Projecting Belief: Cinema and the Re-enchanted World
London
Organization: King's College London
Projecting Belief: Cinema and the Re-enchanted World
King’s College London – May 21-23 2026
Conference Organizers – Rachata Sasnanand and Benjamin Y Goff
Call for Papers:
What does it mean to believe in film? In an age of pervasive skepticism, affective fragmentation, and technological abstraction, belief has become increasingly difficult to locate—and all the more urgent to reimagine. Indeed, if the contemporary era has been marked by a disenchantment of the world, then perhaps it is belief that might act as the central motor for its re-enchantment. It is this central motor which the cinema might configure. Thus, this conference invites scholars, critics, and artists to explore cinema’s relation to belief, not simply as ideology or illusion, but as a way of inhabiting the world, encountering others, and restoring a sense of presence.
Drawing inspiration from the work of André Bazin, Stanley Cavell, and Gilles Deleuze, Projecting Belief: Cinema and the Re-enchanted World asks how film might serve as a site of re-enchantment. For Bazin, cinema bore the trace of the real through its photographic basis - a basis which might configure a vision of the world unshackled from the solipsism of one’s own subjectivity; for Cavell, it became a medium of moral acknowledgment and skeptical struggle; for Deleuze, it opened a time-image capable of restoring thought itself. Across their divergent vocabularies, each proposes that film can render belief sensible again, not only as an object of philosophical reflection, but as a lived, affective experience.
What becomes of believing in film today? What might it mean to treat cinema not just as a tool of representation, but as a belief-machine—one capable of disclosing the world, reanimating our attention, or staging moments of spiritual and political intensity? In the wake of disillusionment—historical, religious, ecological—what remains, or returns, through the screen?
We welcome proposals that engage with these and related questions, including (but not limited to):
How Bazin, Cavell, or Deleuze interrogate the relationship between cinema and belief
Arguments against using Bazin, Cavell, and Deleuze for belief
Cinema as a site of re-enchantment, spiritual longing, or philosophical affirmation
The political, ethical, or metaphysical stakes of belief in contemporary film
Close readings of films that stage belief, doubt, wonder, or the miraculous
Critical engagements with thinkers outside film-philosophy
Comparative and “Global Majority” frameworks for belief and re-enchantment in film
The aesthetics of faith, grace, and recognition in global cinematic traditions
Media ecologies of belief in the digital, post-cinematic, or post-secular age
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Lucy Bolton– Queen Mary University of London
Professor Victor Fan– King’s College London
We invite scholars from film and media studies, philosophy, theology, religious studies, comparative literature, and related fields. Doctoral students, early career researchers, and artist-scholars are especially encouraged to apply.
Please send a 250–300 word abstract and a short bio (100 words) to projectingbeliefconference@gmail.com by November 14, 2025. Notices of acceptance will be sent out by mid-December. The conference will be May 21-23, 2026 at King’s College London.
For inquiries, please contact the conference organizers (Rachata Sasnanand and Benjamin Goff) at projectingbeliefconference@gmail.com.
projectingbeliefconference@gmail.com
Benjamin Goff