EXTENDED DEADLINE: Essay-Competition »backup.plaintext«

We are EXTENDING THE DEADLINE to AUGUST, 31st

CALL FOR ENTRIES - ESSAY COMPETITION:

backup.plaintext - Theory and context of moving images

The 7th »backup\_festival. new media in film«, which takes place at the E-Werk, Weimar, Germany, from October 6-9, 2005, is looking for theoretical texts by academic newcomers. Under the title of »backup.plaintext« we are collecting essays on the theory and context of moving images. In cooperation with renowned media experts and cultural scientists, as well as publishers, the most convincing works will be selected, and awarded with publication in our festival catalogue. Together with our media partners we are preparing further publications.

Goal of this initiative is to afford an opportunity to young film and media theorists to present their thoughts in the highly public framework of a short-film festival. The publication of texts in the backup\_festival catalogue, which has a circulation of 5,000 pieces and reaches a broad audience of experts (e.g. filmmakers, publishers, universities), is meant to contribute to a good start into a career as an essayist or feature writer.

The topic of »backup.plaintext« 2005 is: Avant-garde today - beyond or beside film?
In the context of the festival, the project »backup.plaintext« functions as a theoretical framework for the different short-film programs. It is meant to demonstrate the intellectual substance of a festival which sets out to explore new artistic and narrative strategies in the medium of (short) film. Many of the submitted filmic works prove to be "experimental" or "innovative", and thus pose questions concerning the character of the "avant-garde". In which sense can this concept, originating from the first decades of the 20PthP century and proclaimed dead several times, be formulated in such a way that is plausible for films of the 21PstP 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 avant-garde 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 avant-garde 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?

These and other questions might serve as a possible guideline for the essays, which should contribute to the search for a filmic avant-garde 2005. There are no further content-related restrictions. 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. The competition entries will be anonymized on receipt, so the identity of the authors will not be revealed during the whole selection process. In the first round, every text will be evaluated by several members of the festival-internal pre-selection committee. The remaining ca. 15 works will then be presented to the jury, composed from renowned film experts and cultural scientists, who will choose two texts for publication.

Jury members: Roger Behrens (Weimar), Dr. Ulrike Bergermann (Hamburg/Bochum), Christine Hanke (Potsdam), Judith Keilbach (Berlin), Sabine Nessel (Frankfurt/Main) & Prof. Dr. Joseph Vogl (Weimar/Princeton)

Selection criteria:
- thematic relevance
- autonomy of theoretical position
- strength of argumentation
- linguistic quality

Deadline for submissions (postmark) is August, 31st, 2005

backup\_festival. new media in film
c/o Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, Fakultat Medien
Bauhausstrasse 11
D-99423 Weimar
Germany

phone +49 (0) 3643 - 58 39 29
fax +49 (0) 3643 - 58 37 01
mobile +49 (0) 176 - 216 30 422
[email protected] www.backup-festival.de