CFA: Existentialist Screen-Philosophy

We are excited to issue a Call for Abstracts for a Special Issue of the academic journal Film-Philosophy related to the topic of “Existentialist Screen-Philosophy”. 

https://journals.ed.ac.uk/f-p-submissions/cfp/existentialism

Issue Editors: 

We are initially seeking abstracts of between 400-500 words from scholars around the world. After review, we will invite a select number of authors to develop this proposal and submit a full article of between 7,000-10,000 words for consideration. These papers, subject to successful peer-review, will be published alongside a number of invited articles and previously published essays on the topic of existentialism in Film-Philosophy.

  • Round 1: Deadline for Abstracts (400-500 words): 1 February 2025
  • Round 2: Deadline for Selected Articles (7,000-10,000 words): 1 August 2025 (will be subject to peer-review)

Existentialism has waxed and waned in popularity since the 1970s, and Film Studies has only recently started to take existentialist philosophy more seriously. While the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are central to existentialist thought, Frantz Fanon and Albert Camus have also been important figures for both filmmakers and theorists of cinema. Film-philosophy has spent some time thinking with Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, although both denied the label of existentialist, especially via the resurgence of phenomenology and film in the early 1990s. Precursors to 20th century existentialism include Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer and they too have been variously significant in film-philosophy’s development. There are, of course, many other names, canonical and non-canonical, that can be associated with existentialism and there are important existentialist traditions outside of Europe and North America.

More recent work in film-philosophy has brought existentialist thought into conversation with contemporary cinema, including books by William Pamerleau (Existentialist Cinema), Daniel Shaw (Movies with Meaning), Kelli Fuery (Ambiguous Cinema), Shai Tubali (Cosmos and Camus), and the collections edited by Jean-Pierre Boulé, Ursula Tidd and Enda MacCaffrey. The time is ripe to build on this foundational film-philosophy and introduce perspectives that enlarge existentialist relationships and encounters. 

In this special issue of Film-Philosophy we will explore the broad field of existentialism in relation to cinema and the moving image and address a number of significant issues that include:

  • Re-evaluating the role of cinema in the thought and work of the existentialists
  • Considering the history and influence of existentialism on the history and development of film theory and film and television studies as disciplines.
  • Examining a wide range of screen media in light of existentialist themes, topics and debates, which can include, but are not limited to:
    • Absurdity and the absurd
    • Anxiety
    • Authenticity
    • Bad faith
    • Being-for-Others
    • Colonialism and Post-Colonialism
    • Death and suicide
    • Emotion
    • Ethics and existentialism 
    • Existence and essence
    • Existentialist revisions of psychoanalysis
    • Freedom
    • Genre and existentialism
    • Imagination and existentialism 
    • Individualism and collectivism
    • In-itself and for-itself
    • Nothingness
    • Oppression
    • Praxis and the practico-inert
    • Religious existentialism
    • War, violence and politics 
    • World existentialism

Please submit your abstract here:  Special Issue: Existentialist Screen-Philosophy