*CFP* "THE AUDIOVISUAL THINKING PROCESS IN CONTEMPORARY ESSAY FILMS", Nº 18 (SPRING 2022), COMPARATIVE CINEMA JOURNAL

Born out of modern cinema, the essay film departed from the dominant forms of fiction and documentary cinema in order to explore an unknown territory defined by subjectivity, hybridization and reflection, evolving to become “a form that thinks,” as Jean-Luc Godard defined it. The final decades of the 20th century witnessed the consolidation of the essay film, which was enabled by postmodern thought and culture, as well as by the development of video recording technology. In this mode, works by Chris Marker, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonas Mekas, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders, Guy Maddin, Peter Watkins, Chantal Akerman, Alexander Kluge or Johan van der Keuken, among many others, developed a practice of audiovisual thinking for which Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) could be considered the epitome, marking a turning point that also took place at the century’s end. Over the last twenty years, this essayistic practice has proliferated due to the digital revolution, facilitating diverse experiences of subjectivity and intimacy, and multiplying the possibilities of audiovisual editing; that is, of the very thinking process that defines this filmic form. Taking this itinerary into account, the 18th issue of Comparative Cinema proposes to address the specificities of the audiovisual thinking process in the contemporary essay film. The most notable studies devoted to the essay film have established its key traits – the audiovisual expression of the thinking process and the self-reflexiveness of subjectivity – and its specificities – issues related to its genealogy, historical path and bond with the literary essay – allowing for the consolidation of this research area. 

*CFP* "DECENTRING THE AVANT-GARDE: LANDSCAPE, TRAVEL AND THE GAZE IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO", SPECIAL ISSUE, VOL. 57, PAPERS ON LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

The special issue of Papers on Language and Literature (vol. 57) aims to highlight the work of filmmakers working on the margins of the avant-garde, including those using traditional (8 mm or 16 mm) and new (hybrid) media formats, and the ways they (re)address the questions of landscape, travel and the gaze. Although certain avant-garde films, including those made by Vertov, Bolotowsky, Kubelka, Winkler, Lehman, Welsby, Snow, Fischinger, Dutta, Rashidi, Takahiko, Frampton, Brakhage and others, have received some attention from researchers, there exists a number of underrepresented works, which use landscape and travelogue forms to challenge the hegemonic master narratives and undermine the image of majority groups and interests, continuously breaking the taboos and censorship of the mainstream (film) culture. Likewise, this issue will hopefully extend the use of some recent revisionist theories, which have moved beyond structuralist-formalist thinking to incorporate intermediality and heterogeneity (Branden), spectatorship and (gendered) body politics (Lambert-Beatty), corporeal turn in avant-garde film (Osterweil), expanded cinema practices (Sutton), materialism (Walley) or personal registers (Kase), to the study of landscape and travelogue films, many of which clearly de-center formalist strategies.

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, ISSUE 7, FOUND FOOTAGE MAGAZINE

Found Footage Magazine is a printed and double-blind peer reviewed film studies publication devoted to the reuse and repurposing of extant media in moving image art. FFM will select essays/articles that engage with scholar discourses from a wide range of found footage filmmaking theory and praxis.

Key words:

• Found Footage filmmaking
• Recycled Film
• Collage Film
• Archival Footage
• Compilation Film 
• Assemblage Films
• Recut movies
• AV Remix
• Mashup
• Supercut

*CFP* “ARCHIVES FOR EDUCATION. CREATIVE REUSE FOR STUDENT FILMAKERS”, BFI EDUCATION SYMPOSIUM

As cultural heritage organisations digitise their collections and increase public access, the creative reuse of moving image archive material remains problematic, beset by questions of copyright law, rights clearance and “fair dealing” exceptions. The Archives for Education project provides a new model for the creative reuse of archive film in higher education, giving student filmmakers access to 39 films from the BBC and the BFI National Archive for creative reuse on course-related projects for the first time. 55 institutions have signed up to the scheme, allowing student filmmakers to connect their vision of Britain today with archival representations from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

This one-day symposium, organised by Kingston School of Art and hosted by BFI Education, reflects on the first full academic year of the scheme andexplores the creative and learning opportunities creative reuse can offer to young filmmakers and how the scheme can be developed within and beyond higher education.

*CFP* “INTERACTIVE IMAGES AND NEW NARRATIVES”, SPECIAL ISSUE FOR THE REVUE FRANÇAISE DES MÉTHODES VISUELLES

Revue Française des Méthodes Visuelles, while acknowledging the preponderant role of photography and cinema in the evolution of research practices, remains open to other types of (audio)visual methods. And if researchers can claim to be from visual sociology or visual anthropology, they can also be from other disciplines, in an institutionalization of disciplines or sub-disciplines more or less asserted in this field (PINK, 2003). Since The Nuer (1940) by Edward EVANS-PRITCHARD and Balinese Character (1942) by Margaret MEAD and Gregory BATESON, the resulting photographic and then film production (Jean ROUCH among the precursors) is necessarily linked to aesthetics and the history of visual art in a complex and often ambiguous relationship. 

