CALL FOR PAPERS

We accept articles – in Polish or in English language – concerning subjects as announced below, as well as papers not strictly connected with the main topic of the volume, especially if they are related to history of Polish cinema, film theory or issues from the area of film and media studies that are underresearched so far. We also accept reviews of the books on film published in Poland or concerning Polish cinema and media.

No. 133 (Spring 2026)

FILM STUDIES AND MEDIA STUDIES IN THE HUMANITIES

(submission deadline: December 8, 2025)

The contemporary era demonstrates a weakening of theories, particularly in the humanities. Multiple “turns” – often transient and provisional – replace these theories. However, can these turns substitute the theories and guarantee the methodological rigor of scientific inquiry? Perhaps “theorizing” and “mapping” research fields by academia will suffice today, instead of “deep” ontological and epistemological insight, to maintain clarity in navigating the course of intellectual trajectories. Suppose a new theory (or theories) were to emerge. What form should they take, and what purpose should they serve in the age of digitalization, transitivity of media cultures, and constant transformations of post-cinema?

More theoretical questions arise. Should film and media studies function as a unified discipline or separate research fields? Should they adopt an integrative and comparative approach, or should it lean toward interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity? What should film studies constitute today when questioning the nature of film no longer indicates theoretical extravagance? Should the digital paradigm, defined by the dominance of algorithms and artificial intelligence, serve as its primary context? Should we view cinema through the lens of critical theories or position it within posthumanist perspectives (which is not mutually exclusive)? What constitutes the nature of the dispositif today, and where should we draw inspiration for the field’s language?

Film studies and media studies remain in perpetual motion today, driven by the dynamics of transitions from humanistic to posthumanist and transhumanist narratives. In such circumstances, does reviewing past analog theories still hold value? How should we conceptualize film histories within inter-, trans-, and post-media spaces? By inviting readers to engage in this issue, we encourage discussions about the place of film studies and media studies in contemporary humanities; we also invite attempts to capture the dynamics of their transformations.

Examples of thematic areas:

• theoretical discourses of film studies and media studies facing transformations in the humanities
• proliferation of turns – a temporary necessity or the state of theory after theory?
• theorizing versus mapping in response to theoretical deficit
• film expertise – media expertise: integration, interdisciplinarity, or transdisciplinarity?
• post-cinema and post-media as research objects and cognitive tools in the humanities
• metalanguage of theory in times of its decline
• film and screen media in the digital paradigm
• transformations of dispositif and their theoretical, psychological, formal, and technological aspects
• trans- and posthumanist perspectives in film and media research
• critical theories and critique of theory
• histories anew – further challenges or an anachronistic project?

No. 134 (Summer 2026)

FILM AND CINEMA HISTORIOGRAPHY

(submission deadline: March 9, 2026)

Writing history is a cultural category that changes over time: new methodologies and information emerge, previously hidden contexts reveal themselves, and specific political agendas take shape. Thus, however banal it may sound, historiography is never transparent; it is always a narrative rather than merely a (politically neutral) chronicle – to use Hayden White’s terms, arguably the most prominent advocate of treating history and literature as kindred enterprises.

This issue of Kwartalnik Filmowy concerns precisely the questions of shaping, inventing, and recording the history of film and cinema. The New Film/Cinema History is no longer new, and it seems that in the third decade of the 21^st century – when we, as researchers, have access to an expanding range of sources and data together with increasingly sophisticated tools for their processing – it is possible to reflect both on their usefulness for historiography and on contemporary historiographic methods themselves, previously impossible or unavailable.

An additional field of inquiry may also be non-academic film-historical narratives – political, ideological, journalistic, fan-based, or self-referential. We are interested not only in the theory of writing film and cinema history but also in how it intertwines with the film text itself. How does one shape the other? What can appear on screen precisely because the history of film has taken the shape it has? And what changes in historiographic methodology do specific images and filmic narratives compel?

