ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

Edited by: Ewa Mazierska

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040350X.2022.2097612

The last issue in 2022 is dedicated to Želimir Žilnik: one of two issues of Studies in Eastern European Cinema, dedicated to his work. There are many reasons we decided to honour this director with a series of articles. First, Žilnik (b. 1942) is one of the most important directors coming from Eastern Europe, in his case Yugoslavia, yet also one who attracts a cult following and niche popularity, rather than enjoying mainstream appeal. Consequently, although many articles and book chapters were devoted to his work (including two I have published myself), these publications are dispersed or are not widely available, due to being published in German or one of the ‘post-Yugoslav’ languages. Dedicating to Žilnik two issues of Studies in Eastern European Cinema is meant to allow the readers to learn more about Žilnik’s films, especially less-known facets of his activities and expand his audience. Second, Žilnik’s career demonstrates the complexity of Eastern European cinema and its entanglement in cinemas of other regions, given that during his career, lasting almost 60 years, he worked in Yugoslavia and after its dissolution, Serbia, as well as in Germany and Austria. He is thus a Yugoslav, Serbian and a transnational director. He also worked in different genres and utilised different media, most importantly film and television. Whatever Žilnik does, he also comes across as being able to remain relevant: notice the acute problems facing his compatriots, as well as the European and global community. Nobody can criticise Žilnik for shirking from difficult topics, such inequality in an allegedly egalitarian socialist country, Yugoslavia, unemployment and homelessness, in Yugoslavia and elsewhere, the plight of the Roma community, as well as sex workers and people who do not conform to heterosexual norms. As Gal Kirn, the author of one of articles published in this issue observes, ‘Žilnik’s work has become synonymous with political and engaged film already in the tumultuous time of socialist Yugoslavia in the late 1960s, which was marked by workers’ strikes, student protests and cultural experimentation. The engaged nature of his filmmaking can be traced both in the meticulous work about marginalised subjects, as well as in his methodology that recombines fictive and documentary means in displaying his marginalised protagonists.’ In this respect he reminds us of Jean-Luc Godard, with whom he also shares a resolve to carry on working, as long as the moving image does not reject him.

The vast majority of Žilnik’s films are set in contemporary times, including his debut feature, Rani radovi/Early Works (1969), which was sent to the 19th Berlin International Film Festival, where it received the Golden Bear award. However, all his films reveal an acute sensitivity to history. The past is like a heavy cloud hanging over the heads of his characters. The past usually means their class background – in his films, unlike in Hollywood fairy tales, people at the bottom of the social hierarchy usually stay at the bottom. If anything, their situation worsens rather than improves in the course of the narrative. For this reason, he is regarded as one of the principal representatives of the Yugoslav Black Wave of the 1960s and 1970s, and in many ways he remained faithful to this movement throughout his entire career.

Žilnik’s films often look back, like the characters in Early Works, who discover the signs of German presence on the Yugoslav territories they traverse. Past and present also intermingle in Ustanak u Jazku/Uprising in Jazak (1973), whose characters, villagers in the village Jazak thirty years after the war ended, tell the stories of the antifascist resistance. Another film showing the entanglement of the present with the past is Tito po drugi put medju Srbima/Tito’s Second Time Among the Serbs (1994), in which Tito (or Dragoljub Ljubičić who plays Tito) meets ordinary people who compare the past when he was his leader with the postcommunist reality. In all these films the past is alive – it is a matter of (re)discovery, of comparing different memories, rather than something which fills the pages of historical books. His films also look into the future. In particular, his 1986 science fiction film Lijepe žene prolaze kroz grad/Pretty Women Walking Through the City is regarded as a prediction of the fast approaching disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Much connects Žilnik with his older colleague and collaborator, Dušan Makavejev. Both were creators of the Yugoslav New Wave, both combined in their films fiction and documentary techniques. Both also spent parts of their lives abroad, where they made some of their most interesting films. However, there are also important differences between them. Makavejev has been always most interested in human psychology and sexuality. His films are made ‘under the sign of id’, whom ‘ego’ is unable to tame. For Žilnik, on the other hand, human psychology is chiefly the consequence of objective, mostly economic circumstances. In this sense he can be considered the follower of Marx. He is also a Marxist director because he shares Marx and Engels’ conviction that workers are robbed of the fruits of their labour and he shows us it how this happens, most poignantly, in Stara škola kapitalizma/The Old School of Capitalism (2009).

