The deadline for submission of full paper is November 15th, 2009.
For submission guidelines, check either [word format] or [pdf format]

Registration opens (via CRASSH online payment, please follow their instruction)
Early bird registration: GBP 40 (full); GBP 20 (student)

* The fee includes coffees and buffet lunches during the conference, but excludes conference dinner.

September 7 - Deadline for submission of abstracts
September 25 - Notification of acceptance of abstract and request for final papers

November 15 - Deadline for submission of final papers
November 30 - Early bird registration closes

December 8, 9 - Conference (Theory-led presentations)
December 10 - Workshop (Practice-led presentations)

[Concepts]
Cinematic _ writing in movement
Urbanism _ the study of cities
Narrative _ episodizing space and time
Mapping _ spatializing experience and knowledge

[Themes]
Urban Cinematics aims to review the mechanisms by which cinema and the moving
image contribute to our understanding of cities while at the same time addressing
two key issues: how do filmmakers make use of cities and how do cities make use of
cinema? This symposium will explore the use of cinema as a tool/approach to
investigate the phenomena, experience and narrative of cities. It will bring together
the leading scholars in the divergent yet dynamic field between the disciplines of
architecture, urbanism, film studies - and related disciplines - and cover diverse
sub-themes:

Montaged Urban Cinematic Landscapes
Montage-based films - without human leads - are usually referred to as city
symphonies, a genre that flourished in the 1920s but which is still very present in
contemporary moving image works. With the city as its subject, city symphonies not
only represent the city as such, they also invent the city, enable its imagination and
creation, and bring out the hidden, silent and invisible features of the city to public
consciousness.

Keywords: montage, city symphonies, cinéma vérité, observational cinema

Cinematic Urban Archaeology
A cinematic archaeology of a city makes visible the becoming of the modern city and
its subsequent transformations since 1895. Such retrospectively longitudinal
cinematic studies of cities are now possible through increasing availability of archive
material. Such exploration of the filmic spaces of the past may enable historians,
architects and urbanists to better anticipate the city of the future.

Keywords: film history, film archives, urban studies, history of the city, city of the
future

Geographies of the Urban Cinematic Landscape
Cinema may use cities in creative ways to reorganizes the city spaces into narrative
geographies where urban fragments are collaged into spatial episodes. The
alternative to creative geographies is cinematic topographical coherence. Both
approaches - used in montage as well as in continuity editing traditions - may give
different readings of the city and have a different impact on our spatial perception.

Keywords: Kuleshov, creative geographies, topographical coherence

Cinematic Mapping
Bird’s eye views of cities are common in cartography and planning representation
while, in contrast to airborne geographical mapping, cinema is essentially concerned
with the tactility of the on-the-ground experience, and formulates the city from the
inside. There are numerous examples of films demonstrating cinema’s capacity to
reconcile the optic - the bird’s eye view - with the haptic and the lived experience - a
key component of the perceptual panoply in grasping and communicating the
modern metropolis.

Keywords: history of cartography, mapping, establishing shots, point of view

Cinema as a Form of Spatial and Social Practice
Films can reveal social practices where social relations are spatially organised:
cinema makes explicit the relationship between the geography of an area within the
social order and practice of the time. As characters move through the city, the urban
topographies form a spatially organised social system. In doing so cinema renders a
tangible vision of a reality through situations and provides a passage between an
aesthetics of representation with an aesthetic of perception - thus enhancing our
largely fragmentary knowledge of cities.

Keywords: microhistory, situations, social practices

The conference (Dec 8-9) will be hosted at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) of the University of Cambridge. (MAP)

The workshop (Dec 10) on Cinematic Aided Design will be hosted at the Department of Architecture, 4A Trumpington (MAP)

The symposium is organized by the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge. It is part of the research project Narrascape funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of UK, which investigates urban landscape as narrative system and uses camera as a tool to unravel our experience of cities.

Supported by:

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

The Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies

French Cultural Institute in the UK