Examples of thematic areas:

• film historiography as an object of study – the state of (self-)reflection on the history and status of cinema historiography
• new methods and methodologies of working in/with archives
• revisions of the paradigms and tools of the New Film/Cinema History
• incorporating the latest achievements of historiography and historical methodology into film studies
• historiography in the academy – modes of practice and teaching
• the presence of film and cinema historiography in education and in the public realm
• national historiographies – perspectives, shifts, re-evaluations
• the influence of historiography on the reading of the canon and the archive
• film history under construction: losses and omissions, findings and discoveries
• the historiography of unrealized filmographies: abandoned projects, untrodden paths, broken genealogies, missing links
• meta-historiographic reflections in cinematic works
• the influence of political, ideological, and institutional changes on film historiography – censorship, propaganda, forgetting, reclaiming
• other ways of “writing” cinema/media history – film essays, history in the blogosphere and vlogosphere
• oral history of cinema as an alternative historiography

No. 135 (Autumn 2026)

TRANSIENCE AND OLD AGE

(submission deadline: June 1, 2026)

There is a somewhat tragic, if truistic, thought – already weighing on the minds of the ancients – that the experience of transience begins at the very moment of birth. The world and human life are determined by a continuous process of becoming and vanishing, which gives rise to diverse movements and changes. Still, even while humbly accepting the variabilist view that becoming and passing away are the most essential features of existence, we constantly strive to leave behind a visible and lasting trace.

Transience permeates not only our daily lives but also our reflections and artistic expressions. Art, too, is subject to passing, though we often stress that we value precisely its universality and timelessness. Today, it is hard to imagine culture without Botticelli, Bach, or Vivaldi – but they too once disappeared from it (or at least from its foreground) for many years. The world of art is a world of stars, in every field and regardless of its value. Once-forgotten artists (great and mediocre alike) and works (masterpieces as well as less successful efforts) suddenly become almost pop-cultural icons, yet surely there are also creators and works that – despite former splendor – remain invisible to us, “observing” us from hiding. In film art, transience pertains not only to its content, the significance of ideas, but also to its materiality. After all, cinema also grows old. Bad and good films alike pass and age, as do great acting and directing legends and cinematic technologies – sometimes to return unexpectedly. Botticelli needed the famous art historian Ruskin in order to reemerge; films sometimes need only the curiosity and attention of ordinary viewers.

We invite reflection on how cinema thematizes transience on individual and social, ideological and material levels – and on the transience of cinema itself as a physical space, and of film as idea, medium, and matter; on the mechanisms, circumstances, and consequences of sudden returns, but also the causes of falling into oblivion.

Examples of thematic areas:

• the transience and immortality of films – rightfully forgotten or rediscovered: new interpretations, values, and meanings
• the end of the canon – whose/which cinema is fading away?
• cinema in a permanent crisis of transience – e.g., the coming of sound, the twilight of Hollywood’s golden age, the backlash of the Reagan era, the pandemic crisis, etc.
• the end of cinema or post-cinema? new forms of distribution and transformations of cultural practices
• ageism in the context of film production and the functioning of the film industry
• cinematic depictions of life’s transience and changing approaches to aging and mortality
• the aesthetics of decay and ephemerality
• relations to materiality, to one’s own existence, and to others in the face of seemingly infinite resources of time: what do we gain, and what do we lose?
• the film-ontological motif of immortality and the mummification of time and humanity
• the dialectic of transience and permanence as mutually conditioning categories
• the visualization of the passage of time, of phenomena of transience
• transience – progress, historical necessity, or loss?
• transience and the passage of time as models of futuristic archaeology in science fiction
• the contrast between transience and permanence in film genres: the disaster film (transience) versus the vampire or zombie horror film (permanence) – the political, social, and cultural contexts of their popularity in a given era
• testamentary films: the final works of filmmakers read through the lens of their awareness of transience
• the question of film’s survival as both material and cultural asset
• nostalgia for media formats
• the problem of the transience and permanence of film media and cinema infrastructure