Call for audiovisual proposals: #Coronaseries

edited by Ariane Hudelet (Université Paris Cité)

We are now inviting proposals for audiovisual essays for our Autumn 2024_#Enough issue – exploring how TV series brought a specific type of attachment, comfort and knowledge to their audiences during the Covid pandemic. These serial narratives were considered as a way of “coping” with the crisis (Boursier et al), either because they contributed to structure time at a time when it became undifferentiated, connected people through a shared viewing experience, or simply provided long-term narratives that either alleviated or made sense of the collective trauma we were all undergoing. The kind of connections that were thus created have had a lasting impact and still inform the way we relate to series, discuss and share personal, critical and theoretical insights. At a time when Covid is no longer treated by governments as a crisis, but its memory is still vivid, the special AV section aims to bring together video essays that address this phenomenon in diverse ways, contributing to memorializing this recent trauma. Video essays allow for a combination of the personal, the poetic and the analytical (Keathley, Mittell and Grant; Grizzaffi). As such, they help tackle the intimate connection with the spectator that the serial form so efficiently achieves (Garcia, Pribram), and explore how such affective links are created in a particularly trying time. By focusing on these affects as socially shared “structures of feeling” (Williams) in a period of globalized trauma, these video essays will offer a glimpse at a collective cultural experience whose effects are still intimately felt. The “Covid period” will here refer to the years 2020-2022, during which the global population was submitted to months of lockdowns, social distancing and sanitary measures, leading to a restriction of public gatherings and circulation, and thus to an increase in the home consumption of audiovisual content, with TV series as the primary choice. Whether these video essays stress forms of consolation, escapism, or cathartic grief provided by the dramas, soap operas or sitcoms their authors watched, the collection of essays will help us understand how TV series contributed to shape subject positions and social identities, at a time when many people were deprived of familiar social structures.

• We look forward to receiving abstracts for audiovisual essays (300 words) dealing with one’s personal connection to a specific series during the pandemic period and a short biography of 100 words by 15 May 2024 via this form. Please include a brief reference list of the material to be included in your audiovisual essay.
• In order to provide coherence and homogeneity, the videos should feature footage from a series – a scene, a brief sequence, or a montage of scenes or shots. Analysis/commentary should be expressed in a voiceover, or text on screen, explaining why this particular series resonates with the essayist’s experience of the pandemic (either because they watched it in lockdown or because it shed light on a particular aspect of the pandemic period for them)
• On the basis of selected abstracts, invited audiovisual essays should be between 3-4 minutes long and accompanied by a written statement of 500 words positioning the work . All audiovisual essays must feature English subtitles (regardless of the languages spoken in the video). Audiovisual essays will be due before 1 September 2024, and will subsequently be peer reviewed by our editors before final acceptance for publication.