The articles chosen for this and the second issue dedicated to Žilnik, reveal different facets of his oeuvre, such as dealing with marginalisation and exclusion, using non-professional actors, shooting films in a ‘partisan way’ and engaging with various waves, dominating European cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. They also focus in on a variety of his films from disparate decades, from Early Works (1969) to The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2015).

The first article, authored by Vesi Vuković, is titled ‘Yugoslav(i)a on the margin: sexual taboos, representation, nation and emancipation in Žilnik’s Early Works’. In line with this title, Vuković draws attention to the fact that unlike the majority of Yugoslav New Wave Films, whose leading character is a man, Early Works is exceptional for having a woman as the main heroine. Jugoslava is treated by the author as an allegory of Yugoslavia and its revolutionary spirit, as well as a prototype of an emancipated woman, punished by rape and killing. However, rather than celebrating Žilnik as a champion of women, Vuković claims that Jugoslava is concurrently empowered and disempowered, and the director objectifies his female heroine.

The next film dissected in this issue, by Gal Kirn, is a short production titled Uprising in Jazak, made in 1973. Kirn argues that this film perfectly demonstrates how to make a partisan film in a partisan way in socialist Yugoslavia. In particular, the film’s raw image and cutting is a conscious politico-aesthetical intervention into the dominant genre of that time in socialist Yugoslavia – war partisan spectacles, also known as ‘Red Westerns.’ Žilnik’s method consists of a delicate bottom-up ethnographic reconstruction of partisan and antifascist memory of the Jazak villagers, who 30 years after the war collectively tell and renegotiate the stories of the antifascist resistance to the war.

The third article, by Michael Brady, considers the German chapter in Žilnik’s career, covering the years 1973-6. This period ended with the short feature Paradies: Eine imperialistische Tragikomödie/Paradise: An Imperialist Tragicomedy (1976). Brady observes that this rich and at times uncomfortably visceral and chaotic parody of far-left terrorism (the RAF or Baader-Meinhof group) does not feature in any of the myriad publications on New German Cinema, despite being much more audacious than the work of contemporary German directors. Brady suggests that if there is a German film Žilnik’s compelling mix of riotous anarchy, actionist body art, political satire can be compared with, then it is Fassbinder’s Die dritte Generation/The Third Generation (1979), possibly inspired by Žilnik’s film. While offering a detailed examination of this film, the author of the article points to the problems encountered by transnational directors, who often slip through the cracks of scholarship, conducted largely along national cinema lines.

Finally, Jelena Jelušić in ‘The politics of a rock ‘n’ road docudrama—genre and intertextuality in Žilnik’s Oldtimer (1989)’ examines Žilnik’s foray into television - his telefilm Stara mašina/Oldtimer (1989) as an example of the politically engaged use of genre and intertextuality in televisual representation. As a road movie, Oldtimer highlights how the journey trope imbued visual representations of movement with ideological and political meanings. At the same time, the film exposes the nationalist motivations behind the so-called anti-bureaucratic revolution in Serbia in 1988 and emphasizes television news department staff’s complicity in concealing them. Jelušić argues that Žilnik’s work contributed to the broadening of televisual potential for ideological signification, allowing the medium to function not simply as a propaganda instrument, but as a space of contestation of different ideological positions.

Although all the articles in this issue focus on individual films, their authors use them to tease out characteristics of Žilnik’s artistic method and style, together showing the director’s wide interests, but also consistency in his interests in Yugoslav and wider politics and the spirit of experimentation.

This issue contains three short articles in the review section. Veronika Hermann discusses the book Taking Stock of Shock. Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions, which does not address screen media directly but is of great importance for the studying of the culture of the region. Denise J. Youngblood introduces the journal Apparatus, and Ewa Mazierska commemorates the Polish composer Andrzej Korzyński.

Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon

This scholarship is financed by the Research Centre for Communication and Culture, through funding by FCT, with reference no. UIDB2022.3/00126/2020.

SUBMISSION OF APPLICATIONS

The call for applications shall be open from 8 August to 2 September 2022 at 23h59 (Lisbon time).

Applications and their respective supporting documentation, stipulated in the present Public Notice of Call for Applications, must be submitted via email to concursos.cecc.fch@ucp.pt.

TYPE AND DURATION OF SCHOLARSHIPS

Doctoral Research Scholarships are intended to finance students’ PhD research, leading to the attainment of a PhD degree in the Doctoral Programme in Communication Sciences at Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

The research leading to a PhD degree shall take place at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC) (UIDB2022.3/00126/2020), which shall thus be the scholarship recipient’s host institution, without prejudice to any other work undertaken in collaboration with one or more institutions.

The research leading to a PhD degree by the scholarship recipient must fall within the framework of CECC’s (UIDB2022.3/00126/2020) strategic activities plan and must be developed under the auspices of the Doctoral Programme in Communication Sciences, Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

This is, as a rule, an annual scholarship, renewable for a maximum period of two years (24 months). Scholarships cannot be awarded for periods of less than three consecutive months.

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

The following documents, without exception, must be included in the application, under penalty of exclusion from the call for applications:

• the details stated on the identity card, citizen’s card, or passport;
• the candidate’s CV;
• certificates for each academic qualification held, which must specify, without fail, the final classification and, where possible, the marks received for each subject studied. Alternatively, should candidates be unable to access their undergraduate or Master’s degree certificate by the application deadline, a declaration upon honour that the candidate completed their undergraduate or Master’s degree studies prior to the application deadline;
• letter of motivation;
• letters of recommendation (optional);
• preliminary PhD project proposal in line with one of the following CECC research groups: a) Media Narratives and Cultural Memory or b) Digital Literacy and Cultural Change (max. 2000 words).

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATION

2 September 2022

FURTHER INFORMATION

For all details please check the the official call: https://fch.lisboa.ucp.pt/system/files/assets/files/edital-50-alterado-03-08-2022-eng-signed.pdf

University of Nottingham Ningbo China

There are five vacancies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China:

• Research Fellow in Cultural Heritage - https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CRV360/research-fellow-in-cultural-heritage
• Assistant Professor in Cinematography - https://www.timeshighereducation.com/unijobs/listing/303660/assistant-professor-in-cinematography/
• Associate Professor/Professor in Creative Technologies- https://www.timeshighereducation.com/unijobs/listing/303663/associate-professor-professor-in-creative-technologies/
• Associate Professor in Media Production and Product Development - https://www.timeshighereducation.com/unijobs/listing/303662/associate-professor-in-media-production-and-project-development/
• Professor of Creative Industries and Digital Media - https://www.timeshighereducation.com/unijobs/listing/301482/professor-of-creative-industries-and-digital-media/

Please see specific postings for further information.

Join a unique British University in China. The University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) was the first Sino-foreign university to open its doors in China. This award winning campus offering a UK style education has grown to establish a student body of over 8,000 in just 16 years.

A pioneer in Sino-foreign tertiary education, UNNC is rapidly expanding as part of the University of Nottingham’s Global University. The institution seeks ambitious, talented academics with a flair for research and a passion for teaching to join its team of experts, offering unique teaching and research opportunities in a highly dynamic economy.

The School of International Communications is the largest school in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and is affiliated to the Department of Culture, Media and Visual Studies at the Nottingham UK campus. Our BA (Hons) in International Communications is a provincial level accredited degree which includes a dedicated programme of study for a European or East Asian language. Its sister programme, BA (Hons) in International Communications with Chinese, has proved successful in attracting high quality international students to the school. We currently run an MA programme in International Communications and also have one of the most successful PhD programmes in the university.

The post-holder will be expected to teach across the full range of our programmes, undertake supervision of BA and MA dissertation students and PGR students, and conduct research and external engagement in the school’s main research areas. More details of the school and its teaching and research activities can be found here:

https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/humanities-and-social-sciences/international-communications/home.aspx

Comparative Cinema 20 (Spring 2023)

Deadline: January 15, 2022

Film scholars are today well aware of cinema’s multiple connections to the so-called “natural” world. From the very beginning, the medium’s technical affordances allowed it to draw attention to the hitherto unseen aspects of our environments, showing us in close-up and time lapse the minutiae of animal and plant life – what Siegfried Kracauer famously called the “reality of another dimension” (1997). More fundamentally, cinema’s longstanding dependence on a congeries of natural resources – silver, petroleum, gelatine – and the effects on screen of its inescapable “hydrocarbon imagination” (Bozak 2011), situate it both with and against the world it depicts.

