October 25-26, 2019
Romania
Continuing our series of conferences dedicated to rethinking
intermediality in contemporary cinema and visual culture, we propose to
initiate a discussion around aspects of intermediality that may unfold from the
perspective of the picturesque.
The much-debated notion inherited from the art theories of the late 18th
century originally denoted both an aesthetic quality (something pleasing to the
eye situated between the serenely beautiful and the awe-inspiring sublime) and
a particular visual impression (something that looks like a picture in nature).
It anticipated and later became deeply entangled with many of the ideas of
Romanticism, of modernity and postmodernity by shifting the appeal of images
from knowledge to imagination, sensation and mood, by applying the frame of art
to life, or the frame of one art to another, and emphasising the abstract
aesthetic value of a kind of pictured vision. Photography appropriated it as a
strategy of so-called pictorialism and popular culture perpetuated it in
various forms of spectacularization from the early dioramas and panoramas to
today’s ubiquitous digital screens through which we continually reframe our
lives in picturesque images.
The picturesque emerges therefore not only as a transversal concept in
art history or visual culture, but also essentially connected to issues of
intermediality and in-betweenness that we would like to bring into focus. In a
“beautifully circular” dynamics (Rosalind Krauss), in a “conjunction of nature,
picture, eye” (Geoffrey Batchen) a given moment of the perceptual array is
connected to recognizable patterns in a picture which always reveals the form
of one medium perceived in another (e.g. painterly tableaux in photography,
film, installation art, photographic frames in film, photos that look like film
stills, etc.). As such, the picturesque directs our attention to the sensuous
aspects of intermediality and their relevance in our so-called postmedia age,
when the “photographic”, “the cinematic” or the “painterly” can be seamlessly merged
through digital technologies.
We would also like to address the controversial aesthetics of the
intermedial picturesque that foregrounds instead of a sublime
Gesamtkunstwerk-like effect the sheer visual pleasure of imageness, and to
highlight its range in this respect from the decorative and the playful to the
contemplative. Keeping in mind the potentially “troublesome” aspects of
“pretty” images (Rosalind Galt), we encourage proposals to consider their
“politics” as well, which can either align with what John Ruskin described as
the “heartlessness of the picturesque” (i.e. delighting in images of ruin and
decay), or can imply a reflexive acknowledgement of their underlying tensions
between art and life (by engaging Raymond Bellour’s and Laura Mulvey’s “pensive
spectator”).
Accordingly, we invite proposals to explore the variety of intermedial
strategies that generate visual pleasures associated with the picturesque in a
broad sense, and to uncover their intricate relations of in-betweenness.
We suggest the following topics (but welcome any relevant approach to
the issues outlined in the CFP):
- Cinema and the picturesque across time and media: the history and poetics of the picturesque in film
- The tableau vivant as a visual attraction between high art and popular culture, and in-between painting, photography, sculpture, theatre and film
- Synaesthetic pleasures: picturesque impressions in conjunction with tactility, soundscape and music
- Picturesque landscapes in slow cinema, slow TV and experimental films
- Media reflexivity and the picturesque in contemporary documentary and essay films
- Moving image installations and the immersiveness of picturesque images
- The picturesque world and the ruins of civilization: nature versus culture in images of the anthropocene
- Painterly images and remediations in heritage films and bio-pics
- Gender and postcolonial perspectives of the picturesque intersecting with intermediality
- The picturesque in-between the analogue and the digital, the natural and the artificial
- Theorising what “looks like a picture” today
- The intermedial visual pleasures of VR
- The picturesque and the spectacular in video games
Submission of proposals:
We invite proposals both for individual papers and for pre-constituted
panels. Panels may consist of 3 speakers.
Deadline for the submission of proposals: July 15, 2019.
Please fill in one of the submission forms:
The official language of the conference is English. The time for
presentations is limited to maximum 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute debate.
Conference fee (which includes participation, conference buffet and
banquet): 120 EUR, special fee for participants from post-communist/communist
countries: 70 EUR.
A selection of papers based on the conference presentations will be
published in our department’s international, peer reviewed journal (Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Film & Media Studies) indexed in several
international databases.
You can contact the organizers at this e-mail address:
2019.picturesque@gmail.com
For further information and updates see the official website.
Contact Info:
Conference convenor: ÁGNES PETHŐ, Professor of Film Studies, Head of
Department
Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Executive editor: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film & Media Studies
PI of the research project: Rethinking Intermediality in Contemporary Cinema: Changing Forms of In-Betweenness
Contact Email: 2019.picturesque@gmail.com
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