[csaa-forum] CFP: This is the Sea: Cinema at the Shoreline

[Sean Redmond]

Apologies for cross-posting

Call For Papers: This is the Sea: Cinema at the Shoreline

Edited by Brady Hammond, Victoria University of Wellington, and Sean Redmond, Deakin University, Melbourne

We would like to propose a collection that looks at those films in which the relationship between the sea, shoreline and beach are of particular narrative, aesthetic, and ideological significance. This is the Sea: Cinema at the Shoreline will explore the ways in which the meeting places between land and sea offer up sites where complex issues around identity, belonging, otherness, nomadism, death, and renewal are played out. For the editors of this collection, the shoreline holds particular significance for understanding the way in which the relations between sea and land can create liminal, often transgressive, possibilities for representational and phenomenological encounters between people who ‘find themselves’ at the water’s edge.

In recent years, the question of space and place in cinema has provided fertile ground for analysis and discussion. For example, exciting work has emerged on; the rural in cinema (Fowler, Helfield, 2006); landscape and heritage (Higson, 2003); the geographies and trajectories of the city (Abbas, 1997, Clarke, 1997, Mennel, 2008); and on the complex, multi-relational, visual-mobile spaces of cine architecture (Bruno, 2002). However, little sustained work has taken place on this specific (‘non’) location, on this dry and wet landscape where key transformations and happenings take place.   The editors intend for This is the Sea: Cinema at the Shoreline to be an exciting addition to the literature on cinema landscapes, offering valuable new insights into the way this location or site of transformation can be read and experienced.

Indicative Themes
Disaffected youth at the shoreline
Suicide at the beach, at the water’s edge
Death (physical, existential, symbolic)
Birth (physical, existential, symbolic)
Love and romance at the beach
The journey down stream
The watery arrival of the monster/creature/alien
The ‘blockbuster’ shoreline, beach
The conquest/landing/occupation
The harbour
Ecology at the water’s edge
Deterritorialisation
The beach as escape, hideout, prison, body
Class, race, gender, sexuality and the beach
The shoreline, beach, harbour as heterotopia of compensation and/or illusion
Purification, renewal, and re-birth at the beach
The beach, shoreline as national myth
The sea as limit
The beach as a site of nostalgia, play, innocence lost or regained
Transgression, hedonism, at the water’s edge
The beach as a space, a location, a time of subtraction, of negative space
Contemplation – the cerebral shoreline
Colour sensation – the aesthetics of the beach, harbour.

Indicative Films
The Seventh Seal
Jaws
Planet of the Apes
The 400 Blows
Road to Perdition
The Warriors
Hana-bi, A Scene at the Sea, Sonatine, Kikijuro,
>From Here to Eternity
Ponyo
A Ma Soeur!
Bhaji on the Beach
Les Vacances de M. Hulot
Coming Home
8 1/2
Cast Away
Saving Private Ryan
Blue Hawaii
300
Y Tu Mamá También
Maborosi
Dark City
Blue Lagoon
The Piano
Rain
On the Waterfront
Brighton Rock
Point Break
The Big Wednesday
Godzilla/Gojiro
The Woman of the Dunes
The Beach
Rumble Fish
The Secret of Roan Inish
Floating Weeds
Jason and the Argonauts
Whale Rider
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Submission guidelines and time line

Enquiries and 500 word abstracts (attached as a word document) should be sent to Brady Hammond at Brady.Hammond at vuw.ac.nz and Sean Redmond at s.redmond at deakin.edu.au by the 1st April 2011.

Accepted abstracts/contributors will be notified by the 1st May 2011

Articles of between 6,500-7,000 words due by 1st November 2011

Final Drafts by 1st February 2012

Brady Hammond is a completing PhD candidate in the Film Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, looking at violence and negative peace in the pre and post 9/11 blockbuster film.

Sean Redmond is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Deakin University, Melbourne, and editor of the journal Celebrity Studies and author of Flowering Blood: the Cinema of Takeshi Kitano (Forthcoming, Columbia University Press)



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