Cluj-Napoca, October 23-24, 2015. Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca. Deadline for proposals: June 30, 2015.

Conference website: http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/the-real-and-the-intermedial

CALL FOR PAPERS

Following up on the themes introduced in our previous conferences dedicated to "film in the post-media age", the
"cinema of sensations", "rethinking intermediality in the digital age", and "figurations of intermediality in film", we
invite you to address one of the most puzzling phenomena of contemporary media and film: the intertwining of the
illusion of reality with effects of intermediality, connecting the experience of a palpable, everyday world with
artificiality, abstraction and the awareness of multiple mediations. While on an ontological level the concept of the
"real" has been radically challenged by the advent of digital technology in photography and the movies, we find that
new, audiovisual media have also effectively reshaped our sense of reality, and have expanded the areas of our
sensual reach into the world. In our post-postmodern age, the question of the "real" is back with a vengeance
regarding all aspects of media. The digital image, as a "graphic mode" has not only brought back painting reinstating
"the artist' as the source and origin of the movie" (T. Elsaesser), but in cinema, television and new media, we also
have diverse and astonishing examples in which hypermediacy fulfils "the desire for immediacy" (J. D. Bolter), and we
see productive intersections between the emphasis on the senses, on the physical-biological, socio-political "reality"
of existence and conspicuous, intermedial stylization. Cultural differences, subjectivity, a sense of history and place
are often articulated through techniques of intermediality in avant-garde experiments, documentary practices or
fiction films alike. As a rule, the "haptic" image can be seen as the gateway to a myriad of connections between
cinema and the other arts. In certain cases, a reflexive foregrounding of mediality and constructedness has become
not an instrument of ironic detachment but of a search for authenticity: all of which may also bring into focus the coexperience of "the real" with the "intermedial".
We are especially interested in the following topics (but welcome any paper that proposes a relevant approach to
either keywords of the conference):
"Reality effect", hybridity and media reflexivity in film, television, and new media.
Intermediality and inter-sensuality in film: e.g. the represented and sensed body as a site of intermedial relations,
haptic "texturality" and interartiality.
Figurations of intermediality as imprints of (and meditations upon) history and time, cultural and personal identity.
"Analogue" versus "digital" viewed in terms of the "real" versus the "intermedial".
Painterly stylization and "reality effect" in slow cinema.
Inflections of realism and intermediality within the post-communist cinema of Central and Eastern Europe.
Magical realism in world cinema.
The merging of the "representation" and the "real" within the rhetoric of intermedial cinema (e.g. the tensions
underlying "poetic realism", techniques of figuration and disfiguration, the various forms of media collage or the
tableau vivant in cinema).
Intermediality theorized or analyzed from the perspective of phenomenological or postphenomenological points
of view.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

LCIA NAGIB, Professor of Film, Director of the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures.
LAURA MULVEY, Professor at the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of
London.
JRGEN E. MLLER, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Bayreuth.

Submission of proposals:
Deadline: May 25, 2015. We will get back to you with our decision by June 1, 2015.
SUBMISSION FORMS are available on the website: http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/the-real-and-the-intermedial
For additional information you can contact the organizers directly at this e-mail address: 2015.real.intermedial@gmail.com