FILM-PHILOSOPHY:
PROSPECTS, DIRECTIONS AND NEW PERSPECTIVES
January 5-7, 2016
Film and Television Department
Tel Aviv University

CFP: Interdisciplinary conference on new perspectives and directions in Film-Philosophy.

Much has been learned from, and many interesting avenues for rethinking the interconnections between and among film studies and philosophy have been opened by, the burst of interest in “film-philosophy” over the past two decades. Calling upon philosophical and critical resources culled from both disciplines, this vibrant and still-emerging field presents an agenda for the kind of work for which we hope to provide a platform here: research that combines a careful and astute critique of objects of profound aesthetic appreciation with a rich and disciplined application of the methods of philosophical argumentation. We aim to expand this body of work by bringing together leading and emerging scholars and filmmakers to investigate together the significance of the objective phenomenon of the moving image and its subjective experience in order that we might enhance ongoing dialogues both within film studies and philosophical aesthetics individually and also between these discourses.

Such an engagement is especially timely and topical because of the pressing need to reconfigure the now maturing notion of “film-philosophy” with respect to these disciplines from which it was born and which it brings together. All too often, film-philosophers find themselves responding to a theoretical legacy in which the conceptual is deified and the image abjected. We aim, among other things, to deepen film-philosophy by challenging this legacy from multiple perspectives. From film studies, we wish to examine how both recent cinematic practice and its theoretical reception shed new light on the status of the cinematic image as an object of (subjective) experience and thinking. From within the history of philosophy, we wish to investigate the status of “the moving image” as a phenomenon within philosophical aesthetics, so as to reformulate the relation between image and language as objects of analysis.

We welcome a range of papers which might be conceptual and theoretical or practice-as-research in orientation. We are interested in papers, for example, in the following broad areas:

• Filmmaking and film analysis in the age of film-philosophy.
• Filmmaking as philosophical practice.
• Rethinking objections to the idea of philosophy through film.
• The difference between film theory and philosophy of film in film studies.
• New technologies and their effect on philosophizing cinema (CGI, 3D, VOD, etc).
• Film theory in the age of film-philosophy.
• Specific genres and types pertained to philosophy (documentary, horror, etc.).
• Essay films and installation essays as philosophy.
• Individual filmmakers as “film-philosophy” auteurs.
We are also open to topics that include (but are not limited to):

• Film-philosophy methodologies: between theory and practice.
• Authorship, spectatorship and narrative.
• Film and ethics.
• Film, ontology and epistemology.
• Specific concepts and metaphysics (time, memory, subjectivity, the real).
• Film theory in the age of posthumanism.
• Film and phenomenology.
• Re-thinking cinema along the “film-philosophy” lines.

SUBMITTING PROPOSALS:

Send an Abstract (up to 500 words in length, including the research objectives, theoretical framework and methodology) and a brief Bio-CV (100 words maximum), by August 1st, 2015 to taufilmphilosophy@gmail.com. Each proposal must include title, name(s), affiliation, and email addresses of the author(s). Notification of acceptance/rejection of abstracts will be sent by September 1st, 2015.
Travel and accommodation costs will be covered by participants.

For further enquiries, please contact the organizers: Dr. Shai Biderman (bidermans@post.tau.ac.il) or Dr. Ohad Landesman (lander@post.tau.ac.il).