Call for Papers: Screenwriting and Screenwriters in Eastern European Cinema

Special Issue of Studies in Eastern European Cinema
Guest edited by Jan Černík, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czechia

Topics may include but are not restricted to:
Screenwriting history
Screenwriting theory
Screenplay analysis
Screenplay formats
Film genres and screenwriting
Screenwriters and authorship
etc.

Deadline for 200-word abstracts with short bios: 31 March 2020.
Deadline for full articles: 31 October 2020.
The journal’s web page: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/reec20/current

Screenwriting Studies as a separate academic area are still a young discipline. In the last decade, research was focused on the industrial context and screenplay development (Macdonald, 2013, Banks, 2015), screenwriting formats (Price, 2013, Price, Pallant, 2016), analyses of screenplays (Nelmes, 2010, Murphy, 2015) and screenwriting discourse (Maras, 2009). Authors also paid some attention to screenwriting in television (Novrup Redvall, 2013), gender inequality in screenwriting (Wreyford, 2018), modern attitudes towards screenwriting (Millard, 2014) or film genres in the context of screenwriting (Selbo, 2015). Several broad-scope anthologies on screenwriting were published, too (Brenes, Cattrysse, McVeigh, 2017, Maras, 2016). However, there is a significant lack of Eastern European contribution to this English-language discussion on screenwriting.

In 2012, an international workshop “Theorizing Screenwriting Practice” took place at Masaryk University in Brno as a part of the conference Screen Industries in East-Central Europe. The participating scholars and filmmakers discussed different aspects of film and television screenwriting and among twenty participants, there were just a few scholars from Eastern Europe. The region was represented mostly by screenwriters, scholars were mostly from Western Europe. Likewise, only a few articles concerning Eastern European screenwriting have been published in the international Journal of Screenwriting since its foundation in 2010.

Up to this point, research on Eastern European screenwriting is either published in national languages or is discussed within a broader framework of production studies (e. g. Szczepanik, 2013, Marecki, Malatyński, 2012, Belodubrovskaya, 2017). Only a small number of studies on this subject have been published in English. In the special issue on screenwriting and screenwriters, we want to provide space for articles on Eastern European screenwriting and screenwriters.

Topics may include but are not restricted to:

Screenwriting history

Screenwriting theory

Screenplay analysis

Screenplay formats

Film genres and screenwriting

Screenwriters and authorship

Screenplay development in socialist film units

Collaborative scriptwriting

Dramaturgy and script doctoring

Narration and storytelling

Screenplay structure

Screenwriting discourse

Manuals and pedagogy

Censorship and screenwriting

Please send your 200-word abstracts with short bios to Jan Černík (jan.cernik@upol.cz) and Ewa Mazierska (EHMazierska@uclan.ac.uk) by 31 March 2020.
The deadline for full articles is 31 October 2020.
The journal’s web page: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/reec20/current