[Nettime-ro] CfP Conference: Cinema and Visual Culture in Post-Communist Europe: From Crisis to Euphoria and Back Again

[Horea Avram <horea.avram@gmail.com>]

Call for Papers



*Conference*

*27-28 May 2016*



*Department of Cinematography and Media*

*Faculty of Theatre and Television, *

*Babeş-Bolyai University, **Cluj-Napoca, Romania*





*Cinema and Visual Culture in Post-Communist Europe:*

*From Crisis to Euphoria and Back Again*





Europe is rather an elusive concept. It means different things for
different people, it describes very diverse civilizations with distinct
historical backgrounds, it represents an uneven pattern articulated by the
split and the convergence between East and West, North and South.
Nevertheless, Europe has and promotes the same set of values (if it is to
name only democracy and the universal human rights). Moreover, Europe is
seen nowadays as a transnational entity with a shared identity and a common
political goal. Yet this unity is more and more contested especially in the
context of the previous economical crisis, and the recent waves of
immigration.



Cinema and visual culture have always been part of the efforts to build
Europe’s identity, and to define its national/cultural borders. At the same
time, cinema and visual culture contribute to undermine these borders
(through a wide circulation of works, open networks, common funding
policies etc.) and equally to questions Europe’s identity especially now,
during the present round of continental turmoil.



The questions that arise from these historical realities equally challenge
and confirm recent developments: How cinema and visual culture shape Europe
as a collective entity? Or rather, how they undermine it? What role
national, ethnic linguistic and religious dimensions play in the recent
cinematic and artistic productions? Is there a specific visual rhetoric of
integration? Why totalitarianism is so appealing? What is national in the
networked transnational spectatorship? Local subjects or global markets? Or
both?



Stemming from these questions, specific areas for further inquiry are
identified. One of them is the role of critical reflection – in different
fields, from visual arts to literature, theatre or cinema – after the fall
of communism in East-Central Europe. If in the 1990s critical discourse
remained somewhat anchored in the established values, after the year 2000,
critical reflection gained more legitimacy, acquired a certain sense of
adequacy and redefined its social function.



Therefore, can we speak about a certain specificity of cultural
methodologies related to this intellectual and geographical area, in the
post-censorship decades? Are the recent Eastern-European interdisciplinary
and cross-cultural explorations in art practice and theory easily
exportable to Western Europe? Or they remain an intellectual pattern which
is functional only for a local, Eastern European paradigm? How the
Western-based critical thinking models (such as Post-colonialism, Critical
Theory, Feminism and Cultural Studies) have penetrated and changed the
East-Central European critical reflection?



This conference is an interdisciplinary forum that welcomes contributions
from academics and practitioners working in the fields or at the
intersection of cinema, visual arts, media, literature and performing arts.







*Topics include but are not limited to:*



-Rethinking cultural cannons after totalitarianism

-Collective memory and personal experience

-The rhetoric of integration

-The cultural politics of Euro skepticism

-Contemporary European cinema in the context of other cinemas

-Big screen / Small cinemas

-World cinema and Eastern European production

-National cinema after communism

-Visual and performing arts at the crossroads – between underground and
global markets

-Models of visuality in Eastern Europe – global vs. local

-Think local act global – an Eastern European approach

-The other Post-colonialism – Eastern and Central Europe’s post-communist
odyssey

-Mediality and locality: television and the global communication

-Identity, memory and trauma

-Multiculturalism vs. interculturalism

-Migration, exile and cultural (dis)connections

-The cultural construction of dissidence

-Periphery / center - comparative perspective

-New artistic production means, alternative distribution networks

-Autobiography and collected memories

-Performing arts – communicating over the language barriers

-National / Post-national in culture

-Spectator, participant, consumer

-Aesthetics and politics of urban space

-Visualizations of the Gulag

-The legacy of the socialist societies

-The persistence of political ghosts

-Culture in hiding: from the secret police to Big Brother

-East-West intermedial arts - attitudes, values, practices

-Literature undercover during totalitarianism

-Local audience, European dimension: forms of public engagement

-The art of resistance





Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words, together with a short
bio and author’s affiliation in English:

daniel.iftene@ubbcluj.ro

horea.avram@ubbcluj.ro



*Deadline for abstract submissions: April 1, 2016.*



Notifications of acceptance of the submissions will be emailed by April 15,
2016.

Each presentation will be twenty minutes long, followed by a ten-minute
discussions period.

The language of the conference is English.



The conference fee for speakers is € 130 (€ 80 for PhD candidates). The fee
does not include accommodation and meals, and will be paid in advance after
the confirmation of paper acceptance (or, exceptionally in cash at the
conference registration desk).

Registered speakers will have access to snacks and coffee during
presentations and will have access to the opening cocktail.



Selected papers will be published in a special issue of the journal *EKPHRASIS.
Images, Cinema, Theory, Media*.





*Keynote speakers:* TBA





For more information, please visit:

http://teatrutv.ubbcluj.ro/conferences/cinemapostcommunist/

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