Dear colleagues,
With apologies for cross-posting. This is a call for papers for the special issue on "Ukrainian Cinema" for the Studies in World Cinema: A Critical Journal (https://brill.com/view/journals/swc/swc-overview.xml?contents=editorialcontent-57548). Please see below for further details:
Studies in World Cinema: A Critical Journal (BRILL)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Ukrainian Cinema
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, 2022, the world’s attention has been firmly focused on Ukraine. Zhaporizhzhia, Mariupol, Kherson, and Mykolaiv have become household names as the cities they refer to are being hammered by Russian artillery. But if international news reports follow the war and consequent plight of the Ukrainian people on a day-to-day basis, the background to the conflict has only been scantily addressed.
Cinema is uniquely placed to provide an insight into the historically complex relationship between Ukraine and Russia. From Ukraine’s founding membership of the Soviet Union in 1922, through its more than 80 years under Soviet leadership until independence in 1991, cinema has born testimony to Ukraine’s ties to and attempts at distancing itself from Russia. And, after the 2014 Maidan Revolution followed by Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea and backing of separatists in the Donbas region, “cinema has become one of the fronts of the conflict” (Olzacka, 2022: 1).
This special issue of Studies in World Cinema aims to highlight how Ukraine’s predominantly thorny ties to Russia have informed the country’s cinema since the 1920s, while at the same time addressing the interchanges that have occurred between Ukraine and Russia within the field of cinema. In the era of Soviet montage cinema, for example, Russian directors shot some of the movement’s finest works in Ukraine: Sergei Eisenstein inscribed Odesa’s harbour in film history through Battleship Potemkin (1925), and in his Ukrainian-produced Man With a Movie Camera (1929), Dziga Vertov turned Kyiv, Odesa and Moscow into one bustling city. Meanwhile, the most famous director to come out of Ukraine, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, struggled to balance his love for Ukraine against the political requirements of a Russia-dominated, centralised film industry, as exemplified in Zvenyhora (1928) and Earth (1930).
For this issue, we are particularly interested in contributions that discuss the concepts of national and transnational cinema in relation to Ukraine. If nationalism has unquestioningly been a prominent feature or ambition of Ukrainian cinema throughout most of its history – articulated, for example, in the Soviet era through Ukrainian filmmakers’ struggle for the use of Ukrainian language, history, settings and culture in their films and, following the Maidan Revolution, through a concerted effort on the part of the Ukrainian state to boost the production of patriotic films – the idea of a national cinema is not without its inherent paradoxes when it comes to Ukraine. Russian and other non-Ukrainian filmmakers such as Romanian-born Kira Muratova and Georgian-Armenian Sergei Paradjanov have, for example, made significant contributions to Ukrainian cinema; Paradjanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) is even hailed as a milestone in Ukrainian national cinema.
We invite contributions related, but not exclusive to, the following topics:
– The Ukrainian poetic cinema of the 1960s and its particular use of folklore in bringing about a Ukrainian national cinema
– The post-Maidan state initiatives to strengthen Ukrainian cinema and “derussify” Ukrainian screens
– Ukrainian film culture at large: cinemas, audiences, journals, festivals, etc.
– The presence – and popularity? – of non-Ukrainian films in Ukraine
– Film culture in Eastern vs Western Ukraine
– Ukrainian cinema as world cinema
– The presence of Ukrainian films in Russia and elsewhere
– Russian (and other non-Ukrainian) film representations of historical and contemporary Ukrainian issues
– The institutional placement and activities of Ukrainian film studios and archives, especially the Kyiv-based Dovzhenko Film Studio
– Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a film actor, producer, script writer and/or director
Timeline for contributions:
Proposals, consisting of a title and a 3-400-word abstract + a short author’s bio, should be sent to [log in to unmask] prior to 15 January 2023. Notifications of acceptance or non-acceptance will be sent out in February.
The submission deadline for accepted, full articles (max 8,000 words) is 1 August 2023. All contributions will undergo double-blind peer review. Publication is planned for 2024.
Any queries should be addressed to [log in to unmask]
Work cited:
Olzacka, Elżbieta (2022). The Development of National Cinema in Post-Maidan Ukraine. East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254221101907
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