CALL FOR PAPERS

We accept articles – in Polish or in English language – concerning subjects as announced below, as well as papers not strictly connected with the main topic of the volume, especially if they are related to history of Polish cinema, film theory or issues from the area of film and media studies that are underresearched so far. We also accept reviews of the books on film published in Poland or concerning Polish cinema and media.

No. 129 (Spring 2025)

TRAUMA

(submission deadline: December 9, 2024)

According to some scholars, references to traumatic memories recurring in the form of visual flashbacks only began to appear in historical records of war trauma after the invention of the cinematograph. Throughout the 20^th century, scholarly reflection on trauma has grown and changed in parallel to the development of film – their paths have intersected since the beginning of the medium. These paths seem to intertwine ever more tightly; not only has the discourse of trauma permeated the artistic fringes of filmmaking, but it has established itself in mainstream cinema as well. In recent years, voices have been raised criticizing the (over)exploitation of trauma in contemporary cinema, where more and more often, the entire emotional background – not only of a character but of the film itself – is reduced to the revelation of some tragic events from the protagonist’s past (‘the trauma plot’). Trauma – adopted or perhaps appropriated by the humanities and social sciences from the language of medicine and psychology – serves nowadays as a key paradigm for both cultural research and filmmaking.

In the next volume we want to reflect on the productiveness of this paradigm in light of both the increasing ubiquity of trauma and its definitional flexibility. We are interested in trauma understood not only as a subject of cinematic storytelling but also as a form that structures audiovisual expression and an effect produced in the viewer. What means and strategies are used to narrate traumatic experiences? Is cinema the site of the eternal return of trauma? Is its symbolic representation even possible?

Examples of thematic areas:

• trauma as a contemporary cultural paradigm – causes, theories, contexts
• historical transformations of film representations of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• ethical issues in the cinematic representation of trauma and/or its effects
• the role of film in legitimizing or attributing symbolic capital to different histories of trauma (individual, collective, historical, national, intergenerational)
• film as a field of research into collective traumatic experiences and as a starting point for the process of forming a collective historical memory
• the role, function, and potential of film in representing and dealing with (individual and collective) traumatic events
• trauma as the subject of documentary film, giving voice to victims and/or perpetrators, the ‘perpetrator cinema’perspective (Raya Morag)
• trauma in the perspective of film autobiography: auto-fictional representations of one’s own traumatic experiences as a form of self-therapy
• traumatizing situations on set and traumatic experiences of actors – and their echoes in the film
• negative viewing experiences: painful, hurtful, traumatizing films (which ones? why? under what conditions? in whose case?)
• trauma as a crisis of representation (Cathy Caruth): narrative techniques and cinematic means of expression used to represent the unrepresentable
• film’s ability (or inability, or refusal) to respond to trauma
• the negation of narration or cinema/film as a medium, a means of artistic, political, and identity expression (doubt or even conscious rejection of this potential) in the face of trauma

No. 130 (Summer 2025)

NEW GENRE IDENTITY

(submission deadline: March 10, 2025)

With the title of this thematic volume, we would like to inspire our prospective contributors to consider not so much genre as a category that makes it possible to organize or structuralize large sets of films or to distinguish canons, but rather genre identity as a specific property. If we second Altman’s observation that genre is lodged in the minds of filmmakers or viewers, and not inherent to a particular group of texts, this property can be identified, for example, with the susceptibility of audiovisual messages to various typologizing operations, that is, with their greater or lesser conventionalization.

Thus approached, genre identity can also be seen as an element of the cultural theory of genre, which departs from the imperative of defining, and tends to situate that which is potentially genre-related in the landscape of wide-ranging cultural changes and flows between various media. This perspective would allow us to break free from the hegemony of traditional genre paradigms and reach out towards new areas.

Therefore, we envisage the contributions to this thematic volume – both theoretical considerations and case studies – as grasping the problem of genre identity through the prism of genre lability, as moving towards redefining hallowed canons, as opening up to new approaches that contest or deconstruct, as addressing the formation of new genre forms, the evolution or renaissance of old ones, and, finally, the genre criteria or markers as seen from different perspectives and in a wide media spectrum: film, television, streaming, video blogosphere, Internet broadcasts. We would also expect that, as per the dictum of genre novelty, the proposed critical reflection should refer to 21^st-century phenomena or works.

