Call for Papers: EXIT SIGNS
EXIT SIGNS pose a provocative double signification. The icon signifies warning and, at the same time, evokes an imagined hidden space, a way forward, or a way out. In his 1983 essay “What is Enlightenment?,” Michel Foucault revives a question posed two centuries earlier by Immanuel Kant which attends to the political purchase of Exit (Ausgang) as a scene of decision. It is this moment of pause, which occurs before the act of choosing, which Kant originally marks as the kernel of the Enlightenment project. Indeed, beyond Foucault and Kant, the exit qua scene has been—and continues to be—seized upon by filmmakers and writers alike, who saw in this moment of transit the poignancy of the Exit Signs’ liminality. Exit Signs promise futures that are intangible and continually receding into a cascade of speculative impasses.
Cinema has long been fascinated with the Exit Sign. This rousing symbol manifests quite literally, as in the heart-pounding race towards an exit and promise of escape characteristic of the horror tradition, as well as more subtly, regarding film’s infatuation with doorways, passages, and porous architectures. In fact, one of
the earliest films captures workers pouring out of a Lumière factory—a structured daily exodus constitutive of the labour practices of the Industrial Revolution. Extradiegetically, Exit Signs define the contemporaneous cinematic experience as well: the arresting red and green lights illuminated within physical theatres around the globe—the glowing anchor of reality contrasting the flashing, moving images that transport audiences. It is this Exit Sign which keeps us from complete diegetic immersion, complicating theories of spectatorial identification. When the lights come back on and audiences leave the theatre, to press on Roland Barthes’ provocations in “Leaving the Movie Theatre,” how do exits cut us out of the apparatus? Exits are themselves an integral visual backbone of the movies, while Exit Signs as a cinematic pillar can be further abstracted. In cinematic practice, spectatorship, and scholarship, Exit Signs open up new ways of thinking about presences, absences, histories, and futurities alike. This imaginative quality of cinema allows for a retracing of the past and speculation towards other, potential futures. At the same time, the Exit Sign may honour utopia’s image ban, signalling the very threshold of the knowable and thinkable, demarcating the scenes of decision that refuse to be deformed by the violence of speculation. Approached in this way, this opening up, this imaginative quality of cinema, is what the Exit Sign warns of, as it does little more than proffer reconciled histories and reassure with soothing images of desirable futures—as Adorno wrote, “as long as the world is as it is, all pictures of reconciliation, peace, and quiet resemble the
picture of death.” Instead, the Exit that calls for our attention here is the open mouth of the cinema demanding things be different, yet offering nothing beyond the impenetrable horizons of negation, the only “chance of another world that is not yet.”
The Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto’s 2025 Annual Graduate Conference seeks submissions that attempt to find ways out through “EXIT SIGNS.” In other words, this year’s conference, which is in collaboration with a simultaneous graduate conference, “SIGNS OF EXIT,” at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, is interested in papers that address the thematic triangulation of hope, nihilism, and utopia through moving images and visual cultures. While these topics appear, at first, to bristle against one other, such contradictions are generative in their abrasiveness, and exploring their convergences and affinities are important interventions in contemporary scholarly debate. How can we understand cinema’s unique relationship to speculation, worldbuilding, and visualised
potentiality? How does desire and hope, even nihilism, play into filmic conceptions of exits, escapes, forms of leaving—and to where do these openings lead? Whether it be a philosophical approach, working with a specific media object, returning to the works of thinkers like Adorno and Kant, or a creative practice that shares in this generative bristling, this year’s joint conference is eager to engage with a wide range of conceptions of exits. Perhaps it is through finding a way out that we can find a way in.
Sample topics might include but are not limited to: accelerationism; Afropessimism; apocalyptic and postapocalyptic imaginaries; capitalist realism; continuities and discontinuities; cruel optimism; decline and decadence; desire, eroticism, and eros; escapist media; fugitivity, ungovernability, and lines of flight; futurities; hapticality, or being in the hold; hope and progress; lack and absence; migration and diaspora; narrative endings, closures, and resolutions; negation and the dialectic; nihilism; nostalgia; opacity, withdrawal, and disappearance; order and disorder; othering, difference, and alterity; postcolonial and decolonial theories; potentialities; queer futurity and the antisocial thesis; reform, revolution, and revolt; static vs. dynamic time; sustainability and durability; the event and its depictions; the restorative, transformative, and reparative; the thinkable and unthinkable; the undercommons; truth and reconciliation; utopia and dystopia.
Conference format: This conference takes place in a unique format as a collaboration with a simultaneous graduate conference, “SIGNS OF EXIT,” at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature. You may apply to either “EXIT SIGNS” or “SIGNS OF EXIT,” but not both. In an effort to provoke an interdisciplinary inquiry into exit, certain thematic panels will include participants from both cinema studies and comparative literature. Presenters will have 15-20 minutes to share papers, followed by a moderated question period. The working languages will be English and French.
Submission details: We welcome English and French submissions from independent scholars and graduate students worldwide. Please submit a brief abstract (300-500 words) and a short bio of 50-100 words to csgraduatestudentunion@gmail.com by January 15, 2025. Submissions should include full name, preferred pronouns, level of study, name of institution (if applicable), title, abstract, bio, and a 3-5 item bibliography. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by the end of January.
Any questions should be addressed to csgraduatestudentunion@gmail.com.
We look forward to receiving your abstracts and welcoming you to the University of Toronto this spring!
Best wishes,
Cinema Studies Graduate Conference Coordinators