Call For Essays – Cinematic Fixations

The Cinematic Fixations website is seeking short 500 word essays about the images in the database. The essays will be featured on the website, and eventually collected in a book. Topics for discussion can be the use of a signature color palette by a filmmaker (for example, Wes Anderson’s fondness for earthy browns and his use of blue tinting to indicate climax), or color as indicator of location (think The Wizard of Oz’s Emerald City and yellow brick road), or the shift from light to dark (as in the horror classics, Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). The essays can also break this mold and be a discussion of the author’s favorite cinematic moment, or a criticism of the project itself.

To get involved or submit essays, email Jeffrey Moser at jsmoser@mail.wvu.edu. This project is made possible through a grant from the Myer’s foundation, and the support of the School of Art and Design, College of Creative Arts, and the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University.

The Cinematic Fixations website is a visual database of film. It currently contains over 1000 film fixations, from George Melies to George Miller. The project invites academics, filmmakers, artists, computer programmers and movie buffs to collaborate in creating a complete visual database of film. Each fixation is created by arranging every frame of a film into a grid with a ratio of 3:1. No matter the length of a film the fixations are standardized so that films across genres and of varying duration can be compared and contrasted. The result is a color-banded timeline that reveals the underlying palette and the pattern of light variation of a film. The website is designed as a tool for researchers, critics, and students of film to investigate the use of color by filmmakers to augment narratives, indicate changes in psychological or physical space, and signify climax.