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Deep Focus invites papers on the cinematic representation of war.

We live in violent times: times in which our community and collective 
memories are dying; times in which the instruments of justice are 
hardly able to redress the violence that's escalating, and 
intensifying; times in which progress presupposes the genocide of 
many; times in which the political space for being the other is 
diminishing, even closing.*

  In these times we look for a language that describes the culture of 
absence, the politics which silences and invisiblizes, we look for a 
language that reads the gaps between images and words, gestures and 
ideas. We propose to study how cinema enunciates/articulates-war, 
historical events, ideas of nations, nationalism and patriotism.

  Almost all war films not so much represented war as something near 
and present, but more as distant and absent, obscuring atrocities or 
images which were too brutal-a sanitised view of war. We intend to 
look at how representations of war were utilised for political 
purposes, as well as the ways in which they were entrenched in the 
contemporary social and historiographical discourse.

  Somewhere we'd like to uncover contemporary political spaces and the 
wars of the 20th/21st century, which with the emergence of the 
techno-militarization and transnational corporations have displaced 
politics (democracy, freedom and civil society) and its implication 
for diverse cultural expressions; by focusing on films apart from the 
holocaust films, maybe lesser known films on countries and 
communities that have been the other or some how do not receive much 
attention in the context of representation.

  We invite well researched articles for our January 2004 issue on the 
theme of war, of the fundamental feelings of human suffering and 
sacrifice, of war crimes and punishments, of representation of war in 
cinema in postmodern times and its re-coloniality.

Deadline: 15th November 2003.

Range: 3,000 to 10,000 words

Deep Focus also invites articles on film criticism, interviews, film 
and book reviews and responses to articles published, which we would 
like to publish in our future editions.

Please mail your articles to:

No. 33/1-9 and 1-10, Thyagaraj Layout, Jai Bharathi Nagar,
Maruthi Sevanagar P.O., Bangalore - 560 033.

E-mail: <mailto:bfs at bgl.vsnl.net.in%C2%A0>bfs at bgl.vsnl.net.in