Call for Papers: Essay Competition »backup.plaintext«

Essay competition backup.plaintext - Theory and context of moving images

Topic 2005: »Avant-garde today - beyond or beside film?«

In which sense can the concept of avant-garde, originating from the first decades of the 20th century and proclaimed dead several times, be formulated in such a way that is plausible for films of the 21st century? Transcending the common definition of art - that was one of the chief concerns of the "classical avant-garde". Is it still legitimate today to try and transcend film, as the exhibition "Future Cinema" at ZKM, Karlsruhe, proposed a few years ago? Is experimental film looking for new spaces, places, ways of presentation? Where are moving images moving to? Where can the filmic avant-garde of 2005 be found - beyond film? Beside film? Offside? Is filmic avantgarde shifting, out of the cinema, e.g. into galleries and museums? Into television? Into the club scene? Is there any room or potential left for an avant-garde in film/cinema? Has the avant-garde of moving images become nothing but a technological project, recycling traditional imagery and trying to reconstruct historical dispositives? Is filmic avant-garde a social project? An aesthetic one? Might not the true avantgarde exist not in the invention of new ideas, but rather in the creative reprocessing of old ones? Could it be that montage, which was judged the most important means of filmic avant-garde by Sergey Eisenstein, has found its up-to-date equivalent in Copy&Paste?

The submitted texts must be no longer than 10,000 characters, texts in both German and English are acceptable (the festival catalogue is bilingual). Submission via post or (preferrably) e-mail in PDF or RTF format.

Jury members include Prof. Dr. Joseph Vogl (Weimar/Princeton), Roger Behrens) & Dr. Ulrike Bergermann (Bochum), see PDF (below) for a full list of jury members.

The deadline for the submission of papers is Aug, 15th 2005

Please review our PDF for detailed information on the background, topic, selection criteria and jury members:

http://www.uni-weimar.de/~zintl/backup/b05\_plaintext\_en.pdf

or contact David&Felix: [email protected]