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Call for Papers on Cinema and Politics

Audiences enjoy, find and sometimes lose themselves, remember and forget through films. They take pleasure, get uncomfortable, learn, interpret and think. They discover other worlds, get away from their own realities, accept certain given values, intensify their thoughts or start doubting their knowledge of themselves and the world… Cinema as a mass communication medium, an entertainment or a propaganda tool, an enormous industry, and a field of art, has always been related to politics either directly or indirectly from the beginning to today.

In the early years of the history of cinema, films drew lots of people fascinated with moving images to movie theatres; then, various ways of telling stories were experienced so as not to lose the audience who had long gotten used to the reproduction of motion; and, as of the first half of the 1900s, both directors and the audience learned and acknowledged basic rules regarding films. By means of these visual and narrative codes, the industry aimed to attract audiences, and, of course, make commercial profit, thus giving way to the reproduction of certain moral norms. However, people have always attempted to discover the aesthetic opportunities offered by the apparatus since the beginning of cinema.

As stated before, cinema is always related to politics when good and bad, right and wrong, and normal and abnormal are defined through representations; when films are used as a means to impose ideologies on masses; when the aesthetic opportunities of the apparatus and alternatives to the dominant are discovered; when emotions and thoughts are interpreted through cinematic language; and when an enormous and highly profitable industry keeps seeking new ways to exist via the opportunities offered by technology.

In this issue of Moment Journal, we look forward to your contributions addressing various aspects of the relationship between cinema and politics including but not limited to the themes below until October 3, 2016:

-          Representation strategies of dominant mainstream/popular-commercial cinema

-          Political economy of production, distribution and exhibition networks in the film industry

-          Nation-state, nationalism and cinema

-          Co-productions and transnational cinema

-          Cinema of migration

-          Imperialism and cinema

-          “Political”, alternative or counter cinema

-          Construction of gender in cinema

-          Feminist cinema

-          Queer cinema

-          Cinema and memory

-          State, cultural policies and cinema

-          Cinema and the zeitgeist

-          Relationship between cinema and reality

-          Audience researches, reception studies and politics

Theme Editors:

Assist. Prof. Dr. Çağla Karabağ Sarı

Assist. Prof. Dr. Eren Yüksel