Given cinema’s unique representational capacities, over the last century the same environments have afforded cinema a collection of vastly different images. The sea, for instance, has gifted us the pioneering representations of underwater fauna in the films of Jean Painlevé; the ethical compromises of Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle’s Palme d’Or winning Le Monde du Silence (1955); and the disorienting GoPro footage of marine life in Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 2012).

If nature has long presented a challenge, a resource, and a backdrop to filmmakers of all stripes, then film studies scholarship is only beginning to reckon with its sheer multiplicity as reflected in film history. The last decade especially has witnessed a flourishing of writing with an ecological bent, and has seen the rise of the field now known as ‘ecocinema.’ A number of collections (Willoquet-Maricondi 2010; Rust, Monani and Cubitt 2013) saw the coming together of ecocriticism and film studies over a decade ago, but scholars including Adrian Ivakhiv (2013); Kristi McKim (2013), Adam O’Brien (2016; 2017) and Jennifer Fay (2018) have since made exciting advances in other directions.

There is indeed already a vast proliferation of approaches to cinema in connection with nature, but recent developments – such as attention to the implications for particular national cinemas (Past 2019) – suggest that ecocinema as a field still holds many unexplored possibilities. As such, the 20th issue of Comparative Cinema is capacious in its focus, inviting contributors to consider novel ways of addressing cinema in connection with all manner of non-human environments and perspectives. Articles should employ a comparative methodology, and topics may include, but are not limited to:

- Cinema’s Natural Resources: Given the provenance of film materials like celluloid, and the massive carbon footprint of streaming technology, how heavy is the burden of cinema on the scarce natural resources of the world today? How might cinema’s materials – and its waste – emerge in film aesthetics and narratives?

- More-than-human Perspectives: To what extent can cinema de-centre our habituated ways of seeing the world on screen? How close can the camera, as what André Bazin called the “non-living agent,” take us to the non-anthropocentric possibilities of vision?

- Cinema and the Elemental: What role do the traditional elements – earth, air, water, fire – have to play in the images we see on our screens? How might the concept of “elemental media” (Peters 2015) or the notion of cinema’s “elemental imagination” (De Roo 2019) be deployed in comparative analyses of particular films, or of cinema and its environments? How are spectacular natural phenomena like storms, floods and fires represented on film?

- Extraction of Materials and Meaning: How has cinema represented the perils of extractive capitalism on screen? Or, considering the work of scholars like Leo Goldsmith (2018) and Daniel Mann (2022), how has the medium itself knowingly participated in this dynamic of extraction in its bid to draw meaning from the world? What are the gendered and colonial dimensions of environmental extraction in cinema’s history?

Comparative Cinema invites the submission of complete articles addressing ecocinema from a comparative perspective, which must be between 5500 and 7000 words long, including footnotes. Articles (in MS Word) and any accompanying images must be sent through the RACO platform, available on the journal website.

In addition to articles that respond to this particular topic, Comparative Cinema is also accepting submissions for ‘Rear Window,’ a miscellaneous section of the journal that will include articles focusing on other aspects of cinema using a comparative methodology. Please indicate in your submission if you wish to be considered for this section of the journal.

TIMELINE FOR ISSUE 20:

• Deadline for submission of complete articles: 15/1/2023
• Peer review: 15/1/2023-28/2/2023
• Final copy deadline: 30/4/2023
• Publication: June 2023

REFERENCES

Bozak, Nadia. 2011. The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.

De Roo, Ludo. 2019. “Elemental Imagination and Film Experience: Climate Change and the Cinematic Ethics of Immersive Filmworlds.” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 13(2): 58-79.

Fay, Jennifer. 2018. Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Goldsmith, Leo. 2018. “Theories of the Earth: Surface and Extraction in the Landscape Film.” World Records 2. https://worldrecordsjournal.org/theories-of-the-earth-surface-and-extraction-in-the-landscape-film/

Ivakhiv, Adrian J. 2013. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Kracauer, Siegfried. 1997. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mann, Daniel. 2022. “Red Planets: Cinema, Deserts, and Extraction.” Afterimage 29(1): 88–109.

McKim, Kristi. 2013. Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change. New York: Routledge.

O’Brien, Adam. 2017. Film and the Natural Environment: Elements and Atmospheres. London: Wallflower.

———. 2016. Transactions with the World: Ecocriticism and the Environmental Sensibility of New Hollywood. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Past, Elena. 2019. Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.

Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt. eds. 2013. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge.

Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula. ed. 2010. Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema/announcement/view/170

Contact: comparativecinema@upf.edu

Berlin School Of Public Engagement

The Berlin School Of Public Engagement at the Museum For Natural History Berlin has a vacancy for a Project Coordinator.

1. Location: Berlin School Of Public Engagement at the Museum For Natural History Berlin

2. Salary: German salary table E 11 TV-L: approx. 2209.27€ monthly, upgrading depends on work experience (taxes already deducted)

You can find all information about the vacancy and the application here: https://jobs.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/jobposting/add5b81709f808eaa87c3cbe92c2ebcfdd16ad5b0

April 11-14, 2022

Lisbon, Portugal

Deadline: November 4, 2022

The 18th Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) held in Lisbon, Portugal, invites all research contributions in the form of papers, posters, demos, doctoral consortium applications, as well as panels, competitions and workshop proposals. We invite contributions from within and across any discipline committed to advancing knowledge on the foundations of games: computer science, engineering, mathematics, natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, arts and design.

Topics include:

• Technical Game Development, Novel Controllers
• Game Design, Studio Practices, Novel Mechanics, Novel Experiences
• Game Analytics and Visualization
• Game Artificial Intelligence
• Game Criticism and Analysis
• Games Beyond Entertainment

Author Information

Papers should have a maximum of 10 pages, excluding references, reporting new research. Papers need to be anonymized and submitted in the ACM SIGCONF version of the ACM Master Template within their respective track using EasyChair. FDG 2023 is held in cooperation with ACM and ACM SIG AI, SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI.

Accepted papers will be included in the proceedings under the respective track submitted. When submitting, authors are requested to select the track that fits more closely to their submitted work.

Papers and Demos will receive double-blind peer reviews. All other submissions will be single-blind. All papers are guaranteed at least three reviews. Games and Demos are guaranteed two reviews. There will be no rebuttal.

Submission Deadlines

Submission Deadline: 4th November 2022

Workshops, Panels and Competition Deadlines: 21st October 2022

Late-Breaking Paper: 27th of January 2023

Games & Demos Deadline: 27th of January 2023

Conference Dates: 11th-14th of April 2023

Conference website: http://fdg2023.org/

February 20-26, 2023

Indian Institute for Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee, India)

Deadline: August 31, 2022

Dear Colleagues,

we hereby invite you to submit an abstract for the Session “Culturally Sensitive Approaches – Potential New Directions of Empirical Research” at the “3rd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability” (“SMUS Conference”), which will simultaneously be the “3rd RC33 Regional Conference Asia: India”, and take place on site at the Indian Institute for Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee, India) from Monday, February 20th, to Sunday, February 26th, 2023.

The deadline for ‘Call for Abstracts’ for the conference has been extended till 31.08.2022. We kindly invite you to submit an abstract to this or to other sessions of this inspiring conference.

Best regards,

Thomas Herdin

About the Conference

The six-day conference aims at continuing a global dialogue on methods and should attract methodologists from all over the world and all social and spatial sciences (e. g. anthropology, area studies, architecture, communication studies, computational sciences, digital humanities, educational sciences, geography, historical sciences, humanities, landscape planning, philosophy, psychology, sociology, urban design, urban planning, traffic planning and environmental planning). The conference programme will include keynotes, sessions and advanced methodological training courses. With this intention, we invite scholars of all social and spatial sciences and other scholars who are interested in methodological discussions to suggest an abstract to any sessions of the conference. All papers have to address a methodological problem.

Please find more information on the above institutions on the following websites:

• Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (GCSMUS): https://gcsmus.org/ and https://gcsmus.org/news/call-for-abstracts/
• ISA RC33: http://rc33.org/
• ESA RN21: www.europeansociology.org/research-networks/rn21-quantitative-methods
• IIT Roorkee: https://www.iitr.ac.in/

If you are interested in getting further information on the conference and other GCSMUS activities, please subscribe to the SMUS newsletter by registering via the following website: https://lists.tu-berlin.de/mailman/listinfo/mes-smusnews

Conference Sessions:

