New Publication: Ekphrasis Special Issue on Age and Ageing in European and World Cinema(s)

We are happy to announce a new collective scholarly publication emerging from the AGE-C project, published in December 2025. Ekphrasis, Volume 34, Issue 2 (2025), edited by Boglárka Angéla Farkas and Dr. Andrea-Adriana Virginás, is a special issue titled Age and Ageing in European and World Cinema(s). The volume grew out of close collaboration between the AGE-C project, Babeș-Bolyai University, and the SERCIA international conference Age and Ageing in Anglophone and European Cinema(s), hosted in Cluj-Napoca in September 2025.

The issue brings together a wide range of perspectives on ageing as a cultural, aesthetic, and political process. It addresses not only ageing bodies and characters on screen, but also ageing stars, audiences, cinematic technologies, and film genres. Rather than treating ageing as a fixed synonym for old age, the volume approaches it as a dynamic movement through time that reshapes narratives, industries, and modes of spectatorship across European and global cinemas.

Opening with a foreword, the editors situate ageing within contemporary demographic, social, and media transformations, from Europe’s increasingly ageing populations to the ageing of cinema itself as a medium negotiating its position between theatrical exhibition and digital platforms. Drawing on cultural gerontology, film history, and gender studies, the introduction frames ageing as a key site where questions of gender, power, care, memory, and technological change intersect.

The contributions that follow explore ageing through diverse lenses and methodologies. Several articles focus on auteurship and late style, examining how filmmakers negotiate creative ageing and historical time. Others address gendered ageing, with studies on ageing femininities, ranging from hagsploitation and post pandemic representations to feminist aesthetics, as well as on ageing masculinities, including nostalgia, authority, and animated temporalities. The issue also engages with genre and industry, tracing how ageing reshapes horror, action cinema, and science fiction, alongside national and transnational contexts in which ageing bodies become carriers of collective memory, trauma, and political critique.

Taken together, the special issue offers a coherent yet diverse mapping of contemporary scholarship on ageing and cinema, affirming the field’s momentum while opening space for new questions, methods, and cross disciplinary dialogue.

Read the full issue in open access on the Ekphrasis archive: https://www.ekphrasisjournal.ro/index.php?p=arch

Written by: Olena Gepper

Image credit: Cover image of Ekphrasis, Volume 34, Issue 2 (2025), special issue “Age and Ageing in European and World Cinema(s)”.