. Nous espérons que vous explorerez ces possibilités à nos côtés.

Nous invitons les contributions de chercheur.e.s de toutes disciplines à nous faire parvenir leurs travaux interrogeant l’intersection du post-humanisme avec le cinéma et les médias, et centré sur des aspects critiques tels que :

·         Les études postcoloniales

·         Les futurismes afro et autochtones

·         Les théories queer

·         Les études sur la trans-identité

·         Les études féministes et de genre

·         Les études sur le handicap

Nous souhaitons explorer comment les sites traditionnels d’interrogation du discours post-humaniste, tels que le cyborg et le (post-)apocalyptique, pourraient être réexaminés à travers des formulations critiques et décolonialisées. Les contributions pour la section avec comité de lecture devraient faire environ 5 500-7 500 mots et doivent suivre les directives du style auteur-date de Chicago (17e éd.). Les essais vidéo pour la section avec comité de lecture seront également acceptés. Toutes les images doivent être accompagnées de leur source et d’une légende.

Nous invitons également les contributions comprenant des critiques de conférences, d’expositions, de festivals de films, de livres ainsi que des entretiens et réflexions liés aux sujets mentionnés. Les articles sans comité de lecture doivent comporter un maximum de 2 500 mots et inclure une bibliographie suivant le style auteur-date de Chicago (17e éd.).

Enfin, les œuvres et interventions créatives sous forme de vidéo numérique, d’images, d’écriture créative et d’autres formes multimédias sont également les bienvenues. Ces œuvres seront intégrées sur le site web de Synoptique, et/ou liées à la version PDF de la revue. N’hésitez pas à nous contacter si vous avez des questions concernant vos idées de soumission pour la section sans comité de lecture.

Toutes les contributions peuvent être rédigées en français ou en anglais.

Veuillez soumettre vos essais ou vos travaux terminés aux éditeurs de la revue (editor@synoptique.ca) et aux rédacteurs invités du numéro Brianna Setaro (brisetaro@gmail.com), Jess Stewart-Lee (Jess.stewart-lee@mail.concordia.ca), et Marielle Coleman (marielle.coleman@mail.mcgill.ca) avant le 4 octobre 2021.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The ‘little apparatus’: 100 years of 9.5mm film

16, 17, 18 June 2022

University of Southampton

An international conference hosted in person and online by the Department of Film Studies’  ‘Centre For International Film Research’ at the University of Southampton.

December 1922 will mark the centenary of the introduction of 9.5mm film to the French cinematographic market.  Pathé Freres first launched their ‘Pathé Baby’ home cinema system on domestic territory in time for the Christmas season, with the promise of a soon to follow lightweight and modestly priced cine-camera using the same narrow gauge, that could fit in a vest pocket (1923, pp. 48–50). In time, the new gauge became available elsewhere -arriving just ahead of Kodak’s 16mm film/cinema system and together signalling the first major boom in amateur filmmaking.

This event aims to reflect on the diverse use of 9.5mm film throughout its 100 year history and create space for scholars, archivists and curators to explore and share new research in the field while opening up new avenues for inquiry.

Hosted by the University of Southampton this international conference will accommodate a dual approach – in-person and online for contributions exploring/considering the global reach of 9.5mm film culture. International speakers are encouraged and our proposed format will allow for virtual attendance via live streamed sessions or recorded content.

The conference organisers are delighted to confirm keynote addresses by Dr Ryan Shand (Ravensbourne University London) and Dr Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes (University of Cambridge).

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers and for 1hr 30min conference panels, from scholars, archivists, and curators around the world at any stage in their academic careers. We are especially interested in interdisciplinary submissions and encourage papers and contributions across the wide use and application of 9.5mm film in the last 100 years.

We would also like to invite regional, national and international archives to present curated packages of film as well as presentations on 9.5mm collections and filmmakers within their holdings. The organisers welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• 9.5mm as an amateur gauge
• Professional/Avant Garde/artists’ filmmaking using 9.5mm
• ‘Cult’ 9.5
• 9.5mm and the democratisation of filmmaking
• 9.5mm and challenges of representation and diversity in amateur film collections
• The archival challenge/digitisation agendas/funding/historiography
• Curating amateur film gauges, especially 9.5mm
• 9.5mm and global experience of amateur technologies
• 9.5mm and ‘The Cinema In Your Home’
• 9.5mm and colour film

Abstracts of maximum 250 words and bios of maximum 75 words should be submitted via the Google Form on the conference website (Conference Website) by 17:00 (GMT) on 17 October 2021, with decisions expected in early December 2021.

Submissions must include the presenters’ full name, institutional affiliations and the preferred method of attendance (in person or online). 

Conference Website

Conference date: 16, 17, 18 June 2022

Deadline for proposals: 17 October 2021

Please submit proposals via the Google Form on the conference websiteConference Website  

If you have any questions please do get in touch by email: 100yearsof9.5mm@gmail.com

References

Anonymous (1923) ‘Cinematography’, The British Journal of Photography, 70(3273), pp. 48–50.

‘the little apparatus’  Clerc, L. P. (1924) ‘New Apparatus’, The British Journal of Photography, 71(3325), pp. 52–53.

Image credit: Illustration from the cover of ‘Instructions on using The Baby Cine Camera’ 1925