Rethinking Rhythm in Film
A one-day symposium
Date: Thursday 22 May 2025
Venue: ARU Cambridge
We are delighted to invite abstracts for Rethinking Rhythm in Film, a one-day symposium organised by Dominic Lash and Simon Payne.
In contemporary film studies, rhythm no longer occupies the same kind of central, anchoring position it held for many pioneering theorists, from Sergei Eisenstein to Jean Mitry via Jean Epstein. Recent studies tend either to concentrate on certain manifestations of rhythm or to make it so complex as to be all-pervasive. For Rick Warner, rhythm, by definition, ‘imparts coherence amid fragmentary impressions’ (Warner 2022, p. 422). Such an account is not immediately easy to square with Domietta Torlasco’s interest in rhythm's ‘virtual life … one in which the sensible eludes the power of counting, of thinking according to a standard’ (Torlasco 2021, p. 6). Despite the fact that Noël Burch observed, almost fifty years ago, that ‘cinematic rhythm is defined by the sum total of all the parameters’ of film, detailed research into the full complexity of cinematic rhythm is not common (Burch 1973, p. 67).
This one-day symposium aims to contribute to the reinvigoration of the study of rhythm as a central aspect of film, whether developing strands of contemporary thought, suggesting entirely new avenues of investigation, or revising and rethinking earlier theories. We invite submissions looking at the broadest possible range of films (from early cinema to contemporary digital work; from narrative to documentary to animation to experimental and beyond) and considering any aspects of the relationship between film and rhythm.
A small sample of possible questions to be addressed might include:
- Are there such things as essentially cinematic rhythms?
- Do we need a unified concept of cinematic rhythm or, instead, a diversity of different concepts?
- How do the rhythms of the different components of film relate to one another?
- How might we best deploy concepts of rhythm in the close critical analysis of films?
- How do film rhythms relate to other kinds of rhythm?
- Is film rhythm always unifying or can it be disturbing or disruptive?
- How does film rhythm relate to broader questions of temporal experience in film?
- How are we best to approach the historical, social, and political dimensions of film rhythm?
Please submit 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers (together with 100-word biographies). We also welcome presentations of creative practice-based research. Submissions along these lines should include a link to representative work.
Online participation and attendance will also be possible.
Proposals should be sent to [email protected] by Friday 14 March.
Notification of decisions will be sent out the following week.
Selected Bibliography
Burch, Noël. Theory of Film Practice (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973)
Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘Methods of Montage’, in Film Form (ed. and trans. Jay Leyda; New York and London: Harvest, 1977), pp. 72-83
Guido, Laurent. ‘“The Supremacy of the Mathematical Poem”: Jean Epstein’s Conceptions of Rhythm’, in Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 143-160
Mitry, Jean. The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema, trans. Christopher King (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 89-275
Torlasco, Domietta. The Rhythm of Images: Cinema beyond Measure (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2021)
Warner, Rick. ‘Audiovisual Rhythm and Its Spectator: Moonlight as Example’, in Kyle Stevens, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 421-444