Spaces of Encounter (JCC) special issue–cfp

Call for Paper: Spaces of Encounter
Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Special Issue 2021

This special issue seeks innovative research that explores the many spaces in which cinema (broadly defined) is exhibited and encountered in China and the Sinophone world from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Where do we encounter cinema? As digital technologies transform the ways in which moving images are produced and consumed, they also call attention to the extent to which cinema has previously been defined and theorized through a specific exhibition space, namely, the movie theater. American film historian William Paul, for example, asks “if movies are no longer inescapably an art of the theater, have we lost an understanding of the art form that seemed self-evident to past audiences?” But in China and the Sinophone world, cinema was never bound up with the movie theater. From its first appearance in luxurious hotels and tea gardens, cinema has been exhibited in many venues alongside the commercial movie theater, such as classrooms, village squares, workers’ clubs, video halls (luxiang ting), museums, long-distance buses, and the living room. In addition, theme parks and tourist sites offer entry into filmed worlds through characters and landscapes. Large urban screens and personal mobile devices turn sidewalks, malls, and public transit into potential screening spaces (or what Francesco Casetti calls hypertopias). New digital spaces of exhibition afford users novel ways of interaction and performance, such as danmaku/danmu commentaries and the ability to easily create gifs from the video browser.

The editor of this special issue invites contributions that investigate spatial encounters with cinema from heterogeneous locations. The questions explored may include but are not limited to:

  • What are the infrastructures, technologies, and apparatus that enable an encounter with cinema?
  • How are social practices and experiences shaped by the different spaces in which cinema appears? How are the senses (sight, sound, touch, etc.) activated?
  • How does cinema’s presence in specific spaces constitutes the crossing between worlds? What is the relationship between the space of screening and the screened spaces?
  • How does cinema’s relocation to divergent spaces shape notions of medium specificity and the film form?
  • What theoretical lenses and methodologies are productive for studying historical and contemporary spaces of cinema?
  • How does the spatial ordering of cinema relate to the general production of space in Chinese and Sinophone societies throughout the 20th and 21st century?

Abstracts of 250-300 words are due by April 30, 2020. Selected abstracts will be invited to submit full manuscripts (8000 words maximum) by September 30 for consideration of inclusion in a special issue for Journal of Chinese Cinemas in late 2021.

Please send abstracts and questions to guest editor Chenshu Zhou (NYU Shanghai; zhouchenshu@gmail.com).

Journal of Chinese Cinemas is a major peer-refereed academic publication devoted to the study of Chinese film, drawing on the recent world-wide growth of interest in Chinese cinemas. All peer review is double blind.

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