1. Studies in French Cinema 17:1
2. Appointment of a Chief General Editor: Studies in French Cinema
3. CFP NECS 2017: Sensibility and the Senses. Media, Bodies, Practices
4. Studies in French Cinema Postgraduate Essay Prize
5. Query experimental/avant-garde film
6. New books
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1. Studies in French Cinema 17:1
The first issue of Studies in French Cinema in 2017 will have the following articles:
David Pettersen, Maurice Tourneur's Justin de Marseille (1935): transatlantic Influences on the French Gangster
Daniel Winkler, A Mediterranean gap in the Parisian canon? On the exclusion of Paul Carpita's anti-colonialist cinema from French film history
Jennifer Wallace, Varda, Cléo and Pomme in Paris: the figure of the chanteuse in Cléo de 5 à 7 and L’Une chante, l’autre pas
Sébastien Févry, Sepia cinema in the France of Nicolas Sarkozy: nostalgia and national identity
Kaya Davies Hayon, ‘Je suis une étrangère de partout': the material realities of exile in Tony Gatlif's Exils (2004)
Eva Jørholt, White Paranoia: Michael Haneke's Caché watched through the combined prisms of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pier Paolo Pasolini
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2. Appointment of a Chief General Editor: Studies in French Cinema
I will be stepping down as Chief General Editor of Studies in French Cinema at the twentieth anniversary conference of the journal in the summer of 2020. Colleagues who wish to apply for the post, which is tenable for five years, should contact me for a candidate pack ([log in to unmask])<mailto:[log in to unmask])>. It is expected that the successful candidate will be at Professorial level, Anglophone with a near-native command of French, and an experienced researcher in French/Francophone cinema studies. Closing date for applications is 31 December 2017. For more journal information, please visit www.tandfonline.com/rsfc<http://www.tandfonline.com/rsfc>.
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3. CFP NECS 2017: Sensibility and the Senses. Media, Bodies, Practices
29 June-1 July 2017 (Paris 3/Centre Pompidou/Grand Amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne)
Date-limite pour envoyer les propositions de communications et de panels préconstitués: Mardi 31 janvier 2017. Les propositions de communication doivent être envoyées en anglais. Les propositions de panel préconstitué peuvent inclure des communications en anglais et/ou en français. L'appel à communication et le formulaire de soumission des propositions (propositions de communication et propositions de panel préconstitué) sont accessibles sur le site web du NECS (https://necs.org).
The question of the relationship between media, bodies, and the senses cuts across the entire history of media theories. Since their first appearance, technical media such as telegraphy, photography, gramophone, film, typewriter, the telephone, radio, and then television, computer, internet, as well as a wide variety of cultural techniques for the recording, processing, and transmitting of information have been analyzed taking into consideration their relationships with the human body and its sensory organs. Concepts such as “organ projection,” “prosthesis,” “innervation,” “extension,” and “interface” have been used to describe the contact and the interaction between human organisms and technical apparatuses with their various degrees of hybridization, which in turn have generated a whole series of utopian and dystopian visions of a future “post-human” condition. And while the very notion of medium is strictly related to the problem of sensory perception (since it finds one of its origins in the Latin translation of a Greek term, metaxy, which was used by Aristotle in order to indicate the material intermediary entities that make perception possible), the body itself (with its expressive face, its sensitive skin, and its meaningful gestures and movements) has often been considered a sort of primary medium, a crucial reference point in order to understand the very nature of mediation.
The current transformations in our media landscape raise once more the question of the correlation between the history of technology and the history of the human sensorium, and invite us to reconsider the various possible relationships between media – in the widest sense of the term – and the realm of the senses, affects, and emotions. Cinema, with the various historical transformations of its spatial dispositif, has provided for decades and continues to provide a particularly important field for the interpretation of the cultural dynamics involved in the representation and reception of bodily identities and for the analysis of the aesthetic, embodied experience of the spectator. The same can be said for other visual, audiovisual, and sound media, which have tried to render through the grains, textures, and frequencies of their representations the different, dynamic materialities of bodies and sensations.
Today, the new bio-technical forms of life produced by ubiquitous digital media and by a whole range of artistic and non-artistic practices confront us with unprecedented theoretical questions, which can be tackled by combining perspectives that are both archaeological and forward-looking. We need appropriate theoretical frameworks in order to understand phenomena such as the sensory and cognitive functions performed by contemporary networked screens, the return of stereoscopic 3D imagery, the recent developments in the fields of virtual and augmented reality, the increasing presence in our living environment of intelligent sensing devices, the agencies of elemental media and mediating matters, as well as our daily interactions with digital technologies whose computational processes and outcomes are located below or beyond the thresholds of human perception.
Understanding the new conditions of human and non-human sensibility within a fully networked media environment is one of the major challenges of contemporary film and media studies.
The 2017 NECS conference – which will take place for the first time in France, in a cultural context which has given a very important contribution to the development and the institutionalization of film and media studies – will try to meet this challenge by tackling the crucial issue of the relationship between media, bodies, and the senses through the different research perspectives pursued by the members of our community.
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4. Studies in French Cinema Postgraduate Essay Prize
This has been won by Jules O’Dwyer, currently Wolfson Scholar and doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, for an essay entitled ‘Re-orienting objects in Resnais and Marker’s Les Statues meurent aussi’.
http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/film/people/jules-odwyer
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5. Query experimental/avant-garde film
A lecturer colleague of mine from the Central Academy of Drama (Film section) [CAD] in Beijing would like to follow a module on experimental/avant-garde film as part of a semester-long or year-long research programme so that she can prepare a one-term course for her students in the CAD, tentatively called 'experimental films and non-linear story telling’.
The filmmakers she wishes to learn more about so as to prepare the course for her students are (in alphabetical order, but not exclusively these): Chantal Akerman, Kenneth Anger, Sadie Benning, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Peter Greenaway, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gregory Markopoulos, Tracey Moffatt, Sally Potter, Hans Richter, Michael Snow.
If you offer any courses, either at UG or PG level, that cover any of these filmmakers, I would be very grateful if you could let me have some details, including dates and fees for attendance.
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6. New books
Mrabet, Emna. 2016. Le cinéma d'Abdellatif Kechiche: prémisses et devenir. Paris: Riveneuve.
http://www.riveneuve-editions.com/catalogue-2/arts/le-cinema-dabdellatif-kechiche/
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Phil Powrie
Professor of Cinema Studies
Lewis Carroll Building 27AC05
School of English and Languages
University of Surrey
GU2 7XH
T: 01483 682980
E: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
W: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/fahs/people/phil_powrie/index.htm
Chief General Editor Studies in French Cinema: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/englishandlanguages/research/film/sfc/
Chair British Association of Film Television and Screen Studies: http://www.baftss.org/
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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu
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