Strangers to Ourselves: “Enemies from Within” and the Moving Image
The Eleventh Tel Aviv International Colloquium on Cinema and Television Studies

Tel Aviv, Israel, 7-9 June 2016
CFP deadline: 1 January 2016

Distressed by past, current, and emergent civil wars in our region and by an apparently growing chasm between subcultures that are isolated in their own media environments and view others in their community with perplexity and intolerance, the Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University invites scholars to submit proposals that critically explore literal and figurative “enemies from within” and their relation to moving images.

How do films, television, new media, and their viewers and theorists relate to feeling for the enemy, realizing that one is the enemy, and sensing that we are “strangers to ourselves”? How can moving images shed light on being in exile, asceticism and masochism, the penal colony and the hunger artist, shaming and scapegoating, and challenging the boundaries between inside/outside? How do films and media expose hostility and dynamic power relations involved in hospitality and arouse a feeling of unhomeliness? Which types of transformation does the moving image undergo when incorporating participants, ideas, and other texts? What role do moving images play in revealing, forming, and dismantling new and old orders, coalitions, struggles, and identities and in discovering friends, foes, and selves in the past and in prophecies, utopias, and jeremiads about the future?

Presentations may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Allies, dissidents, rivals, and collaborators in the history and theory of moving images and within and between media industries and technologies; blacklists and quotas

• The multivalence of personal, political, and poetic hospitality: giving shelter, expanding one’s world, reciprocity, violence, blurred boundaries between inside and outside, a disturbance to existing orders, and encountering uninvited guests in moving images

• Self-defeating, self-refuting, and self-hating texts, theories, viewers, and filmmakers

• Fragmented narratives, obscure framing, split screens, and other textual disturbances

• Cinematic doppelgangers, body snatchers, earthly/extraterrestrial invaders, and cyborgs

• Paradoxes of spectatorship when horror, pain, boredom, melodrama, tragedy, and other forms of unpleasure are enjoyed as entertainment or art; suffering in the making of moving images; experiencing our own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure

• Autoimmune diseases, Typhoid Marys, parasites and hosts, quarantines, Trojan horses, and malevolent caregivers in moving images and theories; ethics in the time of plague

• Visual violence; moving images and war and terrorism, their history, global and local manifestations, and relation to the state, politics, and ethics; foreign and civil wars; the state of exception; borders, walls, siege, and boycotts

• Moving images and migrants, exiles, “undocumented” immigrants, and homelands/ diasporas; waiting at the border; homo sacer; states of emergency; refugees and “refuge”; definitions of Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, and other national, sub-national, and supranational identities, cinemas, and television and new media industries

All sessions will be held in English.


Please submit an abstract (up to 300 words) and short CV to the colloquium program committee at cineconf@post.tau.ac.il by 1 January 2016.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 1 March 2016.


The Tel Aviv International Colloquium on Cinema and Television Studies traditionally offers an opportunity for scholars from around the world to meet and discuss timely themes from a variety of theoretical approaches. Selected colloquia papers have been published in academic journals and books.


Colloquium Committee: Ilan Avisar, Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Régine-Mihal Friedman, Nurith Gertz, Boaz Hagin, Ido Lewit, Sandra Meiri, Judd Ne’eman, Gal Raz, Raz Yosef, Anat Zanger
Colloquium Coordinators: Anat Dan and Gal Nadler


Website: http://www.tau.ac.il/~cineconf/
Email: cineconf@post.tau.ac.il