Plastic and Cinema

Aesthetic, Materiality and Philosophy (Tentative Title)

Debarshi Arathdar and Jayjit Sarkar

The ontology of cinema exhibits a material tension from its very genesis. Its production is dependent on material cases that arise from the developments of a post-industrial age on the verge of techno-capitalism. Cinema, like an organism, operates. as “something having many related parts that function together as a whole.”[1] More precisely, cinema is a ‘plastic’ organism, and its organelles are made out of time. One can extend the analogy to various surgical interventions (alike to omitting, including, editing, re-taking, re-framing) on the timed body of cinema that composes the (polymeric) embryo or what is known as the ‘cinema-in-process’ and ultimately cinema-as-product (with all its post-productions) is pushed out into the world. Time in cinema is cut, split, sewed, superimposed, stretched, slowed, formed and deformed; this imparts to it the qualities of being plastic.

Plastic and cinema’s connection is an extensive one going back to the invention of the motion picture camera, and the use of cellulose nitrate in the formation of a transparent photographic film. Since then; the material-plastic, plastic-aesthetic, plastic as film-philosophy and plastic as subject are all intertwined with the concept of cinema. To take a recent example, the corporeal in David Cronenberg’s cinema is immensely plastic: it is formed, deformed, and transformed, exceeding the presumption of what a body can and cannot do. Rather than being elastic, it is plastic—the former has the property to return to an earlier state, the latter lacks a ‘promise’ to do so. Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future treats plastic as an (in)dispensable material and plasticity as an inherent property of the body. The organs that sprout in a plastic-contaminated future have an agency of their own, announcing, growing, and asserting their autonomy, often disrupting the usual, corporeal sequence of action. The consumption of plastic in its material form is portrayed as an advertent choice to limit ecological catastrophe whilst paving a path towards resource-oriented sustainability. Through surgical procedures, an illegal faction makes the body capable of digesting plastic, although this deviance invites governmental intervention, following their conservative stance on evolution. The material plastic and the plasticity of the body are central to the film’s ecological overtone.

Various other associations of plastic and cinema need consideration, in lieu of our contemporary affiliations with plastic and plasticity. The metaphorical functions of plastic and cinema are both transformative in nature, embodying the clause for a state of physical change associated either directly with the user, the environment or both. Cinema as a medium and its constructed ‘being’ exhibit a similar relation to the nature of Plastic’s ‘inside-laboratory’ and ‘outside-laboratory’ phases (Ghosh 62), holding a direct analogy for Cinema’s ‘inside-production’ and ‘outside-dissemination’ models whereby its inter-textual/cultural composition brings forth a new schema, a unique combination that is different for every other film.

The aesthetical and political flow (read traversion) of cinema through the global market and its eventual dissemination into the world; suggests a fluid characteristic often equated with the plastic itself, especially its defining characteristic for plasticity. “Plastic is never plastic if it cannot be with others.” (Ghosh 72) Cinema is always already in resonance with other motion pictures that employ camera frames, actors, dialogues, sets, costumes, sounds, actions, props, etc often with the same elements. The following dynamic applies to the hetero-polymer chains that link up to form different compounds, in turn shapes, sizes, compositions, aggregations and agglomerations of plastic objects and products. The process and the product are both plastic in a sense when one views the cinema as an assemblage of several media forms co-existing as an interactive ecological system. Plastic objects typically are perceived as a natural disrupter and contaminant for all forms of ecological systems. However, the (de-)constructed ecology of the plastic polymer chains in their molecular form and its componential distribution as morphed objects in the environment (macroplastics and microplastics) are characteristic of the way in which ideas, concepts, frames, schemas, dialogues and discourses spread interculturally through mediums such as Cinema themselves.

The proposal is a call for critical engagements with the diverse dimensions via which the cinematic mode engages in several relations with the plastic, both in its epistemological and ontological variants- the property of plasticity and the ‘material aesthetic’ of plastic-ness exhibited by contemporary motion pictures.

Themes and Sub-themes (but not limited to):

• Conceptualizations of Plastic in Cinema
• The Material-Aesthetics of Film Production
• Time, Plastic and Cinema
• Plasticity and Cinematic Hermeneutics
• Production, Postproduction, Marketing as forms of Plastic disseminations in Cinema
• Hetero-linkages and the Intertextual rubric of Motion Pictures
• The Plastic Turn and Cinema
• Plastic and the Future of Cinema
• Cinematic Image and Plasticity
• Cinematic Form, Multimodality, and Plasticity
• Eco-Aesthetics, Plastic, and Ethics in Cinema

A preliminary interest for the edited volume has been shown by the editors of the book series- Film Studies and Philosophy published by Palgrave Macmillan (Springer Nature).

Please Email your abstracts (approximately 400-500 words) with 5-6 keywords including your name, affiliation and a brief bio-note of 100 words maximum to: plasticandcinema@gmail.com.

Last Date of Abstract Submission: 1st August, 2026

Notification of Acceptance: 27th August, 2026

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Please reach out on the aforementioned email address if any queries persist.

Recommended Readings:

Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Forms of being: Cinema, aesthetics, subjectivity. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

Davis, Heather. Plastic matter. Duke University Press, 2022.

Gabrys, Jennifer, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael, eds. Accumulation: The material politics of plastic. Routledge, 2013.

Ghosh, Ranjan. "Desiring-Material: Plastic-Art and Affect-ability." Minnesota Review 2021.97 (2021): 53-76.

Ghosh, Ranjan. The Plastic Turn. Cornell University Press, 2022.

Hainge, Greg. "Rapt in (destructive) plasticity: Demonlover and the annihilation of cinematic form." French Screen Studies 23.1 (2023): 52-66.

Hawkins, Gay. "Plastic and Presentism: The Time of Disposability." Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5.1 (2018).

Irr, Caren, ed. Life in plastic: artistic responses to petromodernity. U of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Lepot, Cyril. "Stop motion: From plastic to plasmatic cinema." Animation Practice, Process & Production 3.1-2 (2013): 133-148.

Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the dusk of writing: Dialectic, destruction, deconstruction. Columbia University Press, 2009.

Malabou, Catherine. The future of Hegel: plasticity, temporality, and dialectic. Psychology Press, 2005.

Silverman, Hugh J. "Malabou, Plasticity, and the Sculpturing of the Self." Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36.2 (2010): 89-102.

Souriau, Etienne. "Time in the plastic arts." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 7.4 (1949): 294-307.

Thompson, Richard C., et al. "Our plastic age." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364.1526 (2009): 1973-1976.

Toth, Josh. "Historioplastic Metafiction: Tarantino, Nolan, and the “Return to Hegel”." Cultural Critique 99 (2018): 1-30.

Turnock, Julie A. Plastic reality: Special effects, technology, and the emergence of 1970s blockbuster aesthetics. Columbia University Press, 2015.

[1]  Organism definition & meaning (no date) Merriam-Webster. Available at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/organism (Accessed: 16 July 2024).