Title: Displaced Images, Iconographic Survivals: Cinema and the Public Sphere

Acceptance of submissions for the Notebook section: April 1st to April 30th 2025

Date of publication: January 2026

Coordinators: Glòria Salvadó, Iván Pintor, Teresa Sorolla y Jordi Montañana

Images representing events, upheavals or significant acts in the public sphere are often articulated through visual forms that have been developed by cinema. Media representations of the effects of and responses to tragedies such as the floods that ravaged Valencia in October in 2024, the Los Angeles fires in 2025, the Hamas attack on Israeli territory in October 2023, or the assassination of the head of Russia’s Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Defence Forces, Igor Kirillov, in December 2024, often seem to draw on the legacy of the disaster film genre, the imaginary of the Cold War spy film, or the contemporary thriller. It is a plausible hypothesis in relation to the impact of events (Boucheron, 2024) that there is a specific set of iconographic frameworks for representing both ordinary and extraordinary occurrences in the public sphere that appeal to the spectator’s prior knowledge of certain visual imaginaries and mise-en-scène models.

 

In recent years, the visual construction of the public sphere has undergone a radical transformation, with the emergence of processes of acceleration and upheaval and the disruption of traditional forms of representation (Salvia, 2022), resulting in the appearance of some unexpected new visual codes. This transformation has taken place in relation to four basic categories: technology and war; health and the climate emergency; the rearticulation of gender identities; and migration and racial conflicts.

 

The aim of this monographic issue of L’Atalante is to explore the context of interaction between images of the public sphere and cinema, conceiving of the latter as a medium that both reflects and promotes the creation of iconographic codes for the visual representation of reality. Iconography and iconology have traditionally been concerned with tracing survivals (Nachleben) of gestures, figures and forms of representation from the art of classical antiquity through to contemporary painting and sculpture. By studying visual motifs, various authors (Balló 2000; Bergala, Balló 2016; Balló, Salvadó 2023) have analysed the iconographic patterns of cultural representation that have been conveyed and reinterpreted over the course of history in different media, with a consideration of the centrality of cinema: the woman in the window, the cowboy disappearing on the horizon, the ecstatic dance in the rain and the Pietà are all powerful images that have played a vital role in film history as sites of affective engagement.

 

Throughout the history of the visual arts, there has been a constant circulation and reinterpretation of motifs based on what one of the key scholars of iconography, Erwin Panofsky (1982), called pseudomorphosis, referring to the association of certain visual patterns with new social situations or expressive needs. Some years earlier, the father of iconology himself, the art historian Aby Warburg, had explored the survivals (Nachleben) of images, revealing the possibility, with his Mnemosyne atlas of images (1929), of constructing a cultural history of the transmission of gestures of passion and emotion in the West. The urgent need to conduct a similar study of contemporary images, comparing the gestures, upheavals and contextual displacements that connect visual forms with political and social affects, has inspired this call for papers. Specifically, we are seeking studies that adopt a comparative iconographic perspective to explore subjects, approaches and lines of research such as the following:

 

• Iconographies of political affects in cinema
• Representations of the rearticulation of gender identities in cinema and in the public sphere
• Forms of representation of the climate emergency in the dialogue between cinema and the public sphere
• Visual and technological codes of war, AI, video surveillance and biopolitics in cinema
• Cinema and iconologies of power
• Iconographies of resistance and civil protest
• Postcolonialism, migratory and racial conflicts in cinema
• Forensic aesthetics, desktop documentary

 

REFERENCES

 

Azoulay, Ariella. (2008). The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books.

Boucheron, Patrick (2024), Fechas que hicieron historia. Diez formas de crear un acontecimiento, Barcelona: Anagrama.

Salvia, Mattia (2022).  Interregno. Iconografie del XXI secolo. Rome: Nero.

Balló, Jordi (2000). Imágenes del silencio. Barcelona: Anagrama.

Balló, Jordi, Bergala, Alain (Eds.) (2016). Motivos visuales del cine. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg.

Balló, Jordi, Salvadó, Alan (2023). El poder en escena. Motivos visuales en la esfera pública. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg.

Farocki, Harun (2013). Desconfiar de las imágenes. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra.

Ginzburg, Carlo (2015). Paura, reverenza, terrore. Cinque saggi di iconografia politica. Milan: Adelphi.

Mondzain, Marie-José (1996). Image, icône, économie: les sources byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain. Paris: Seuil.

Panofsky, Erwin (1982). Estudios sobre iconología. Madrid: Alianza.

Steyerl, Hito (2014). Los condenados de la pantalla. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra.

Warburg, Aby (2010). Atlas Mnemosyne. Madrid: Akal.