Mediascape: The Question of Authorship in Cinema and Media
Columns Section: Call for Papers

This Issue’s Theme: Authorship

Present since the emergence of film theory, questions of authorship in cinema, television, and media are ever growing in our day and age, as media platforms become increasingly complex, diversified, and interactive. Film scholarship has devoted extensive attention to this question in the form of various intellectual paradigms: auteur theory, death of the author, media franchises, culture industries, etc. In a recent essay, scholar Rodríguez-Ferrándiz articulated one of the most important and relevant insights to our media age and to film history as a whole: “We have passed from the anguish and disappointment Adorno felt on seeing the creative act of the artist swallowed up by the logic of industry, to qualifying the entire industry as ‘creative,’ to place creativity itself at the very heart of this industry.” Thankfully, it is the very inextricability of industry and creativity that makes authorship such an intricate and exponential topic to explore.

This is why Mediascape is looking for articles that address questions of authorship in the context of cinema and media. Note that an author could be anyone from a director to a screenwriter to a video game designer to an online blog community. Note, too, that any number of art/entertainment vehicles can be used to explore this question: classic or contemporary films, documentaries, television shows, found footage, exploitation films, music videos, art installations, video games, etc. The range is virtually unlimited.

Some potential topics might be, but are not limited to:

• Authorship in the context of film adaptations of novels and screenplays
• How do notions of authorship differ across national cinemas?
• How have the Oscars reflected notions of authorship?
• Is being an author more about one’s personality or the cinema/media one creates?
• How is authorship handled in the context of television, where each episode may have different writers and directors?
• Are there filmmakers/showrunners/artists/entertainers who should be considered authors but are woefully overlooked?
• Authorship in the context of film remakes
• Fans becoming authors and/or struggles over creative control between directors and fans (think the documentary The People v. George Lucas)
• Authorship in an age of narcissism
• Authorship in an age of internet access

We ask that submissions to the Columns Section be 5-15 pages (or 1000-5000 words.) If you have any questions regarding the submissions, please feel free to contact Kate Kennelly at kmk22010@mymail.pomona.edu anytime. We encourage abstracts, outlines, or drafts of papers by March 1st, 2016. We look forward to your submission.