CFP: Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice | University of Toronto & Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2017

Film and media scholars have begun to pay increasing attention to the entangled histories of cinematic media and forms of exploration: from audiovisual documentation of explorations of nature, people, and places, on the one hand, to what Stan Brakhage has called “adventures in perception,” or the manner in which these media may also be instruments of exploration in their own right, tracing the depths and limits of perception and the perceivable. 

From early cinema’s panoramas and travelogues, to more recent made-for-TV spectacles and immersive IMAX experiences, scholars have begun to examine and conceptualize the histories of this heterogeneous mode of filmmaking, demonstrating its often underexamined importance to some of the key questions posed by cinema and media studies. In light of postcolonial and globalization theories, as well as ecological and environmental criticism, attention has been given to filmic practices perceived as instruments of colonization, conquest, and ecological devastation through visual surveying, capture, and domestication. The legacies of imperialism, racism, and orientalism haunt the history and even present practice of the cinema of exploration. This mode of production has been tightly entwined with the extraction and exploitation of resources, territories, and species that have become increasingly politicized and urgent in an era of increasing ecological precarity. But these same practices have also been instrumental in cultivating wonder about the world and its multifarious inhabitants, and even serving as sites for reimagining one’s relations to them.

Send a 500-600 word abstract and a brief biographical note to luca.caminati@concordia.ca and james.cahill@utoronto.ca by March 15th, 2017. The editorial team will notify selected proposals by April 15th, 2017.  We expect completed manuscripts [between 7,000 and 9,000 words] be due December 1st, 2017, and accepted for publication pending editorial and external readers evaluation. All submissions will be subjected to double blind peer review.

[Cinema of Exploration]