The 2025 Women and Film History International conference committee is thrilled to announce the Twelfth International Women and the Silent Screen Conference: “Form and Feeling in Silent Cinema.”  The conference is hosted by the Université libre de Bruxelles, University of Antwerp, and Royal Film Archive of Belgium (Cinematek) in Brussels, Belgium, from June 11-14, 2025. Please mark your calendars!

Feeling has become an urgent focal point in the development of a feminist, queer and decolonial praxis and theory – whether as sensation, emotion, passion, care, sentiment, or affect – upending a long and well-documented history of dismissal. Women and the Silent Screen XII (WSSXII) invites papers that revisit the relationship between feeling and form across diverse media, modes, and genres, historical and geographical contexts, and against the backdrop of new theoretical, ethical and political constellations. We encourage historiographic interventions into the expansive array of formal, material, institutional and cultural expressions of feeling and emotion that constitute global silent cinema from its creation and content to its reception and preservation.

Suggested topics may include (but are not limited to):  

• Feelings, form and their relationship to social, cultural, and political history

• Historiography of the discourse on feeling, sensation or affect; Histories and historiographies of film melodrama, sentimentalism, passion, emotion

• Transnational, and/or interdisciplinary approaches to feeling and form in film, including through genre, style, audience formation, and narrativity

• Intermedial/crossmedial studies of film, feeling and form in relation to theater, opera, pantomime, dance and/or other arts

• New methodologies for decoding emotional structures in terms of form (style, structure, genre, material support, embodiments, figures, incarnations) and content (types of narratives)

• Techniques of emotion/display of feeling:

  • Staging, framing, narrative, intertitles

  • The close-up as conveyor of emotion; display of the face

  • Costumes, locations, decor, settings

  • Lighting, cinematography, color

• Music and sound conventions and innovations; voice and performance

• Gender coding of affect, emotion, sentiment; Feeling at the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and/or nationality

• Histrionic, pantomimic, psychological acting codes and expression

• Early discourses on cinephilia; passionate rhetoric of the amateur writer and film lover; standards of taste, forms of feeling and the (silent) film canon; issues of viewership, and pleasure

• Amateur films and ‘passionate’ versus ‘industrial’ models of production

• Discourses based on forbidden passions and repressed feelings; trauma and recovery

• ‘Writing from the heart’ (scriptwriting restrictions/conventions of dialogue, length, structure, modes of narration, modes of address  of flashback, flash forward, frame narrative); screenwriting and sentimental/psychological literature; different forms of life writing

• Star personas/advertising/fan magazines and emotional expression; private lives mirrored in the filmic spheres, accidental mise en abymes

• Avant-garde or ‘poetic’ configurations of emotions, sensations.

• Instrumentalisation of feeling (manuals, rhetoric, genre)

• Cinemas and exhibition practices tied to specific viewing communities

• Global marketing and distribution practices of melodramas: ‘tearjerkers,’ male melodramas, docu-dramas, etc.

• Studies into the intercultural (conceptions of psychology, myths, legends, beliefs, rituals from different cultures)

• Cross-cultural approaches to forms of feeling; form and feeling beyond the Western canon; case studies of films and filmmakers from Eastern-Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, and Africa.

• Archival activism and social justice, and instances of care, passion, and tenderness in and around the archive; different forms of absences, silences, and inequalities in the archive

• Personal archives, forms of private and public archives and archival practices

• ‘New’ perspectives on ‘old’ case studies, experiments in untangling, unknowing,  re-reading

• Cross-cultural dynamics of film in global contexts that could potentially problematize or reframe assumptions of female ‘emotionality,’ genre identification, and more.

Themes and topics listed above are not exhaustive and the conference welcomes papers that address perspectives not mentioned here–from literal and figurative angles and through a range of theoretical practices and historical methods, including Digital Humanities updates.

List of Presentation Formats

We welcome presentations in a wide range of formats, including the following:*

Academic paper presentation: in the classical academic conference format; 20 minutes maximum, excluding general Q&A.

Show-and-tell: short presentation of a case study or an archival material, including but not limited to a historical document, a short film or video (fragment and/or video essay), a photograph, etc. followed by a general discussion. This format is geared towards a more open-ended discussion over an unidentified or newly discovered archival material; max. 10 minutes.

Pre-formed panel: formed around a single, or similar research focus; consisting of 3- 4 speakers; may include a moderator; 90 minutes max, including Q&A and/or discussion. Pre-formed roundtable discussion: formed around a single research focus, consisting of 3-4 speakers, responding to each other; may include a moderator; 60 minutes maximum, including Q&A and/or discussion.

Screening session: audiovisual presentation of relevant topic, case study, research

*The programme committee reserves the right to propose alternative formats to the proposed presentation format.

Proposal Submissions Checklist

1. Abstract (300 words max.) + Title at top

2. Presentation Format (see above)

3. Bio (50 words max.) including name, affiliation, e-mail contact

4. Bibliography (optional)

5. Microsoft Word document, 12 pt. Times New Roman font

6. Abstract + Bibliography style: Chicago Author-Date:                                                       https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-2.html.

Submit by December 2, 2024 to belwss2025@gmail.com

WSSXII is co-organized by the Women and Film History International Conference Committee (Drake Stutesman, Kristine Harris, Tami Williams, and Kate Saccone) and hosts Dominique Nasta (Université libre de Bruxelles & Belgian Royal Academy), Anke Brouwers (School of Arts/KASK HoGent), and Tom Paulus (University of Antwerp).