Documentary film, for example, is part of the history of cinema and the history of visual methods. It is logical that documentary film should be permeable to the introduction of digital technology and then to its almost-generalization, which goes much further than the abandonment of silver film by the creation of new formats that are more or less stable in their evolving aesthetics. Jacobo SUCARI, in a classification of contemporary documentary (2012), adds to the usual categories of "documentary of cinematic tradition" and "video documentary" four other categories that illustrate the tensions between film and video: 1) the documentary in a contemporary art process, 2) the expanded documentary, 3) the transmedia documentary and 4) the web documentary. The porousness between visual methods in social sciences and the art of documentary filmmaking inevitably leads to the implementation of methods inspired by this rapid upheaval of forms through digital technology. 

*CFP* "DECENTRING THE AVANT-GARDE: LANDSCAPE, TRAVEL AND THE(OTHER'S) GAZE IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO", SPECIAL ISSUE, PAPERS ON LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE JOURNAL

As experimental film practice is still the most prevalent in (yet not confined to) western Europe, North America and Britain, the special issue of Papers on Language and Literature aims to highlight the work of filmmakers working on the margins of the avant-garde, including those using traditional (8 mm or 16 mm) and new (hybrid) media formats, and the ways they (re)address the questions of landscape, travel and the other’s gaze. Although certain avant-garde films, including those made by Vertov, Bolotowsky, Kubelka, Winkler, Lehman, Welsby, Snow, Fischinger, Dutta, Rashidi, Takahiko, Frampton, Brakhage and others, have received some attention from researchers, there exists a number of underrepresented works, which use landscape and travelogue forms to challenge the hegemonic master narratives and undermine the image of majority groups and interests, continuously breaking the taboos and censorship of the mainstream (film) culture. Likewise, this special issue will hopefully extend the use of some recent revisionist theories, which have moved beyond structuralist-formalist thinking to incorporate intermediality and heterogeneity (Branden), spectatorship and (gendered) body politics (Lambert-Beatty), corporeal turn in avant-garde film (Osterweil), expanded cinema practices (Sutton), materialism (Walley) or personal registers (Kase), to the study of landscape and travelogue films, many of which clearly de-center formalist strategies.

*CFP* “HISTORIES OF MICROANALYSIS AT THE INTERSECTION OF FILM, SCIENCE AND ART”, 2020 CONFERENCE

Histories of Microanalysis at the Intersection of Film, Science And Art 

4-6 de Junio de 2020

Philipps University Marburg, Germany

The desire to study the motion of humans and other animals is deeply embedded in the technological, social and aesthetic histories of film. For a long time, the focus was on individual behavior and individual actors. This changed in the 1950s and 1960s when anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, sociologists and ethologists increasingly turned to film to analyze movement as an element in systems of social interaction. Informed by cybernetics, systems theory and structural linguistics, researchers such as Ray L. Birdwhistell, Gregory Bateson, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Adam Kendon looked for patterns in what they regarded as the continuous, multi-sensorial stream of interaction/communication behavior. Film and later video became important tools to tap into this stream, to stabilize it and facilitate close attention to minute details through repeated viewings of brief stretches of interaction. 

Bringing to consciousness “visible, yet unseen” phenomena that sometimes lasted for only fractions of a second, film promised to open a window onto the microtemporalities and processuality of social systems. But such analysis also reflected back on the (micro-)temporalities of film itself. This point was not lost on experimental filmmakers like Hollis Frampton, who drew on studies of movement interaction in his theoretical and aesthetic reflections on film. The field of interaction studies also overlapped with developments in contemporary dance and performance art, drawing choreographers like Irmgard Bartenieff and Forrestine Paulay into the circles of communication research, while also influencing aesthetic approaches to dance and performance.

*CFP* "(RE)FOCUS ON LANDSCAPE AND TRAVELOGUE FORMS IN AVANT-GARDE AND EXPERIMENTAL FILM", SPECIAL ISSUE, LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE JOURNAL

As evident in academic literature, the study of often marginalized avant-garde and experimental works, seen as a peripheral yet distinctive mode of film and art practice, is likely to facilitate contemporary film, visual arts and visual culture studies. Many post-war productions, including those directed by such artists and filmmakers as Vertov, Bolotowsky, Kubelka, Winkler, Lehman, Welsby, Snow, Fischinger, Dutta, Rashidi, Takahiko, Frampton, Brakhage and others, seem to have received little attention from researchers despite being successfully preserved by international centers dedicated to the conservation, study and exhibition of independent, experimental and avant-garde cinema. 

