Call For Papers para el nº 24-2022: Imágenes y sonidos de las geopolíticas urbanas

2021-01-31

Cinema and photography have formed and keep forming a collective imaginary through the urban images that since its inception have been present on the celluloid. Cities are both setting and protagonist in films (CAPARRÓS, 2013), they often become museum spaces and, sometimes, they come to be identified as locations of a kind of "theme park", depending on the choice of settings. The urban images depicted by filmmakers and photographers in their works can also condition our perception of the city (CAMARERO, 2013: 6), capturing them from very different angles and with very diversified intentions: from the city symphonies as complex reflections on the relationship between the avant- garde, the cinema and the city (GAUTHIER, 2015: 54-55; HUESO, 2013) to imaginary settings that bring us the utopias and dystopias, going through settings which are recreational and portraitists of urban revolutions, costumbrist places, destroyed or under construction, territory of war conflicts and cosmopolitan advances, spaces of a metamorphosis that is sign and sense of the action (CAMARERO, 2013). There are many types of cities, as many types as interpretations if we stick to the “look of the cinema” (NOUVEL, 1989) and the plastic multiplicities that the city has as an object, such as “space for modification”, in cinema and architecture. But cities are also refuge of geopolitical events (SCHWERTER, 2017: 8): its streets, its monuments, its modern and ancient architecture, the present and the one that is no longer preserved, the ephemeral and the one that endures; the one that is tangible and coexists with the intangible but does not give less meaning to the space. The one that is not seen, but it’s heard: the word, the sound; the one that is perceived and lived: the recurring acts...The city is a maze of images and sounds, emotions and experiences that has lived together with the cinema since its origins. Synonymous with community and modernity, the city has been constructed, built, destroyed, raised, imagined, faded...becoming a living organism, with its own identity which we propose to discuss these days about.

Accordingly, we propose different approaches that include the representation of cities on “film” from very different perspectives and that allow us to study the city from images and sounds, from urban spaces and from the words that define them. Thus, we propose for this monograph the following eight core ideas of research in which more specific lines of contribution are inscribed:

Thematic Lines:

 

  1. Cities of the Past and Contemporary Geopolitics: Influence of images in Contemporary Urban Architecture.
  2. The photography and the audiovisual as a testimony of the lost urban heritage.
  3. The audiovisual and its use of the past as an element of power in the contemporary world.
  4. Lost / unreal / imagined cities in the audiovisual as a reflection of power.
  5. Geopolitics and Sounds: in Urban Symphonies and/or Video Clip.
  6. Urban Spaces in the Fantastic and Terror Genres.
  7. Ideology and archetypes after the conception of urban spaces.

Propaganda and Empowerment of Cities Through the photographic and audiovisual image.