International Conference on Landscape and Cinema

Dates: 3-5 December, 2018

Venue: School of Arts and Humanities | University of Lisbon

Deadline for submission of proposals: 15 July, 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS
Cinema portrays, creates and decodes landscape, while proceeding as its allegory. Echoing its spatial display of physical elements and confronting it with a soundscape, filmic landscape addresses subjectivity, culture, ideology and theory through the contemplation of what is frequently located at the background of the shot. The background’s autonomy, stated by the mise-en-scène, dispositif and the audience, allows for landscape to emerge, revealing it also as a rhetoric process that implies a self-reflexive gaze.
Moving-image practices also take in the minutiae of what would usually stand as the background in a narrative film as the subject matter for a reflection on history, materiality and situatedness. A film becomes the place where the actualization of the filmed material landscape happens and its connection to its outside and its multiple temporalities becomes evident. Landscape as already cinematic.
A centrifuge and fragmented image, filmic landscape renders atmosphere – Stimmung – and functions as a dramatization element, ‘a sort of polyptych, disseminated, repeated or altered according to a space-organising narrative necessity (Natali, 1996, p. 15). Ever vibrant in itself, ‘landscape is the freest element of film, the least burdened with servile, narrative tasks, and the most flexible in converging moods, emotional states, and spiritual experiences’ (Eisenstein, 1987, 217).
We invite proposals for individual visual works, individual papers and pre-constituted panels (3 speakers) on topics related to landscape and cinema, which may include but not be limited to:
· Landscape’s times and duration
· Backdrop, perspective, lines and points of fugue, light, shadow, color: landscape as visual matter
· Filmic Soundscapes
· Landscape in amateur cinema
· Landscape in avant-garde and experimentalism
· Culturally charged landscapes
· Political landscapes
· Psychological landscapes
· Characters in nature
· Ecocinema
· Colonialism and landscape
· Animism, ecology and relations in the landscape
· Industrialization of time and space

Confirmed keynote speakers:

JONATHAN RAYNER is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. His research interests include Australian Cinema, auteur studies, genre films and the interactions of landscapes and moving images. He is the author of The Films of Peter Weir (1998), Contemporary Australian Cinema (2000), The Naval War Film: Genre, History, National Cinema (2007) and The Cinema of Michael Mann (2013). He is the co-editor of Cinema and Landscape (2010), Film Landscapes (2013), Mapping Cinematic Norths (2016) and Filmurbia (2017).

EMANUELE COCCIA is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power. Among his publications: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (2005), La vie sensible (2010), Le bien dans les choses (2013), and La vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange (2016). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (2009).

The conference will present film works by Portuguese visual artist Sérgio Taborda and American iconic experimental filmmaker Larry Gottheim in Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema.
The time for presentations is limited to 20 minutes.
Proposals may be submitted in Portuguese or English.
To apply, please send a PDF document containing your name, institutional affiliation, email address, the proposed title of your visual work/paper/panel and an abstract (max 500 words) to comunicacao.cec@letras.ulisboa.pt by July 15, 2018.
We will inform applicants by August 5, 2018.

CONFERENCE FEES
Until October 1 After October 1
Students 30€ 40€
Non-students 60€ 80€

A CINEMA AND THE WORLD – STUDIES ON SPACE AND CINEMA EVENT.
ORGANIZERS
Elisabete Marques (Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa, UPorto); Filipa Rosário (CEC, ULisboa); Raquel Schefer (CEC, ULisboa); Ricardo Vieira Lisboa (Independent Researcher); Susana Mouzinho (IfilNova, UNL).