Monday 25 May 2015

[in]TRANSITION Issues! Rossellini, Marclay, Burnett, Snow, Emoticons, Time, Surveillance, Volumetric Cinema, Experimental Cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, Women in Prison Genre


THEORY OF RELATIVITY by Catherine Grant is an experimental video about digital intertextuality and cinephiliac relativity. It was inspired, in part, by (the non-open access article) "Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock," just published in the Spring 2015 issue of Cinema Journal (54.3) by film scholar Julie Levinson. You can read a little more about this video and the connections it makes here. It was also made as a reserve entry for the new issue of [in]Transition linked to below.

Film Studies For Free is truly thrilled to present an entry on the last two issues of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, of which FSFF's author is proud to be a co-editor. The journal and its editors and project managers recently won an 'Award of Distinction' for Innovative Scholarship thanks to the 2015 Anne Friedberg Award Committee and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Board of Directors, presented at the annual SCMS conference in Montreal. Woohoo! (Btw, look out for content related to this conference in FSFF's next entry, coming soonish!)

The first of the two issues FSFF is catching up with was published to coincide with the Montreal conference back in March. It was the first issue of [in]Transition devoted exclusively to peer-reviewed videographic work! Each video was accompanied by a curatorial statement from the maker, as well as the peer reviewer evaluations, all transparently published in the spirit of openness, to encourage scholarship as conversation, and to help our discipline establish a set of criteria for what constitutes valid scholarship in this emerging, audiovisual form. [in]Transition continues to accept submissions of videographic work for peer-reviewed publication in subsequent issues. Guidelines for submission are here.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.1, 2015
And the second issue to be publicised here (commissioned and edited by FSFF's author) has just been published! It features content generated as part of an exciting collaboration with Cinema Journal, its partner publication. That journal's editor, Will Brooker, shared with [in]Transition's editors (some six months in advance of publication) four articles from the latest issue of this highly esteemed journal—54.3, Spring 2015—and asked if we would be interested in commissioning videographic responses to the work. We accepted this challenge, conceiving of it as an experiment to see how audiovisual essays (produced and published relatively quickly) could take up, adapt, or riff off debates and arguments posited by written scholarly texts (which, as is customary, had taken several years to produce and publish).

Five sets of audiovisual essayists accepted the unusual commission, and their creative, critical work forms the basis of the issue. Each video is accompanied by a written statement from the maker(s) discussing the matters at stake in composing such audiovisual responses. Further responses to the work from viewers and readers are invited in the comments threads to the entries.

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 2.2, 2015
[Note: The video at the top of this FSFF entry was made as a reserve video for the issue. You can read more about that one here.]

There is further open access content connected to the above articles from the latest issue of Cinema Journal with which [in]Transition 2.2 interacted, as follows:

Cinema Journal Afterthoughts and Postscripts, Spring 2015, 54.3

No comments: