The Thirteenth Tel Aviv International Colloquium on Cinema and Television Studies

Tel Aviv, Israel, 15-17 June 2020
CFP deadline: 1 December 2019

Blind Spots of the Cinematic: Moving Images and the Loss of Sight

Blindness has long been associated with confusion, error, sin, and punishment while also being tied to a “second sight,” powers of prophecy, priesthood, and poetry. What role could it take in film, television, and media theories, which, perhaps more than other fields, have often been reluctant to equate knowledge and understanding with seeing? The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television is devoting its thirteenth international colloquium to the blindness and the blind spots of moving images. What could a “kino-eye-less” and a “blind” camera discover? What are the necessary blind spots of moving images without which they could not see? Do films reveal the “blind spots of the mind”? What can we see when media look away or are rendered sightless? What are the blind spots of moving image theory despite, or because of, the critique of vision and the gaze, sound studies, and the turn to the haptic, the corporeal, and the material?

Presentations on moving images may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
• Blind spots in moving images and their theory, history, programming, and curating;
• Images by, for, about, and accessible to, the blind; disability studies and moving images;
• Resisting screens that can see us and other forms of media surveillance; questioning interactive and crowd-sourced filmmaking and viewer participation;
• Being blinded by love, fear, obsession, hysteria, or tears; blindness and blindfolds in melodrama, comedy, tragedy, and thrillers; the trope of “the blind seer”;
• Eyes without a face and faces without eyes; in the eyes of the dead; seeing others seeing and images of eyes; “an eye for an eye” and “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out”;
• Post-human, mechanical, and animal perception, subjectivity, and consciousness;
• Technologies of seeing; the optical subconscious; “persistence of vision,” frame rates, animation, stillness, and lossy coding; monocular vision and stereoscopy;
• The unrepresentable; the extreme, the numbing, the impossible, the obscene, the abject, the sublime, the traumatic, the intimate, the secretive, and the sacred;
• Lost and unwatchable films; re-seeing moving images from the past through archives, compilation films, restorations, video essays, and remakes;
• Narrative gaps, jump-cuts, incomprehensible editing, offscreen spaces, opaque
characters, inaudible dialogue, absence of color or sound, and obscure allusions;
• Social, political, and aesthetic blind spots and exclusions;
• Blindness and blind spots as metaphor and model in the art, science, technology, ethics, politics, and scholarship of moving images;

Please submit an abstract of up to 300 words, 3-5 bibliographical items, and a short CV to the colloquium program committee at cineconf@tauex.tau.ac.il by 1 December 2019. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by January 2020.

Colloquium Committee: Ilan Avisar, Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Régine-Mihal Friedman, Nurith Gertz,
Boaz Hagin, Ohad Landesman, Ori Levin, Sandra Meiri, Judd Ne’eman, Gal Raz, Raz Yosef,
and Anat Zanger

Colloquium Coordinators: Tal Avidan and Shlomo Oz Uziel

Website: http://www.tau.ac.il/~cineconf/
Email: cineconf@tauex.tau.ac.il
All colloquium sessions will be in English.