(Dis)locating Early Cinema: Exchange, Extraction, Environment
The 2026 Domitor committee and the EC is happy to announce the Nineteenth International Domitor Conference: “(Dis)locating Early Cinema: Exchange, Extraction, Environment.” The conference will be held at Federal Fluminense University in Niterói, Brazil, from June 10–13, 2026. Mark your calendars!
Below, we include the CFP in English; it is also available in French, Portuguese, and Spanish. You can find it in pdf at this link.
The most recent Domitor conference troubled the conventional timelines and boundaries of film historiography by conceptualizing a “long early cinema,” acknowledging that cinematic technologies and techniques emerged and evolved at different speeds across the world. Questions of time, however, could not be decoupled from questions of space: the space of the exhibition venue, the environment captured or staged before the camera, the location of film industries, and the geography of international film circulation—including the place of scholars and archivists themselves. The nineteenth Domitor conference builds on these lines of inquiry to dislocate early cinema’s spatial and historiographic assumptions.
Film historians have long studied early film’s global networks, tracing routes developed by foreign distributors to show their films around the world and examining how local exhibitors adapted films to their markets by re-titling and re-editing them to appease censorship offices and appeal to local audiences. Scholars of early cinema have also investigated the many itinerant and nontheatrical spaces where film was encountered at the turn of the century, turning their attention from theaters to fairgrounds, schools, and churches—even drinking establishments, such as the Latin American cervejaria-cinema and bar-biógrafo. More recently, space has become a productive lens through which to think about the physical displacement of people, resources, and (archival) objects and to challenge perspectives and historiographic frameworks centred around the Global North.
Early cinema’s spatial representations have provided one of the epistemological foundations for the modern perceptual and ideological charting of space. Moving images offered the visual and evidentiary basis for the establishment of geography as a modern discipline and its vernacular use in education and propaganda. Early film genres, such as travelogues and actualities, often constructed visual representations of empty landscapes and anachronistic places that aided colonizing and civilizing agendas. Visual colonial tropes circulating in photographic media, pre-cinematic apparati, and early films cemented binary understandings of space across the axis of metropole and periphery, civilization and wilderness. And early attractions of speed and mobility, industrial machinery, and scientific observation objectified the planet and its biosphere and minerals as resources for capitalist extraction.
The idea of dislocating contains within it the idea of a location (from the Latin locus). Historians of film, material culture, and the cartographic humanities have, since the spatial turn, elevated location—filmic landscape, routes of circulation and exchange, geography—to the level of subject. Joining this strand of research, we aim to reveal the “silences” of the on-screen map. In this, we maintain a spirit of media-archaeological inquiry in our conference theme: to dislocate early cinema is to look beyond the edge of its traditional map. As such, it seems only appropriate to dislocate Domitor itself by hosting the conference, for the first time, outside of Western Europe and North America.
Hosting the conference in Brazil prompts us to think about a specific space, history, climate, and landscape. For a long time, Latin America was neglected in early cinema scholarship, even though the region has been the locus of an enormous migratory flow from Europe since the late 19th century—a transcontinental exchange of machines, personnel, and films that went both ways. Accordingly, we invite papers that focus on forgotten or locally-repurposed film instruments and practices, neglected sites and intersections of filmmaking, preservation, and exhibition, and overlooked networks of migration and circulation—within Latin America and beyond. What insights could rooting early cinema to these other spaces, locations, and environments bring? What connections would following these routes and exchanges help us make? How does attending to the politics and ideology of early filmic landscapes and colonial visual culture shift our perception of early cinematic representations of space? What would it mean to dislocate Europe and North America as the privileged centers of modernity?
Suggested topics may include (but are not limited to):
● Decolonial/revisionist approaches to early film historiography and research methods
● The implication of the spatial turn and material turn in early film historiography
● Early film scholarship and historiography in Latin America
● The cinema of attractions within the Latin American context
● Early cinema’s asynchronous development in different locations
● Domitor’s role in decentring scholarship and historiography
● How location impacts access to and distribution of resources and scholarship
● Material histories of early cinema
● Early film distribution, exhibition, and reception
● Histories of film exchange and extraction
● Patents, copyright, and piracy across continents
● Knowledge in transit: how filmic ideas, topoi, instruments, and personnel move, migrate, or become translated in new locations
● Nontheatrical filmmaking and exhibition
● Expedition filmmaking, ethnographic film, and colonial exploration
● Early film, imperialism, and the colonization of Latin America
● Early cinema’s colonial visual cultures
● The gendered construction of space
● Representations of space and landscape in early cinema and pre-cinematic devices
● Early cinema’s role in the establishment of geography
● How space is represented on screen in maps, atlases, and the graphic method
● The scientific and epistemological status of early cinema’s cartographies
● Media archaeologies of space in early and pre-cinema
● The proliferation of different film versions based on local censorship, national markets, and international distribution
● Lost and incomplete films, archival lacunae, and misidentification
● The impact of location and climate on film preservation and access to film archives
● The colonial film archive and decolonization
● Repatriation of film and film-related archival objects
We welcome papers that focus on specific case studies as well as those that undertake broader theoretical explorations of any of the suggested or other related topics.
Proposal Submission Process
Proposals and other inquiries should be sent to domitor2026@gmail.com no later than September 5, 2025. Proposals for individual presentations should be no longer than 300 words and include a bibliography of 3–5 sources and a brief biographical statement. In addition to traditional academic papers, we also invite proposals for video essays and creative projects. Proposals can be written in English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. While we hope to secure funding for translation services for the conference, participants may be required to submit drafts of their papers in advance of the conference and/or present in English or French.
Proposals for pre-constituted panels of three or four participants, or roundtables of four to six participants, will also be considered; such proposals should be submitted by the chair and consist of a 300-word rationale for the panel, along with the collected individual paper proposals or a brief description of each participant’s contribution. While membership in Domitor is not required to submit a proposal, anyone presenting a paper at the conference must be a member: https://domitor.org/membership/.
Diversity Bursary
The Domitor Diversity Bursary sponsors attendance at Domitor’s biennial conference through a $500 award and waived registration fees. This bursary supports research by scholars based in the Global South and/or who identify as members of any marginalized community. We welcome proposals that pursue or explore an expansive range of forms (from empirical to speculative), as well as interdisciplinary approaches to early cinema. Graduate students, early career scholars, and contingent or independent scholars are encouraged to apply. The recipient of this bursary will also be invited to contribute to the conference proceedings. If you would like to be considered for this bursary, no additional application materials are necessary; just indicate your interest in the bursary when you submit your abstract to domitor2026@gmail.com. We look forward to your submissions.
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