Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

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General Editor’s Note

Laura Rascaroli

 

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This issue marks ten years of Alphaville.

Over ten years, we have been able to sustain several of the ambitions that originally motivated us in establishing the journal, and primarily to provide opportunities for early career researchers to participate in the development of an outlet with the highest international standards. The journal has also allowed us to realise our vision of an open-access publication committed to publishing exciting work at the frontiers of film and screen media studies, authored by international scholars at all stages of their careers. The scope and diversity of the areas covered in the twenty issues to date has far exceeded our expectations. For this outcome in particular, we owe a debt of gratitude to all of our issue editors and contributors.

The formula we have chosen for the journal of thematic issues devoted to topics identified both by board members and guest editors has allowed us to make focused, coherent, meaningful scholarly interventions into current debates. The first twenty issues have also shown that there is scope for a journal in film studies to be a forum not only for research but also for matter like extended book reviews and event reports where contributors have the opportunity to address innovative work and important trends in critical depth. Alongside these aspects, we have been able to witness exciting new developments in both open-access publishing and in a film and screen media scholarship increasingly beyond the book. Today, Alphaville regularly publishes podcasts, recordings of sessions such as round table discussions, and video essays. All of these developments have given the journal much of its impetus, and we look forward to discovering as yet unsuspected horizons in the issues to come.

The journal originated in an emergent film studies community based at University College Cork. It is therefore wholly appropriate to celebrate its anniversary with an issue stemming from the Women’s Film & Television History Network–UK/Ireland, this also an initiative born of a group of scholars, together with teachers, archivists, collections managers and professionals, driven by their interest in exploring the range of the contributions of women to the emergence and development of film and television. The Network held its inaugural conference in April 2011, while Alphaville was preparing its first issue, which was published in the summer of the same year.

The scholarship published in this anniversary issue of Alphaville was due to be presented at the 2020 Doing Women’s Film & Television History conference at Maynooth University, one of the many research events that was cancelled in summer 2020 as a result of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. As Martin Paul Eve has recently written, commenting on the effects of Covid-19 on publishing in 2020, “[t]he pandemic has shown, more than ever, why we need open access to research” (3). We at Alphaville are proud of having provided for ten years already an open-access outlet fuelled by the passion and curiosity of its editors, publishing excellent scholarship that remains the property of its authors, and delivering what we hope is a prized service to the community of scholars, critics, professionals, students, and film lovers.

I would like to close by acknowledging our readers. Alphaville receives today around 2,500 visitors per month, from a highly diverse, global readership. Perhaps more than anything, we look forward to strengthening this set of relationships over the years to come.

 

Reference

Eve, Martin Paul. “Open Access in the Plague Year.” Research Professional News, 9 Sept. 2020, www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-views-of-the-uk-2020-9-open-access-in-the-plague-year.

                                                  

Suggested Citation

Rascaroli, Laura. “General Editor’s Note.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 20, 2020, pp. 1–2, https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.20.00.

 

Laura Rascaroli is Professor of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork. Over the past ten years, as well as editing Alphaville, she authored two monographs on essayistic and first-person cinema: How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford UP, 2017)and The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Columbia UP, 2009)—the latter also translated into Chinese (2014) and Farsi (2020). Her most recent book is the collection Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema (edited with Jill Murphy, Amsterdam UP, 2020). She has also published several other volumes on contemporary European cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni, amateur film, cosmopolitanism, and the cinema of Nanni Moretti.