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*Cinema** 10: Call for Papers*

*PAINTING, MOVING IMAGES AND PHILOSOPHY*

Edited by Susana Viegas (IFILNOVA and Deakin University) and James Williams
(Deakin University)



*Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image *(cjpmi.ifilnova.pt/)
invites submissions for its issue on *Painting, Moving Images and
Philosophy*.

This issue will be dedicated to exploring the relationship between painting
and film, their irreducible heterogeneity, and the idea of establishing a
philosophical propaedeutic to better understand the way the visual arts
matter to us. It aims to question the limits, the adaptation and the
irruption of the traditional styles and categories of romanticist and
impressionist painting into the moving image; how they are challenged and
how they are reworked.

The issue will address the following questions. Why is the relationship of
painting to film an aesthetic issue? Why is it important not only to
experience their differences and what they have in common, but also to
reflect upon the implications of their difficult relations?

Film is not a pure art. Its impurity has been one of its main weaknesses in
the philosophical debate about film as art, but also, we counterargue, its
strongest quality and distinctive sign. The aesthetic answer to the iconic
dialogue between painting and moving images has been manifold, as film
borrows, eludes or reinvents plastic values and the static nature of
painterly images. It is tempting to say that most
filmmakers/cinematographers borrow their film’s visual composition from
painting. Painting is then in the creation of a mood or in the presence of
certain motifs and figures (for instance, where the *tableau vivant *becomes
*plan-tableau*). However, to keep following this citation method, already
criticized by Jacques Aumont, is a way of suspending the heterogeneity of
painting and moving images. More importantly, it is to fail to think about
their differences.

The debate around the quality and the suitability of films about art is
longstanding. It is a debate where film, with its automatic techniques, is
seen as a betrayal of the spiritual, unique and subjective effort of the
painter. Painting does not need to legitimise film as an art. In his most
famous essay on the topic, “Painting and Cinema”, André Bazin separates the
two pictorial spaces - the centripetal screen and the centrifugal frame -
but he is still limited by an essentialist point of view that, in practice,
painters such as Degas and Monet had already challenged. Subsequently, painting
reinvented itself with abstraction and suprematism, but how could film
respond to this artistically? With its hyper-realistic images (*tableaux
vivants*), film also exceeds the economy of the narrative. Its purpose is
contemplation: without narrative, without plot, not coping with or
representing a certain reality, just being … visually stunning. But can we
say that experiencing this beauty make us any better as human beings? Maybe
it makes us worse?

 Setting aside the orthodox *paragone* debate ( while recognising the
interest in discussing quotation in art documentaries, for example), what
interests us most is Bazin’s statement that the encounter of the two
art-forms creates a “new-born aesthetic creature” and that films such as
Resnais’ *Van Gogh* and Kast’s *Goya, Disasters of War* “are works in their
own right. They are their own justification.” Can we say that the imitation
(film) has the same value as the original (painting)? Or do the terms not
apply in this case? What then should we make of the aesthetic
symbiosis of Clouzot’s
*The Mystery of Picasso*?

For Gilles Deleuze, it is important to ask which artistic problems film’s
audio-visual sensations answer. Within his nonrepresentational thought of
the visual arts, images do not simply illustrate or narrate something;
painting and film are not even in the present. The key question becomes:
how to unfold the virtual movement, the forces of visibility, created with
the expansion of space and the stretching of time?

Thus, for the 10th issue of *Cinema*, we wish to pay attention to cinematic
images and to question them in their iconic status: how to create
sensations with a certain visual tone and a visual rhythm; how to imagine
(to create) moving images? We wish to put the technological concept of
montage aside, as a secondary aspect, and focus on a phenomenological
approach to the cinematic plan, to its duration, and also to its
pictorality.



Particular themes of interest include the following subjects:

§   Revisiting Malevich, Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Jarman, Malick, John Alcott,
Robert Burks, Kant, Bazin, Merleau-Ponty, Aumont, Deleuze, Bonitzer, and
Lyotard…

§   Aesthetic thoughts about the sublime, excess and absence, *aisthesis*,
the pregnant instant, the use of colour/black and white/shadows,
*plan-tableau*, …

§   Questioning Godard’s claim that Lumière was the last of the
Impressionist painters (*La Chinoise*).

§   Analysing Merleau-Ponty’s rendering the invisible visible: how to
express and film the invisible forces, the unseen, the spiritual, the
suprasensible?

§   Comparing Benjamin and Epstein’s opposite perspectives on film’s
metaphysics.

§   Film, the iconic turn and criticism of *mimesis*. Examining Tarkovsky’s
claim that the metaphor is an image.

§   Film’s excess of visuality and the hyperrealism in moving images in
dialogue with a criticism on the limits of aestheticism, mannerism and the
abundance of clichés.

§   Film’s temporal ecstasies: the depth of field, the slow motion,
distorted and blurred images, the sublime of the now.

§   The crisis of framing, double frame, *mise en abyme*, the screen as a
canvas, from the diptych/tryptic to multiple screens.

*   *   *   *

Submissions are accepted in English and French and should be sent to Susana
Viegas: [log in to unmask] Prospective authors should submit a short
CV along with the abstract. Abstract proposals (max. 500 words) are
due on *February
1st, 2018*, and a notice of acceptance will be sent to the authors in the
second week of February.

A selection of authors will be invited to submit full papers according to
the journal guidelines. Acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee
publication, since all papers will be subjected to double blind peer-review.

*   *   *   *

For further information or questions about the issue, please contact Susana
Viegas: [log in to unmask]



*Cinema* also invites submissions to its other sections: *Interviews*,
*Conference* *Reports* and *Book Reviews*. Please consult the web site
<http://cjpmi.ifilnova.pt/about/> of the journal for further details.

____________________________
*Susana Viegas*
FCT Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Ifilnova/Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Honorary Fellow, Deakin University

CV: DeGóis
<http://www.degois.pt/visualizador/curriculum.jsp?key=8331942135796713>  |
E-mail: [log in to unmask]

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