June 25-27, 2020
Goethe University Frankfurt (Campus Westend)
Organized by the Graduate Research Training Program 2279 “Configurations
of Film”
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
During a hospital stay in the US, French anthropologist Marcel Mauss
became fascinated with the nurses’ gait, which reminded him of the peculiar way
of walking by Hollywood movie stars. Back on his feet and back in Paris, Mauss
noticed the same gait among Parisian women: “In fact, American walking fashions
had begun to arrive [in France], thanks to the movies.”
However problematically
gendered it now appears, Mauss’s observation, which he made in connection with
his study Techniques of the Body (1934), alerts us to an important mode of
knowledge circulation that we define as “tacit cinematic knowledge”: implicit,
informal, and uncodified knowledge acquired in, with, and through film and
cinema that informs cultural and social practice outside the cinematic
dispositif. Drawing on Michael Polanyi’s concept of “tacit knowledge,” the
notion of “tacit cinematic knowledge” allows us to theorize how tacit epistemic
templates that use cinematic forms and techniques configure and enable daily
activities, social interactions, warfare, education, and working procedures.
The theorization of “tacit cinematic knowledge” also has a historical
dimension. Cinematic techniques have been common in many fields of cultural
practice since the development of moving image technologies, and configurations
of film have continuously appeared in unexpected locations and unsuspected
forms, formats, usages, and temporalities beyond the cinema. In the late 1930s,
Eisenstein described architecture in terms of a “montage sequence ... subtly
composed, shot by shot” by his legs as he walked among the buildings of the
Acropolis. In the early 1940s, war reporter and novelist Vasily Grossman wrote
about the experience of battle, stating that he was “forever feeling as if I am
on the cinema screen, not just watching it.” Today, airports, data centers,
weather stations, laboratories of aerodynamics and fluid mechanics,
corporations, military bases, schools are just a few examples of sites where
cinematic knowledge routinely supports and shapes different sorts of
procedures, social and object interactions. From software for the visual design
of industrial products to games for military training, from surveillance
cameras to telepresence robots that facilitate multinational corporate
meetings, from videos that guide the bodily movements of people learning a new
recipe on the Internet to self-tracking devices that allow for performance
control, film technologies have become ubiquitous. In other words, in order to
understand the present state of tacit cinematic knowledge, we also need to
understand how film entered into a variety of realms of practices, which are at
first sight unrelated to film in its cinematic context.
The international conference “Histories of Tacit Cinematic Knowledge”
invites scholars to further theorize and historicize “tacit cinematic
knowledge” in its different configurations. Specific questions to be addressed
include: What is the unnoticed part of cinematic knowledge in the production of
scientific evidence? How do techniques and templates from film affect
architectural design, musical composition, or sports performance? How do modes
of circulation and formats of film reshape human and non-human interactions and
what types of political action do they inconspicuously give rise to? How does
“tacit cinematic knowledge” create inequalities through processes of
colonizing, and of gendering societies, or what is the potential of “tacit
cinematic knowledge” in opposing institutional discrimination? What impact do configurations
of film beyond the cinema have on economies of production, distribution, and
consumption? How do film-based technologies inform policies of security and
regulate the circulation of people? How do filmic procedures generate affect
and emotions in areas that apparently have nothing to do with film?
We welcome contributions from all scientific fields, including
sociology, anthropology, architecture, literature, musicology, educational
sciences, neurosciences, engineering and technology studies, theatre, film and
media studies. We are especially interested in papers that engage with the
following topics:
Tacit Cinematic Knowledge and:
- Visual Literacy, Data Visualization, Didactics
- Architecture, Networks, Infrastructures
- Body, Embodiment, Performativity
- Sounds, Soundtracks, Film Scoring Practices
- Sensors, Screens, Secrecy, and Surveillance
- Industrial Complex, Corporate Culture, Institutional Practices
- Race, Gender, Labor, Sexuality
- Amateur Media, Participatory Culture, Media Convergence
- Globalization, Transnationalism, Nationalism
Please send 250–300 word abstracts and a brief biographical note to
2020tacit@gmail.com by January 15, 2020. Applicants will be notified of
acceptance by February 15, 2020.
The conference organizers have set aside funds for travel grants for
graduate students and precariously employed (part time on limited contract) or
currently unemployed scholars. Further information about the application
process for travel grants will be sent out with the acceptance notifications.
Information about the event will be available at the website.
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