call for paper

Background

How does film mediate water, and in what ways does this ‘secret element’ affect the filmic flow of sound and image? Bodies of water —from the oceanic to the man-made — shape landscapes and the built environment, affecting our orientation within them. Film has the capacity to outline that which seems to have no contours or silhouettes, and this issue of film place collective editions seeks to explore the relationship between water and film, as it intersects with questions of space and the environment.

From Gilles Deleuze’s notion of perceptual liquidity, to the films of Marguerite Duras, water shores up questions of form, materiality, and perception in film. In Isaac Julien’s immersive film installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), water not only informs its oceanic images, but also the design of the filmic exhibition space. At the same time, in mediating bodies of water, film can draw our attention to their role in structuring urban, cultural, and geopolitical spaces. For instance, London’s radical regeneration of its waterways and waterfronts has been represented in a variety of films and art projects about different areas: the Docklands in Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (1987); the Lea River Valley in Conrad Shawcross’s Pre-Retroscope V (2008); and the Thames Estuary in Andrew Kötting’s Swandown (with Iain Sinclair, 2012). In Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, Giuliana Bruno traces the influence of such nautical and fluvial cartography on early cinema’s mapping of urban space - its representation of the city in motion.

In The Lottery of the Sea (2006) and The Forgotten Space (2010), Allan Sekula explores the maritime industry as basis of global capitalism, calling attention to the sea’s material forces of resistance. Today, the waters of the Mediterranean and the Channel form the backdrop to the migrant crisis, as powerfully evoked in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (2016). In Verena Paravel and Lucien Taylor’s Leviathan (2012), the ocean is a sensory cosmos where fish, water, and vessels meet in the fiercest of ways. The ecological crisis facing the world’s oceans -- as well as other aquatic environments -- points to the urgency in (re)thinking the human relationship to ponds, rivers, and seas.

Topics

For the second issue of our print journal, we are looking for essays and experimental texts (full spread; 500-1500 words) that examine the various dimensions of the relationship between water and film, including:

• How water shapes film form, materiality, and/or perception across different modes of filmmaking - i.e. observational documentary, essay film, and feature film;

• Water and the exhibition of film in the gallery space;

• How film mediates bodies of water and their structuring of space;

• Ecological and political approaches to water on film.