1. Co-Production (of Knowledge) as Pathway to Decolonization of Knowledge in the Global South

2. Decolonizing Social Science Methodology

3. Fieldwork in the Global South – Shedding Light into the Black Box

4. Assessing the Quality of Survey Data

5. Comparing Social Survey Data Collected During a Global Crisis? The Uncertainty of Comparative Research

6. Culturally Sensitive Approaches – Potential New Directions of Empirical Research

7. Application of Quantitative Techniques in Spatial Analysis

8. Ethnography as Spatial-Temporal Method

9. Ethnographic Methods: Constructing Public Space

10. Visualizing Urban Nature: Ethnographic Approaches and Explorations

11. Multimodal Data Integration for Spatial Research

12. How Modality Matters? Learning from the Multiplicity of (Non-)Digital Discourse Analytical Approaches

13. Discourse Analysis, Historical Analysis and Biographical Research: Multi-Method Approaches in Interpretive Empirical Research

14. The Individual and the City: Urban Life Stories

15. Measuring Change in Urban Space(s)

16. The Longue Durée in the 21st-Century Social Sciences: Methodological Challenges of Analyzing Long-Term Social Processes

17. Design Methods for Accessibility and Social Inclusion

18. Applying Spatial Methods in Homelessness Studies: Methodological and Ethical Challenges

19. Analysing Hidden Forms of Violence and their Spatialities: The Methodological Challenges of the Research on Intimate Partner Violence and Sexualized Violence

20. Spatial Methods in Healthcare Research

21. Methods of Transnational Organisational and Economic Research

22. Methods for Studying the Spatial Dimension of Global Digital Infrastructures

23. Digitalization, Political Participation and Transformation in the Global South

24. Cross-Cultural Research Methods in Community-Oriented Approaches in Human Behavior

25. Spatial Methods in Transdisciplinarity for Urban Sustainability

26. Methodological Overlaps, Misunderstandings and Conflicts between Spatial Planning and Social Sciences

Varda, the Cinema

29 November 2022

University of Genoa, Italy

Varda, Photography, Art, Words

21 April 2023

University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Deadline: September 5, 2022

Curated by Luca Malavasi and Anna Masecchia

Scientific Committee

• Delphine Bénézet (Queen Mary, University of London), Marco Bertozzi (IUAV University of Venice),
• Elisa Bricco (University of Genoa), Laura Busetta (University of Messina), Daniele Dottorini
• (University of Calabria), Sandra Lischi (University of Pisa) Luca Malavasi (University of Genoa), Anna
• Masecchia (University of Naples Federico II), Rosamaria Salvatore (University of Padua), Chiara
• Tognolotti (University of Pisa), Federica Villa (University of Pavia), Emma Wilson (University ofCambridge).

Organisation

School of Humanities-University of Genoa, DIRAAS-Department of Italian Studies, Romanities,

Antiquities, Arts and Performing Arts-University of Genoa, Department of Humanities-University of Naples Federico II.

Under the patronage of the Consulta Universitaria del Cinema.

Keynote Speakers

Delphine Bénézet (Queen Mary, University of London) | Genoa

Emma Wilson (University of Cambridge) | Naples

Photographer, director, writer, designer, spectator, thinker… more simply: artist. It is difficult to sum up in a single definition the career of Agnès Varda (1928-2019), a key figure in contemporary culture, a tireless storyteller who knew how to use all forms of audiovisual communication in an always personal and often surprising way, beginning at the end of the 1940s with photography (after studying art history) and then, past the age of seventy, inaugurating a successful career as a visual artist. In between, a lot of cinema, both fiction and documentary, from the 1950s, when she made her feature film debut with La Pointe courte (1955), defined by André Bazin as "a true miracle", until the year of her death, when she presented Varda par Agnès (2019) at the Berlin Film Festival, a personal journey in her own adventure as a filmmaker, the ideal closure of an autobiographical journey that occupied the last part of her career.

The “nouvelle vague” success of Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) is only the first stage of a six-decade-long journey, during which Varda has known very different seasons, marked by important technological, cultural and linguistic changes, always intuiting the most fruitful way to cross them and to continue and, at the same time, renew her own artistic path. And, above all, without ever losing that astonishment for life, reality, places and people that constantly marks her production.

The two conference days ideally take their cue from the book Pianeta Varda (edited by Luca Malavasi and Anna Masecchia, Edizioni ETS, 2022), the first attempt to take stock – without any pretense of “caging” Varda in a series of definitions – of the protean work of an artist still little studied in Italy.

