Call for Papers

Call for Papers

New Approaches to Documentary.

Documentary film is undergoing an intense transformation. In recent years, new genres have emerged, such as the animated documentary or the interactive documentary, as well as new names for previously existing but unrecognised phenomena, such as the mock-documentary. Technological changes have brought a lot of life to the subject, especially the emergence of mobile phones equipped with cameras, which brought filming almost under the radar, the spread of surveillance cameras and, last but not least, networking, creating global opportunities to show documentaries. The result is a situation in which anyone can, at least potentially, record reality with their phone (and there are few people who have never done so), anyone is subject to being recorded, even many times a day, and anyone can post what they have recorded to a global audience. Thus, with some exaggeration, it can be said that anyone can become the author, protagonist, producer or distributor, if not of a documentary film, then at least of documentary recordings of reality. There are also few spheres of life that escape documentary recording. The documentary is no longer just a social service, as it used to be, and not just a reverie about the fate of the individual, as it became somewhat later, but a form that has access to all forms and aspects of reality.

The watchword of our planned new issue of "Panoptikum" – "New Approaches to Documentary" should be understood in several ways. Firstly, then, it would be about new phenomena in documentary filmmaking: new films that explore hitherto undiscovered territories or stand out for their original approach to film form. Secondly, transformations within documentary cinema, or more broadly, non-fictional recordings of reality – whether technologically motivated or not. Thirdly, new methodological approaches, new forms of reflection on the phenomenon of non-fiction, new conceptual categories, new theoretical approaches.  Examples of thematic areas include:

- New definitions of documentaryism.

- Non-fiction in the age of new media.

- New systems of financing and distributing documentary films

- Documentary cinema and national identity in the age of globalisation.

- Non-fiction cinema in the face of contemporary challenges.

- Revisions to history

- Film of fact and film of fiction revisited.

- The bodily dimension of documentary filmmaking.

- Documentary explorations of corporeality

- The ethics of documentary filmmaking in an age of widespread surveillance.

- Documentary filmmaking and mobile phones.

- The limits of privacy.

For this issue we will accept papers only in English. Deadline for submission is the 28th of February 2023. The authors’ guidelines concerning the style and the submission procedure are to be found here:

https://czasopisma.bg.ug.edu.pl/index.php/panoptikum/about/submissions.