UPCOMING ISSUE:
Cinephile 20.1 – Big Feelings: Cinematic Solace, Grief, and Comfort
In the rush of the 24-hour-a-day information age, we are inundated with more shared grief than ever before. Daily life is a deft navigation through layers of historic tragedies, global dread, and bewildering anxiety. As such, our relationship with “solace,” an emotional tool with which to handle difficult emotions, is complex and loaded with levels of guilt, desire, and fantasy. Merriam-Webster’s definition of solace describes it as “comfort in grief” and as such it can be considered a step in a healing process; a transitory emotion on the road from pain to pleasure. But what happens if we decide to stay in and with solace? Pausing the moment of consolation renders grief and peace coexistent and creates a strange picture of these normally towering affects existing within one another in a disorienting blurring overlay of big feelings.
Art is a portal through which to access these big feelings. It is an aesthetic and topological tool for mapping the relationalities of solace and grief. Art is used in therapeutic practice to process big feelings, interactively as a method to install big feelings, and intellectually as a method through which to examine and explicate big feelings. Cinematic art offers particularly fertile ground to discuss solace and the array of feelings that surround it. As a time-based processional medium, a constantly moving art form of “becoming” that (typically) rejects stasis, emotion in the cinematic experience reflects the complexity of living in a world of constant motion. And so we ask of it the same question we ask of ourselves: can cinema halt the movement of solace? Can it freeze the momentum of grief and joy and hold still the chaos of our ambition for comfort? Is solace an emotion that will forever behave like smoke, impossible to grasp, or can cinema hold it still?
Cinephile 20.1 aims to go beyond a reading of solace as a transitory emotion. Our hope is to develop insights into cinema as a place of solace and a spiritual device that can halt the never ending forward movement of big feelings on the rattling late-stage-capitalist highway.
Possible topics can include (but are not limited to) any of the following:
• How cinema can increase (or decrease) empathy
• How cinema can be used as an elegy
• Representations of companionship in cinema
• Solace and reassembling history with the cinematic archive
We encourage submissions from graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and established scholars. Papers should be between 2,000-3,500 words, follow MLA guidelines, and include a detailed works cited page, as well as a short biography of the author. Submissions should be directed toward SUBMISSIONS@CINEPHILE.CAindicating the intended issue and general inquiries toward INFO@CINEPHILE.CA.
Submissions are due by Jan 30th, 2026.
Incoming editors: Jacob Pascoe, Mickey Semera, Fernando Vargas.
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