Examples of thematic areas:

• the need for theoretical clarifications/redefinitions: general and specific genre categories (confused in analytical practice), genre vs. cycle/series or trend (closed vs. open formula), genre as a vague descriptive category in film criticism
• genre typologies and hierarchies: considerations of their usefulness and functionality in film research
• genre hybrids and crossovers: mashups, remixes, science fiction/fantasy-horror, historical fantasy, auteur cinema drawing on the conventions and aesthetics of genre cinema
• genre markers: content, space, sound, narrative, paratext; style vs. genre markers
• new (?) media forms/technologies and their genre specificity: videoblog, mobile films, reels (TikTok, Instagram, etc.), genre vs. virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)
• genre and marketing: the profitability of genre cinema, genre mimicry (e.g., editing psychological thriller trailers as advertising a horror), film franchises and universes vis-à-vis genre, genre principles vis-à-vis production studio profiles (e.g., A24, Blumhouse, Monkeypaw Productions)
• genre intersectionality: genre formation/transformation as influenced by (sub)cultural or social factors (e.g., correlations between fandoms and specific genres; audiovisual genres in social media; the influence of literary genres)
• the specificity/recognizability of genre structures in the perspective of neuroscience and neurocinematics
• the birth and death of genre: factors/films that give rise to genres; reasons for the exhaustion of genre formulas; do we need new genres?
• new genre identity in television and streaming: formats, conventions, series/cycles, transitivity of formulas, affinity of solutions
• niche (sub)genres and the tradition of ‘old’ genres (mockbuster, mumblecore, Lovecraftian horror, etc.)

No. 131 (Autumn 2025)

CINEMA/MEDIA ECOLOGY

(submission deadline: June 2, 2025)

Ecology is a domain that uses insights from various sciences – biology, geography, economics, sociology, etc. – to study the mutual influences between the animate and inanimate environments, or, put differently: between humans, nature, and technology. With regard to cinema and/or media, this term obviously evokes concepts such as ‘green cinema’ or ‘ecocinema,’ which are based primarily on the film industry’s relationship to environmental issues and activism. While this perspective is not excluded from the proposed thematic volume, we would like to go beyond it, towards phenomena such as systemicity or environmentality. We encourage reflection on both the system created by cinema or media themselves and their various, not always evident, relations with other systems (e.g., ecosystems, including those entirely independent of humans). We seek contributions that not so much juxtapose culture and nature or isolate one category from the other, but rather discern the mechanisms of their functioning, similarities, and even interdependencies; mechanisms that are based on the balance between various factors and influences or vulnerable to its absence.

We invite considerations of the proposed topic in various orders: ontological or epistemological, ethical or aesthetic, historical or contemporary, as well as textual or infrastructural.

Examples of thematic areas:

• film as a cognitive tool in natural sciences
• ecocritical perspective in film and media studies
• the transgressiveness of relationships between humans, media, and nature
• aesthetics of nature and its (possible) relations to cinema and media: experiencing nature as art, Gernot Böhme’s ecological aesthetics of nature (the aesthetic, sensual experience of nature; nature not contrasted with culture or technology: ‘expanded ecology’)
• in lieu of representation: transformation and creation as a paradigm of ecological audiovisual art, i.e., how can films teach us to perceive the world differently?
• theory and practice of research on ‘ecocinema’
• globality and locality of media ecosystems
• transmedia worlds as narrative types and strategies; fandom, online discourses and other paratexts as a film ecosystem
• the convergence/divergence of ‘eco-ethical’ perspectives in film content and production (growing environmental consciousness vs. disregard for labour rights; environmental devastation as part of other social problems, etc.)
• zero waste cinema in terms of materiality (waste reduction and disposal) and/or aesthetics (against the aesthetics of excess)
• film/cinema/media history and the growing environmental awareness, i.e., what may discourses in film theory and history have to do with nature?
• AI and its influence on pro-environmental developments in cinema/media