The aim of this conference is to examine Varda’s work in its totality and complexity, directing reflection, on one hand, towards an analysis of her film production, considered in itself and in its relationship with the great aesthetic, technological and cultural junctures of the 20th century, with which she often dialogued in a crucial way (during the Genoese day); on the other hand, during the Neapolitan day, the reflection will be more oriented towards visual production (artistic and photographic, in the first place) but also literary (think, for example, of the central role of the words in her work) and television (for example, Agnès de ci de là Varda). A distinction, the one suggested by the two days, of perspective, in the full awareness that the quality of Varda’s work lies above all in its compactness and richness of dialogues and interweavings – often surprising – between different forms, genres and media.

Deadlines and Information

We invite abstract submissions for 20-minute papers. Abstracts should indicate clearly the focus (cinema, visual art, photography etc.) and should be between 1000 and 1500 characters long and accompanied by a short CV.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 5th September 2022. Acceptance will be notified by 19th September 2022. The conference languages are Italian and English.

Abstracts should be sent to: pianetavarda@gmail.com.

The proceedings of the conference will be published in 2023.

CICANT - Research Centre for Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies, Portugal

Between May, 18 and the 15 of august (11.59 p.m. Lisbon time) a call is open for 4 (four) national research grants and 1 (one) mixed research grant, hereinafter referred to respectively as National Doctoral Research Grant and Mixed Doctoral Research Grant, in the area of Media Arts and Communication Sciences under the FCT Research Grant Regulations (RBI) and the Research Grant Holder Statute (EBI). The grants will be funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the Collaboration Protocol for the Funding of Doctoral Research Fellowships within the European Universities Alliance for Film and Media Arts (FilmEU), signed between FCT and the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias.

The work to be carried out under the scope of the grants will be hosted by the R&D Unit - CICANT - Research Centre for Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies (ref: 5260)

Type and number of grant(s) to be awarded: 5 (five) Research grants for PhD students, 4 (four) national and 1 (one) mixed, reference COFAC/ULHT/FilmEU-FCT/2022.

Scientific field(s): Media Arts and Communication Sciences

Applicants: The PhD Research Grant is intended for candidates already enrolled or candidates who meet the necessary conditions to enroll in one of the following PhD Programs in Media Art and Communication and PhD in Communication Sciences, who intend to develop research activities, leading to the award of a PhD academic degree, in the scope with the scientific work developed at CICANT and FilmEU Alliance.

Eligibility of applicants: The following are eligible to apply to this call: National citizens or citizens of other European Union Member States; Citizens of third countries; Stateless persons; Citizens benefiting from political refugee status.

Candidate Admission Requirements:

- Bachelor's degree in the field of studies in communication sciences or arts;

- Master's degree in the study area of communication sciences or arts;

- To live in Portugal permanently and habitually, a requirement applicable to both national and foreign citizens (applicable only to mixed type grants)

- Not to have benefited from a PhD or PhD in companies grant directly funded by FCT, regardless of its duration.

- Proficient knowledge of English

Read full announcement - https://cicant.ulusofona.pt/careers-opportunities/opportunities/601-open-call-for-5-research-fellowships-for-doctoral-students-filmeu

For additional questions please contact cicant@ulusofona.pt

November 15-18, 2022

Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias (Lisbon, Portugal)

Deadline: September 16, 2022

The Media Literacy and Civic Cultures (MeLCi Lab) Autumn School “Media, gender, intersectionality and mediated social mobilizations”, to be held 15th to 18th November 2022, aims to introduce PhD students to current discussions in the field, as well capacitate PhD students with a set of hands-on research skills that help them in their projects, supporting their professional development. The agenda, workshops, and keynote speakers are available at: https://melcilab.cicant.ulusofona.pt/training/ii-melci-lab-autumn-school-media-gender-intersectionality-and-mediated-social-mobilizations/

By adopting an integrative and multidisciplinary approach, the school will bring together several scholars for a set of workshops and communications to foster research skills related to scientific writing, dissemination, funding applications, and innovative methodologies. We will address topics about media representations of gender and sexualities, mediated activisms, civic mobilisations, ethics, etc.

MeLCi Lab Autumn School intends to be an inclusive space, and three equity grants will be available for students from underrepresented communities.

MeLCi Lab is currently looking for proposals of PhD students who want to apply for the Autumn School. These applications can be submitted until the 16th of September.

Applicants should submit their Curriculum Vitae (including scientific publications and activities), a motivation letter, a thesis summary, research questions, and methodologies.

Please email your proposal to melci.lab@ulusofona.pt