Cinemascope - Independent Film Journal
www.cinemascope.it
Issue 6
September - December 2006
Call for Papers
Powerful Reflections
Moving Analysis and Exercise of Power
edited by
Francesca Liguoro
Please, send your proposal to
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Power, in its relations and effects, is so often taken either directly or
indirectly as the central dynamic for understanding. Cinema, it seems,
offers an opportunity to get beyond and/or qualify this perspective, helpful
and even fruitful as it is and has been, but also limiting and perhaps not
well suited to appreciating film in its specificity nor reality in its
diversity. The theme is much more precise than exploration of other
perspectives. Cinemascope invites thoughtful reflections --- from
professional scholars and others who have the courage to affront this
challenge --- on ways of understanding that will turn this power-based
analysis inside out. Film and its analysis opens up many spaces in the field
or webs of power so that other realities, perspectives and understandings
can emerge. Cinemascope is excited about devoting an issue of their online
journal to ways that late 20th cc analysis and its achievements can provide
a basis for advances in film studies today, and indeed for the particular
contributions of film and its theory to human understanding for these times.
The following observation may help to clarify the theme and orient
reflection, beginning with a sketch of the place of power in recent action
and analysis, but also a particular challenge to that analytic key issuing
from what is arguably the closest elaborated analysis of power
The logics of power constitute superior keys of reading in the
interpretation in full range of interrelations in dynamics.
Obviously, power is displayed in many forms. There are forms based on force,
on oppression, on physical violence or psychological imposition. There are
forms grounded in charisma, on self-affirmation and authority, on the
experience of an individual or group. There are forms of power based on
admiration, reverence, and on the faith and trust placed in someone. By
means of such forms, power affects and even regulates all relations in which
human beings live: familial, social, interpersonal, professional, political,
economic. In this way, power is directly implicated in the cultural, social
and political structures. As a result, to know where power is, and how to
regulate it is necessary for social and biological survival, but also any
kind of optimization. This is explored theoretically. For instance, a
bio-anthropological interpretation of human action serves to focus
attention once again on the concept of power as a determinant in various
current manifestations. In this way, then, the principle of the survival and
indeed domination of the fittest and strongest in nature is linked to modern
cultural norms (among others), lending primordial and biological basis to
human behaviours.
Before this insistence on the centrality of power in action and thought, the
Marxist theorist John Holloway (in his book Change the World Without Taking
Power) has delivered a challenge: conceptualize the above-mentioned
relations and structures without the support of a foundational investigative
and interpretative category like that of power; abandon the concept of power
as a point of reference in the interpretation of the real and in the
struture of thought itself.
Cinemascope invites analyses of this drama of power and its displacement as
found in cinema and its theory. In light of the difficulaty of appreciating
the full impact of Hollowayıs challenge, but also the necessity to ground
and locate that confrontation within the operations of power which remain
very real and energetic, Cinemascope proposes three approaches and programs:
1. Unmask and bring to light dynamics of power --- either of an oppressive
or charismatic nature ---
present in films which do not have power (personal, political, sexual,
social, economic, etc.) as explicit themes and in which this
political-ideological background is not evident, but rather where the
dynamics of power are unexpectedly and unforseeably hidden.
2. Analyze the stylistic modalities of films with an explicit political
ideological theme where by the use of such modality, there is the attempt by
means of film language to deconstruct, without or with success, the dynamics
of power.
3. Identify and clarify ways that recent films (or a film) either confirm or
disprove suggestion such as Hollowayıs that power and its dynamics are
giving way to and clearing a way for other basis of analysis and action
Being well-aware that power excercises its influence even more by the logic
of forms than the logic of contents, Cinemscope welcomes studies that
consider the operation of power by means of the cinematographic language
(use of sound, editing and framing, the use of light, etc.).
In addition to these, Cinemascope welcomes parallel studies which analyze
cinematic style from philoosophical, social, historical and political points
of view focusing attention on cinematographic representation....
At the same time, on this occasion Cinemascope cannot accept proposals
concerning the cinema industry or the culture industry in general in so far
as they are not inherently part of the focus on representation.
The objective of Cinemascope is to discover the extent to which cinematic
representation is part of the construction of the category of power as a
dominant key in interpretation of reality, and how much, to the contrary,
that it is able to be part of the process of deconstruction of that
category.
DEADLINES
Proposals: April 30, 2006
Notice of Acceptance of Proposals by Cinemascope: May 14, 2006
Reception of Articles: July 16, 2006
Length of Articles: max 5000 words
Issue Editor: Francesca Liguoro
Editorial Board: Giustina DıOriano, Frank Coffey
Language: English
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