Moreover, both landscape and travelogue forms, although central for the history and aesthetics of many national literatures, art movements and cinemas, remain another underexposed aspect of 20th century experimental film imagery, which should be investigated in terms of periodization, production and meaning-making processes pertaining to the artist’s construction and rendering of the surrounding reality. Hence, given the paucity of material offering a number of in-depth scholarly analyses of works of individual artists, it seems that there is a growing need for publications in the field other than wide-ranging anthologies and interview books.

*CFP* "HYBRID MEDIA FORMS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, FILM, AND VISUAL CULTURE", PASE 2019 SEMINAR

Hybrid media forms in American literature, film, and visual culture 

PASE 2019 seminar

With the proliferation and synergy of new visual technologies, critics have long anticipated the demise of the traditional media. Some have even mourned the impending death of literature (Kernan), cinema (Cheshire) and serious art (Krauss), proclaiming the emergence of post-media aesthetics (Manovich) marked by media convergence (Jenkins) and diachronic and synchronic hybridization (Kim). Indeed, the transition from the analogue to the digital has resulted in an ongoing re-evaluation, re-contextualization, and re-mobilization of the current media practices. Whether they celebrate or counteract the “abandonment of the specific medium” and its “aesthetic meaninglessness” (Krauss, Perpetual xiii), theorists call for the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the medium in the post-media conditions in order to continuously challenge and re-locate its standardized apparatus, parameters, and ontological features.

*CFP* CALL FOR PAPERS SPECIAL ISSUE VOL.6 FOUND FOOTAGE MAGAZINE

Found Footage Magazine is a printed and double-blind peer reviewed film studies publication. FFM offers theorical, analytical and informative content related to the use of the archive and extant images in found footage cinema. Found footage filmmaking has became the most pervasive tendency in avant-garde film during the last decades. Found Footage Magazine’s goal is to endorse these practices and promote a lively dialogue about the use of the archive in documentary film and experimental cinema. 

FFM will select essays/articles that engage with scholar discourses from a wide range of found footage filmmaking theory and praxis.

*CFP* "AVANT-GARDE AND POPULAR FORMS BETWEEN MUSIC AND VISUAL MEDIA", SPECIAL ISSUE Nº 33, CINÉMA&CIE INTERNATIONAL FILM STUDIES JOURNAL

In 1987, Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s "Art into Pop" questioned the rise of British Post-War popular music within the context of art schools, employing cross-terms such as “rock bohemians” and “pop situationists”. The authors focused on the 1970s and the aftermath of punk, finding a close relation between popular music forms and art forms in the contexts of several British cities as well as in New York City. More recently, Simon Reynolds traced the genealogy of an “artistic bias” in popular music back to the post-punk period of the late 1970s, when “art ideas affected actual musical practices” (2009: 365) due to the influence of not musically trained artists coming from the NYC experimental scene such as Yoko Ono and Brian Eno.

So far, scholarly investigations on the intersections between popular music and culture and avant-garde arts have been mostly limited to the social cultural milieu of only two decades (1960s/1970s) and two countries (U.S.A./U.K.). Essay such as Bernard Gendron’s "Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club" (2002) and Sytze Seenstra’s "We are the noise between the stations" (2003) constitute two notable exceptions through their reframing of the American punk scene and of David Byrne’s work through a diachronical comparison with French modernism and conceptual romanticism, respectively. They do not only reassess the collapse of hierarchical distinction between the social function played by high arts and mass culture with the advent of late modernity/postmodernity, but also take into serious consideration the relationships between different media domains.

*CFP* ISSUE 5 FOUND FOOTAGE MAGAZINE

Call for submissions for issue#5 is open.

Found Footage Magazine is a printed and double-blind peer reviewed film studies publication. FFM offers theorical, analytical and informative content related to the use of the archive and extant images in found footage cinema. Found footage filmmaking has became the most pervasive tendency in avant-garde film during the last decades. Found Footage Magazine’s goal is to endorse these practices and promote a lively dialogue about the use of the archive in documentary film and experimental cinema.

For each issue, Found Footage Magazine will select essays/articles that engage with scholar discourses from a wide range of found footage filmmaking theory and praxis.

*CFP* CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS, "ESSAY FILM AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES: SCREEN-WRITTING NON FICTION"

"Essay Film and Narrative Techniques: Screen-Writing Non-fiction", edited by Romana Turina, University of York, and Kiki Tianqi Yu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Essay film has increasingly become an inclusive notion, usually emphasising the subjective expression of the filmmaker, through various forms of narrative techniques, often merging the fiction with nonfiction. With the growing attention on essay films in film festival circuits and academic world, however, little research has been done on the phase of the film’s development, when what we call essay films are going through the ‘screen-writing’ process, a stage when various forms of image collecting, script (re)writing and film (re)editing are involved, contributing the presentation of the final film. In addition, essayistic non-fiction scripts and the documentation of editing procedures rarely make it into the archives, as the presence of very minor collections testifies.