Frames, Issue 7, Spring 2015
“Conflicting Images, Contested Realities”
The centenary of World War I has brought into view an exceptional range of palimpsestic re-imaginings of this historical moment, from Joe Sacco’s magisterial graphic panorama, The Great War, to the restoration and re-issue of films such as Verdun andWooden Crosses. The multi-modal writings and rewritings of the memory of WWI display a remarkable range of cultural investments, which can be mapped along a continuum of contested to consensual memory. If, as Maurice Halbwachs suggests, the past is a social construction reflecting the present, how does this present reimagining of WWI confront or even contradict past representations? How do these conflicting images and contested realities redefine our perceptions of the past and present as they are negotiated through what Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone describe as a “politics of memory”?
With WWI’s ‘re-presentations’ serving as a precipitating example that inspires reflection on images of conflict, and, more importantly, on the conflicting images that have emerged in its wake,this issue of Frames Cinema Journal seeks related essays and proposals prompting dialogue about the cultural processes of meaning formation that both derive from and generate contested realities through audiovisual media.Here, in line with the ideas of Jacques Rancière, artistic practices will be approached as providing the ground for both dissent and for social consensus, a politics that is felt and articulated as an aesthetic experience. We thus invite critical work on the insertion of aesthetics into social and political debates and on how images and portrayals of contested realities are produced, distributed, and consumed.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Audiovisual representations of war, political conflicts, conflict zones in occupied territories
- Conflicting representations of history and the historicity of film
- Constructed media images of gender, identity and its place in society
- Conflicts within the production and distribution of media images
- Debates provoked by and expressed through social media
- Media networks and activism
For article submissions, a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical note should be sent by 15 January, 2015, to
Eileen Rositzka and Amber Shields (editors-in-chief)
E-mail: framesjournal@gmail.com
Notification will follow by 31 January, 2015. Deadline for the submission of a final draft: 15 March, 2015. We also seek video contributions enquiring the proposed topics. Submissions may be sent to the editors in the form of a link using an online streaming source (Vimeo, YouTube, etc.).
http://framescinemajournal.com/call-for-papers/