Landscape and Cinema (deadline: June 30, 2016)

Mapping Landscape through the Moving Image: From the Image of the World to the World of Images

Cinema emerged as an extension of planimetric logic, not only for its affinities with an atlas, but above all due to its ability to show places around the world in the shortest possible time, turning the movie theatre into a theatre of modernity's journeys for the new voyeur-voyageur, as Giuliana Bruno has explained. Cinema is therefore a technology of place, that is, a social and aesthetic practice able to produce spatiality through the moving image. On the one hand, it can faithfully depict landscapes and places, on the other hand, it can construct spaces that are either complementary or alternative to their real counterparts.

This ability is shared by other media, such as television, video games, and many digital applications for tablets and mobile phones which have appeared in recent years. In these forums, images no longer reproduce the sensible world, but the intelligible one, thereby destabilizing the common experience of space and time. Nowadays, places and times are intermingled according to a logic of ubiquity and instantaneity and thanks to their virtuality, they multiply in a process of deterritorialisation and desynchronisation, through which the human being is placed within and beyond the space-time of phenomenal reality.

Cinema thus contributes to the acceleration of the globalization process and the modification of the conception of space-time. Digital tools developed in recent decades have increased the formal, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities for reproducing and representing the world beyond the cartographic thought based on the Euclidean-Newtonian framework. In these circumstances, as media landscapes and geographies currently shape our worldview, we must discuss their process of creation in order to understand the logics that determined the past and present media geopolitics.

This new special issue of Aniki. Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image. Which is focused on the relations between mapping, landscape, and the moving image, will be edited by the coordinators of the Work Group ‘Landscape and Cinema’ of the Association of the Moving Image Researchers: Filipa Rosário, Iván Villarmea and Francesco Giarrusso. We welcome contributions from such areas as film studies, cultural studies, aesthetics, history, geography, sociology, anthropology, and architecture. Potential papers can address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

· Mapping through the moving image: audiovisual maps

· Formal strategies and mise-en-scene devices for creating media landscapes.

· Relations between real (objective) landscapes and media (subjective) landscapes.

· Landscape’s functions and meanings in different film genres.

· Landscape’s functions and meanings in different national cinemas.

· Landscape through time: landscape and history in the moving image.

· Media landscapes and social imaginaries.

· Urban and rural landscapes in the moving image.

· Landscape and architecture in the moving image.

· Analogical / digital landscapes.

· Mindscapes: dreams, imagination, and memories in the moving image.

· Male / female bodies in landscape: formal, narratives and conceptual relations between figures and backgrounds in the moving image.

· Media landscapes of the Great Recession.

· Colonial and post-colonial landscapes: border landscapes / the representation of the cultural other in landscape.

· Landscapes in motion: travelogues as an account and a record.

· Geographies of the future: utopian and dystopian landscapes.

The deadline for submitting completed papers is June 30, 2016. All articles will undergo a selection process followed by double blind peer-review. Before submitting your article, please read the journal’s Section Policies and the Authors’ Guidelines.

Editor's biographies

Filipa Rosário is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Comparative Studies, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, where she coordinates the project ‘The Cinema and the World - Studies in Space and Cinema’. She is also visiting professor at the Technological School of Abrantes - Polytechnic Institute of Tomar and belongs to the  board of directors for The Association of the Moving Image Researchers (AIM). Rosário holds a PhD in Art Studies - Studies of Cinema and Audiovisual (University of Lisbon), with a thesis entitled In a Lonely Place - The Reading of Space in Road Movie through the Representation of the American City.

Iván Villarmea Álvarez holds a PhD in the History of Art from the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain), as well as a degree in Journalism and another in Contemporary History from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Galicia). He currently works as a visiting professor at the Universidad Estatal de Milagro (UNEMI, Ecuador) and has recently published the book Documenting Cityscapes. Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film (2015). Moreover, since 2013, he co-directs the online film journal A Cuarta Parede (www.acuartaparede.com), for which he has co-edited the volume Jugar con la Memoria. El Cine Portugués en el Siglo XXI (2014).

Francesco Giarrusso is a member of the research group ‘Ciência e Arte’ and of the Science-Art-Philosophy Lab at the Center of Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon (CFCUL). In 2013, he was awarded a PhD in Communication Sciences by the Universidade Nova de Lisboa for a dissertation entitled O Regime Dialógico na Obra de João César Monteiro: Matérias e Conteúdos de uma Prática Subversiva. He currently teaches at the Istituto di Istruzione Superiore Caterina Caniana (Bergamo, Italy), and contributes to the film criticism website À Pala de Walsh (www.apaladewalsh.com).