Storytelling at the Extreme? Narrative Turns in Contemporary Film and TV Series

H-Film Storytelling at the Extreme? Narrative Turns in Contemporary Film and TV Series

Discussion published by Daniel Iftene on Friday, December 18, 2015 Type: Call for Papers Date: March 31, 2016 Location: Romania Subject Fields: Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Film and Film History, Humanities

New call for papers Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media Volume 15, 1/2016

In the past two decades, various filmmakers challenged their audiences and what was defined as the “classic” narrative in cinema and television. With their new ways of approaching audiovisual storytelling authors like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run (2006), Cristopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) and Inception (2010), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2006), Gaspar Noé’s, Irreversible (2002), David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2000) or Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013) stirred the interest of other writers, directors, viewers and researchers, equally intrigued by the causes and the effects of these new narrative forms. Some film theorists never saw these transformations as groundbreaking as the authors claimed them to be, interpreting them as mere variations on classical Hollywood storytelling (David Bordwell, 2006). Others read these approaches as a way to organize the late modernist excess on subjective or schismatic temporality, thus creating only more conservatory modular narratives (Allan Cameron, 2008). Meanwhile others praised the engagement of the audience in a complex adventure of puzzle-solving, and thus transforming film consumption into a game-like endeavor (Warren Buckland, 2009). Just as these three approaches defined the debate, and many of these films create their own special place in contemporary film canon, new production and distribution opportunities sparked the interest in other approaches on storytelling in cinema and television, with an increased attention to the mechanics of TV series narratives. At one end, some explore the film storytelling and new media with interactive movies, micro-movies, collective online productions or database features, while others see the traditional serialization process challenged by the contemporary consumption practices like Netflix, Amazon and other such platforms, with a subsequent rise in the narrative complexity of TV productions. At the other end, technical developments also enabled audacious choreographed extreme one-take movies like Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian

Citation: Daniel Iftene. Storytelling at the Extreme? Narrative Turns in Contemporary Film and TV Series. H-Film. 12-18-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/14467/discussions/102984/storytelling-extreme-narrative-turns-contemporary-film-and-tv Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Film

Ark (2002), Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014) or Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2015). Do all these stand as a narrative turn in contemporary cinema and TV series or are they just individual experiments with storytelling? What are the major determinants of these plays upon the narrative form? Are they social, political, technological, industrial? How is the audience engaged by such stories? Ekphrasis welcomes papers which address the topic of ‘extreme’ storytelling in contemporary cinema and television in an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural manner, focusing on the opportunities and the difficulties it raises to theorists, historians, filmmakers, writers, producers, etc.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

- Alternative narratives in film and television - Narrative and the social context of the 21st century - Audiovisual storytelling and the digital age - Serialization process in the contemporary TV series - Time and space in today’s audiovisual narratives - Narratives and technical and industrial context - Serialization and transmedia - Experimental filmmaking - Interactive movies - Intermediality and remediation - Puzzle and game-play narratives - Modular structures in film and other arts - Micro-movies - Online film production

Editor: Lecturer Daniel Iftene

Faculty of Theater and Television, Babes-Bolyai University

Deadline for abstracts up to 300 words: February 25th 2016.

Final paper submission is due on March 31st 2015.

The articles should be written in English or French (for English, please use the MLA citation style and documenting sources). For the final essay, the word limit is 5,000-8,000 words of text (without references). Please include a summary and key-words. The articles should be original material, not published in any other media before. PhD students are particularly encouraged to submit papers. Please send all correspondence to: [email protected]

Ekphrasis is a peer-reviewed academic journal, edited by the Faculty of Theatre and Television, “Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

For more information and submission guidelines, please visit: http://www.ekphrasisjournal.ro

Contact Info:

Ekphrasis Journal

Romania, Cluj-Napoca, Mihail Kogalniceanu 4

Contact Email: [email protected] URL: http://www.ekphrasisjournal.ro