Deadline: December 16
Contact: Michelle Yates, Assocuiate Professor, Columbia College Chicago
Email: myates@colum.edu

Panel call for ASLE 2025: Collective Atmospheres, July 8-11, 2025 at the University of Maryland.

Sponsored by the Ecomedia Interest Group, this guaranteed panel invites contributions exploring the intersection of atmospheric aesthetics and ecocinema through the lens of women filmmakers. Drawing on the conceptualization of air as a medium (Horn 2018) and the philosophy of elemental media (Peters 2016), we examine how cinema, through genre, technique, or form, relates to the material, political, and sensory dimensions of air. This approach fosters a prismatic understanding of how atmospheric elements intertwine with cinematic form, contributing to ongoing discussions on how cinema reshapes our engagement with these elements. What conceptions of cinema emerge from filmic elemental focus on air, and how do such reinventions of cinema remediate environmental awareness? What cinematic mechanisms enable imaginations of and generate alternative practices of feeling air and atmospheres beyond anthropocentrism?
By focusing on films by women filmmakers, the panel highlights how their elemental engagement with air enacts singular “cinematic atmospheres,” (Hven 2018) addressing its sensory and affective registers alongside its political and ecological implications. We welcome proposals that analyze the interplay between ecocinema, gender, and atmospheres, particularly those exploring how women’s ecocinema figures and reimagines air, helping us rethink “both cinema’s elemental properties and the cinematic properties of the elemental” (Luca and Mroz 2023), as well as its broader aesthetic and environmental significance.
Please submit to Salomé Lopes Coelho (salomecoelho@fcsh.unl.pt) and Michelle Yates (myates@colum.edu) by December 16, 2024.

Posted on November 28, 2024