Cinematic Traces of Things to Come

Call for papers:

Moving images possess an uncanny ability to bring to life shadows, remnants, specters and manifestations. They have captivated audiences not only by the tension between presence and absence but also by their power to undo the past, to come to terms with what has been, and to imagine possible futures of society and the medium. 

The Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University invites scholars to submit proposals that critically explore cinematic appearances, disappearances, and reappearances, ruins and edifices, exile and return, and the perpetual being on the verge of disappearance or mutation. 

Presentations may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

Cinematic objets trouvés; documentary film; outtakes and footage left on the editing-room floor; traces, indices, and debris; disaster and recovery

Entropy, chaos, and emergent order

Reenactments; performativity; the Event

Exile and the right of return; “rites of return”; Israeli and non-Israeli cinema

Coming from the future; past and present visions of things to come; utopias and dystopias

Cinematic ghosts and hauntings; nostalgia; trauma and film; myths that endure in moving-image scholarship; regeneration in and of moving images

Archaeologies and genealogies of texts, genres, and media; the appearance and disappearance of moving-image technology and materiality

Anaphora, cataphora, parapraxis, and mise-en-abyme; mosaic films; complex narration, hyper-narration, probabilism in cinematic narratives

Remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels, cross-media franchises, and revivals of cancelled shows; comebacks, breakthroughs, first works, swan songs, eulogies, wills, ancestors, and heirs in moving images

All sessions will be held in English. 

Please submit an abstract (up to 300 words) and short CV to the colloquium program committee atcineconf@post.tau.ac.il by 1 January 2014. 
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15 February 2014. 

The Tel Aviv International Colloquium on Cinema and Television Studies is a research workshop that traditionally offers an opportunity for scholars from around the world to meet and discuss timely themes from a variety of theoretical approaches. Selected colloquia papers have been published in academic journals and books. 

Colloquium Committee: Ilan Avisar, Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Shmulik Duvdevani, Régine-Mihal Friedman, Nurith Gertz, Boaz Hagin, Sandra Meiri, Judd Ne’eman, Raz Yosef, Anat Zanger 
Colloquium Coordinators: Ariel Avissar and Ido Lewit 

For additional information please contact us at: cineconf@post.tau.ac.il.