With apologies for cross posting, we are writing to remind you that the deadline for submissions for the Fast/Slow symposium is 30 November, 2012.
Call for Papers:
Fast/Slow: Intensifications of Cinematic Speed
In recent years, questions of speed have become the focus of keen and often polarised debate across a range of aesthetic, political, and critical contexts.
It has become something of a truism to say that we live in a ‘go-faster’ world defined by the ever-increasing rapidity of the rhythms and cycles of media, technology, and capital. In response, a set of ‘slow’ cultural practices have emerged—the Slow Food Movement,
the Slow Media Manifesto, The Idler Academy, or the recent ‘A/V Festival: As Slow as Possible’—which figure slowness as perhaps the emblematic
mode of resistance for our time.
In the context of contemporary cinema aesthetics, this interest in speed has likewise been paralleled by a particular intensification of pace, temporality,
and duration in both directions, from the hyper-kinetic, frenzied rhythms of ‘intensified continuity’ (Bordwell) or ‘accelerationist aesthetics’ (Shaviro), to the protracted, snail-like pace of ‘slow’ or ‘contemplative cinema’ (Romney; Flanagan). While these
dual tendencies have received a good deal of critical attention to date, discussions have at times had a tendency to polarise opinion and to reinforce presumed dichotomies between passive consumption and active viewing, Hollywood cinema and globalauteur filmmaking,
distraction and attention, commercialisation and art.
The Fast/Slow Symposium calls for a critical re-evaluation of speed and intensification in the cinema. The aim of the symposium is to move beyond reductive
binaries, and to encourage a range of fine-grained critical analyses that shed new light on the role of speed in cinema. How might we think fast/slow instead as a more complex form of relationality? How have fast/slow relations been forged and reconfigured
by evolving technologies, and by socio-economic and political realities? How have changing sites and modes of spectatorship inflected the way speed is registered phenomenologically? How do new cinematic practices and techniques—from ‘bullet time’ and ‘cosmic
zooms’ to ‘timestretching’—create multiple, in-between temporalities, paces, and rhythms, which challenge the fast/slow divide? What are the affective and critical valences of both fast and slow cinematic practices? Is there an ethics of cinematic speed? How
might we historicize these divisions, and evaluate the ideological and technological underpinnings of speed across cinema’s history?
Questions for consideration may include, but are not confined to, the following:
· The phenomenology of speed
· Speed and the ‘attention economy’
· Speed and/as textuality
· ‘Accelerationist’ vs. ‘Slow Cinema’ aesthetics
· Speed aesthetics and politics
· Affect and the ethics of cinematic speed
· Fast/Slow affect/effects: boredom, stimulation, tension,
sensation
The symposium will take place 4-5 April 2013 at
Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge