Cluj-Napoca, October 23-24, 2015. Deadline for proposals: May 25, 2015.

Conference venue: Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca Calea Turzii nr. 4.

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, sociopolitical "reality" of existence and conspicuous, intermedial stylization. The photo-graphic effect of stillness
in the moving image and its fundamental relation to indexicality is exploited to the full in the so-called
"slow cinema" canon, as we see in the breathtaking films of Pedro Costa, Abbas Kiarostami, Bla Tarr,
Alexander Sokurov, Lav Diaz, for example. Or we may think of cases in which painterly images of ethereal
beauty are created alongside violent, shockingly naturalistic scenes in the films of Carlos Reygadas, Kim-Ki
Duk, etc. Jean-Luc Godard's new movie, Goodbye to Language, a bold incursion into the use of 3D, renders
scenes of nature and the texture of everyday things in vivid, artificial imagery. (Even the recent teaming up
of David Attenborough and Bjrk for such a new media Gesamtkunstwerk experiment as Biophilia,
emphasizes this duality.) 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 co-experience 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 analysed 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, University of

Reading, Director of International Engagement, Department of Film, Theatre and Television, editor
of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (2013), Theorizing World
Cinema (2012), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (2009), author of World Cinema and the Ethics of
Realism (2011), as well as several seminal articles on Brazilian, German, French, and Japanese cinema.
JRGEN E. MLLER, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Bayreuth, author

of Intermedialitt, Fromen moderner kultureller Kommunikation (1996), editor of Digital Media and the
Expansion of the Arts (2006), Intermdialit et socialit. Histoire et gographie d'un
concept (2007), Media Encounters and Media Theories (2008), and articles on the history and theory of
intermediality, and digital media.
Further keynotes to be announced.

Submission of proposals
We invite proposals both for individual papers and pre-constituted panels. Panels may consist of 3 or 4
speakers.
Deadline for the submission of proposals: May 25, 2015.
We will get back to you with our decision by June 1, 2015.
Please fill in one of the SUBMISSION FORMS below:
INDIVIDUAL SUBMISSION
PANEL SUBMISSION
For additional information you can contact the organizers directly at this e-mail address:
2015.real.intermedial@gmail.com
The official language of the conference is English.
The time for presentations is limited to maximum 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute debate.
Conference fee (which includes participation, conference buffet and banquet): 120 EUR, special fee for
participants from post-communist/communist countries: 70 EUR. The fee is to be paid on arrival at the
conference registration desk.
A selection of papers based on the conference presentations will be published in our department's
international, peer reviewed journal (Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Film & Media Studies) indexed in several
international databases or in a conference volume.