CFP: Cinephilia/Cinephobia: New Mediations of Desire and Disgust

From: "Javier O'Neil-Ortiz" <[email protected]>

Call for Papers | Extended Deadline: July 1, 2012

Cinephilia/Cinephobia: New Mediations of Desire and Disgust
University of Pittsburgh, November 9-11, 2012
Hosted by the Film Studies Graduate Student Organization (FSGSO)

Keynote by Christian Keathley, Professor of Film and Media Culture at
Middlebury College. Keathley is author of Cinephilia and History, or The
Wind in the Trees (Indiana University Press, 2006), and currently at work
on a book titled The Mystery of Otto Preminger, under contract with IU
Press.

Over the last decade, academic and popular film institutions have reignited
debates surrounding cinephilia and its discontents. Recent pieces in Cinema
Journal, Film Comment, as well as essay collections (2005's Cinephilia:
Movies, Love, and Memory) and monographs (Jonathan Rosenbaum's 2010 Goodbye
Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition), in modes both
nostalgic and speculative, are (re)considering cinephilia not simply as
love of the moving image, but as heterogeneous desires for cinema’s
fragments, peculiarities, materialities, and affects. In other words, we
can be certain that cinephilic (and cinephobic) attitudes and practices are
quite alive today – but for whom, in what forms, and to what ends?

Attending these critical conversations are ever-encroaching “aversions”
toward cinema, including institutional prohibitions, censorship against
filming and exhibition, modes of media refusal, and institutional
objections to the moving image’s dissemination and preservation. If
cinephilia has long raised tensions between academic and popular critical
voices, between preservation and fetishism, and between film appreciation
and critique, how are these tensions recovered or recast in contemporary
film and media studies – particularly in light of digital media, new
categories and avenues of “criticism,” and media studies’ present
investment in affective response? Susan Sontag famously expressed the joy
of cinematic immersion as a “kidnapping” that requires the physical
experience of a darkened theater; how, then, does cinephobia stand to
transform a desire for cinematic experience into a revolt against the
powers of the cinematic apparatus and its affective control?

Following Marijke de Valck’s assertion that cinephilia endures “precisely
because it forms a bridge between the biographical and the theoretical, the
singular and the general, the fragment and the whole, the incomplete and
the complete, and the individual and the collective,” our conference
invites presentations that consider the enduring importance of cinephilia
and cinephobia to film and media studies: both how these ideas have shaped
and articulated our complex relations to moving images, and how they
continue to raise new questions for our field.

Possible topics may include:

* Cinephilia/phobia through digital media (mash-ups and remixes; GIFs;
Twitter, Tumblr, and online community)
* Cinephilic/phobic expressions in TV and other visual media (art,
installation, fashion)
* Cinephilia/phobia and video games
* Desire, disgust, and pornography
* Cinephilic/phobic expressions in “non-visual” fields (literature, music,
philosophy)
* Queer spectatorship, historiography, and affect
* Transnational and subcultural cinephilias/phobias
* Affective modes of spectatorship, “fan” practices and fictions
* Obsession with and/or distrust of medium and site specificity (VHS, Super
16mm, theaters and exhibition practices, protest and destruction)
* Endangered and extinct media technology and practices
* Desire, disgust, and archival work
* Historical and contemporary forms of film criticism (from Cahiers to the
video essay)
* Institutional and “underground” modes of exhibition (film festivals,
award systems, art house, 3D)
* Phobia from within: media boycotts and oppositional viewing practices
* Phobia from without: prohibition and censorship, fair use practices
* Cinephilia/phobia as methodology, ideology, and/or pathology
* Cinephilia/phobia and film pedagogy

We welcome approaches from a range of disciplines, including but not
limited to: Film and Media studies, Art and Art History, Visual Culture,
Feminist and Queer Studies, Communication, Critical Theory, Literature,
Musicology, and Philosophy.

Interested graduate students may submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) –
along with institutional/departmental affiliations and current email – to
[email protected]. For more information, please contact the
FSGSO by email at the above, or visit our website, Special Affects:
http://www.fsgso.pitt.edu