[csaa-forum] Call for papers: Untimely cinema: cinema out of time – a special Issue of Screening the Past (2011)

[Therese Davis]

Call for papers:  Untimely cinema: cinema out of time – a special  
Issue of Screening the Past (2011)

Guest Editors: Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis
“Untimeliness deployed as an effective intellectual strategy, far from  
being a gesture of indifference to time, is a bid to reset time.”  
Wendy Brown, Edgework p.4

Over the last few years untimeliness has become an area of increasing  
interest across a number of disciplinary fields from political theory  
to performance studies. The work of Wendy Brown on untimeliness and  
critical theory, Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, and some of  
Jacques Rancière’s work have played an important role in this turn to  
the untimely. Film, which arguably has a privileged relationship to  
untimeliness, has often made an appearance in recent critical work on  
the untimely though this has primarily been in work from disciplines  
other than film theory.  This special issue of Screening the Past sets  
out to explore some of the various ways in which untimeliness  
underlies and informs cinema. We are interested in papers that explore  
films and/or cinema as “out of time” in any of the various meanings of  
the phrase: out of time in the sense of running out of time (as for  
instance when, in the post-celluloid era,  cinema is understood as  
operating on “borrowed time”); out of time in the sense of being out  
of step (films or film practices that perform or summon an aesthetics  
of untimeliness); and out of time in the sense of being (seemingly)  
disconnected from the present, or out of history (as in film practices  
considered too marginal, too local, to be “in” history, film practices  
that have been understood as belated, too early or too late, as out of  
step with history).
Paper proposals for papers of 5000-7500 words are sought on any of the  
following topics:
·      Aesthetics of untimeliness in particular films and/or film  
practices.

·      Films that have, or have had, an “untimely” reception.

·      Untimely spectatorship/untimely spectatorial practices  
(including papers addressing the ways that changing forms of  
exhibition and distribution can produce untimely spectatorial  
practices).

·      The ways in which cinema shapes/has shaped our experiences of— 
and understandings of—untimeliness.

·      The ways that film might offer what Brown calls “a different  
sense of the times and a different sense of time” (Brown 15),  
including both the current political times and the times of this  
particular moment in cinema’s history.

·      Film’s residues and returns through various forms of media  
convergence and/or through new sites and forms of exhibition.

We are also interested in papers that examine the discipline of film  
theory itself in relation to ideas of the untimely.
This issue aims to generate different ways of thinking about film and  
politics both by looking at how film, and indeed how film theory, can  
“reset” time and by looking at how cinema’s place in “our times” is  
being proposed and understood.
Please send abstracts of 500 words to Dr Jodi Brooks (j.brooks at unsw.edu.au 
) or Dr Therese Davis (therese.davis at arts.monash.edu.au)  by November  
30th. Papers selected for publication will be due July 4th 2011.
Screening the Past is a refereed journal and is ranked an A* journal  
in the ARC-ERA rankings of international scholarly journals in both  
the Film, Television, and Digital Media category and the Historical  
Studies category.










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