‘Sound on Screen’
Vol. 6 No. 1

Submissions deadline: January 22, 2010

It has been nearly a century since film reels began including a soundtrack (though the cinema, of course, was never “silent”), yet there still remains a reluctance to tackle film’s symbiotic relationship with sound.  Despite significant interventions into the study of film sound, such as Chion’s Audio-Vision, and from other disciplines such as musicology, film studies continues to be dominated by the all-important image.  The recent advent of convergence culture — in which sound and image interact across a multitude of different forms, styles, platforms, and media — makes this lack all the more apparent, underscoring the need to expand critical approaches to sound on screen.

From a technological standpoint, the new century presents us with a vast spectrum of film viewing experiences, with IMAX and Dolby surround sound at one end of the spectrum, and YouTube clips on 2″ mobile phone screens at the other.  Where do we situate the aesthetic study of sound and image when an ever-growing number of users focus more on accessibility than quality?  Beyond home theatre systems and High Definition, we also encounter the commodification of the soundscape with the marketing of certain lifestyles through film soundtracks (some of which go on to massively outsell their original film, such as O Brother Where Art Thou?).  Marketing is a factor when it comes to auteur/star status as well, so how do directors operating as ‘curators’ of popular music soundtracks, such as Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, alter our conception of the auteur?  Should there be a canon of the Aural Auteur?  Beyond such legends as Walter Murch and Bernard Herrmann, are there more unsung heroes of sound that have not yet received their deserved acclaim?

These are merely a few possible starting points; Cinephile is calling for a wide range of papers on any aspect of film sound/music in contemporary cinema. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Soundscapes on screen
• Scoring violence
• The quality divide and pro/regressions in film-viewing
• Alternative uses of sound in international contexts, such as Bollywood
• The evolution of sound effects and Big Sound (Dark Knight, Star Wars, Transformers, etc.)
• Critical debates within the historical context of film sound (Chion, Altman, Belton, Donnelly, etc.)
• Celebrity voice-over work in popular animation (Pixar, Dreamworks, anime, etc.)
• The use of prolonged silence (There Will Be Blood, Antichrist, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, etc.)
• Live performance screenings, such as new scores to old films or Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain
• The Aural Auteur (Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, Martin Scorsese. etc.)
• Contemporary strain of musicals (Moulin Rouge, Dancer in the Dark, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Once, Across the Universe, etc.)

Cinephile is the University of British Columbia’s film journal, published with the support of the Centre for Cinema Studies. Since its inception in 2005, Cinephile has been steadily broadening its readership and increasing its academic influence, featuring original essays by such luminaries as Slavoj Zizek, Barry Keith Grant, and Murray Pomerance. In 2009, the journal adopted a rigorous blind peer-review process, and moved to biannual publication, available online and in print via subscription. For more information, please visit cinephile.ca

We accept submissions from both faculty and graduate students. Papers should be approximately 1500-3000 words, formatted in MLA, and submitted with a works cited and brief biography. The deadline for submissions is January 22, 2010. Submissions and inquiries should be directed to: info@cinephile.ca

‘The Scene’
Cinephile Vol. 5 No. 2

Deadline Extended to Februrary 23, 2009

How is it that ‘the shower scene’ epitomises Hitchcock’s style and psychological preoccupations? What is it about Robert DeNiro’s “Are you talking to me?” scene that has such lasting cultural resonance? How does Gene Kelly dancing in the rain embody an entire ethos of escapism? Is there much more to Tarantino than Travolta and Thurman cutting a rug at Jackrabbit Slims? Just as ‘the scene’ has become one of the primary sites of fandom, it is also one of the first points of entry for scholarly analysis. A sequence analysis is one of the first key skills a film student learns, before turning to a more rigorous research and rhetoric-based argumentation, but is there value in returning to such an ‘amateur’ exercise?

The current information age of portable media devices, YouTube clips, DVD deleted scenes, and downloadable movies and trailers has altered our viewing habits. Our memory of certain films, directors, performers, and so on, is frequently stored as a repertoire of key scenes. So, too, a scene may be isolated as a synecdoche for a whole film, genre, director’s oeuvre, national cinema, or otherwise. In this changing climate of spectatorship and cinephilia, can scene studies offer an opportunity to reconcile cinephilic appreciation within film scholarship? What new meanings or problems arise when studying a scene alone, extricated from its filmic context?

As a celebration of its fifth anniversary, and a utilization of its new web presence*, for its Summer 2009 issue, Cinephile is calling for a collection of Scene Studies to consider the privileges and limits of this critical approach. Writers are free to explore one or multiple aspects of a single scene, including theme, mise-en-scene, editing, and so forth, of a narrative film of their choice. In addition to strict scene analyses, writers may interrogate broader issues of scene studies by problematising any of the following possible research topics:

• the homespun re-editing or ‘mash-up’ of scenes as a referential and cinephilic practise.
• the cultural currency of ‘scene films’, that is, films composed of several stand alone scenes such as Robert Rodriguez’s 9 lives, Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, and Olivier Assayas’ Paris, je t’aime.
• the replacement of film viewing with scene viewing and the impact of YouTube and downloadable movie clips on fandom and reception studies.
• while the music video itself has perhaps lost pre-eminence in the music industry, what impact, aesthetically or economically, does music video logic – the over-reliance of montage sequences cut to popular music – have on filmmaking?
• is there a cult of the scene? Is there a canon of viral video?
• how has DVD technology, particularly the ‘scene selection’ function, changed spectatorship?

* Articles will be published on our website with clips of their respective scenes.

Cinephile is the University of British Columbia’s film journal, published with the support of the Centre for Cinema Studies. Since its inception in 2005, Cinephile has been steadily broadening its readership. Starting in 2009, the journal will be published biannually and available online and in print via subscription.

Submission Criteria:

• We accept both faculty and graduate submissions.
• Papers should be approximately 1500-2500 words, formatted in MLA, and submitted with a works cited and brief biography.
• The deadline for submissions is February 23rd 2009
• Submissions and inquiries should be directed to: info [at] cinephile [dot] ca.