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Issue 25 - Spotlight on Early Career Research in Film Studies There are discrepancies when it comes to determining what an early career researcher (ECR) or early career academic (ECA) is, however, scholars agree that this period of development is fraught with a unique set of challenges. Let’s begin by considering the parameters and conditions of being an early career researcher. |
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Issue 24 - Fostering Diversity On and Off Screen This issue of Alphaville brings together research that responds to the broader social zeitgeist concerning gender and diversity inequities in the field of screen production. In recent years, individuals and groups from inside and outside of academia have called for greater diversity on screen, resulting in campaigns such as #MeToo, #TimesUp, and #OscarsSoWhite. In particular, the gender imbalance that exists on screen and behind the camera has been a particular point of focus. |
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Issue 23 - Screening the Artist: Between Presence/Absence, Immediacy/Mediation From 14 to 31 May 2010, the Yugoslavian-born performance artist Marina Abramović mounted a large-scale retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Designed to “to transmit the presence of the artist and make her historical performances accessible to a larger audience”, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present included re-enactments of several signature works performed by younger artists (chosen and coached by Abramović) (MoMA). |
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Issue 22 - On the Cultural Circulation of Contemporary European Crime Cinema Considering the transnational prominence of European cinema, European crime films present an interesting case. As a genre, crime “is clearly the most popular genre across Europe for novels, television series and films”, and crime fiction productions are abundant on a national level in most European countries (Bondebjerg et al. 223). Crime fiction, therefore, appears as the genre most able to..... |
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Issue 21 - Mining Memories: New Explorations in Cinema, Memory and the Past Jean-Luc Godard once observed of Bertrand Tavernier that they shared a common origin: as children of “the Libération and the Cinémathèque” they came of age in the turbulent 1960s (qtd. in A Journey Through French Cinema (Voyage à travers le cinéma français, Bertrand Tavernier, 2016)). Tavernier, who died in March of this year, is an appropriate filmmaker to commemorate in this Introduction to an issue of Alphaville dedicated to themes of memory and the past..... |
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Issue 20 - Doing Women’s Film & Television History The scholarship collected in this issue of Alphaville represents a selection of the research that was to be presented at the 2020 Doing Women’s Film & Television History conference, which was one of the many events cancelled as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic itself greatly impeded academic life and our capacity to carry out and share research among colleagues, students and the public. Covid-19 was even more problematic for women, who shouldered a disproportionate care burden throughout the pandemic.... |
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Issue 19 - Performing the Intermedial across Brazilian Cinema Since the beginning, it has always been the song. Among the different arts that developed in Brazil during the twentieth century, music (particularly popular song) has been a dominant and reputable force within the country and internationally. In the introduction to his book O século da canção (The Century of Song), music academic Luiz Tatit highlights the importance of the whole social spectrum in the shaping of Brazilian popular song, the global prestige it gained despite the lack of a Portuguese language influence on the international scene, and its overwhelming heterogeneity, which inhibits definitions and classifications (11–2). Since colonial times... |
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Issue 18 - Refugee Filmmaking This issue of Alphaville centres on the work of displaced and exiled filmmakers and directors committed to challenging border violence. This is achieved in part through the work of the academic contributions in the main section, but perhaps most pertinently through the contributions of filmmakers in the two Dossiers. The editorial team in this issue practiced a form of borderless collegiality by imagining a scholarly publication that fosters empowering dialogues between academics, artists, activists and those with lived experience; debordering here begins with the vision of the editorial team and extends into the selection and configuration of contributions. |
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Issue 17 - Researching Creative Practice In their introduction to Mind the Gap! (the conference proceedings of a series of papers delivered by practice-based researchers in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 2015) Desmond Bell and Rod Stoneman observe: 'while practice-based research towards a doctorate in the creative arts has been established now for over twenty years, a series of recurring and unresolved debates around this mode of scholarship continue to resonate with our arts schools, departments of music, drama and the performing arts and media and communications studies'....
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Issue 16 - Queer Media Temporalities Queerness has always been marked by its untimely relation to socially shared temporal phases, whether individual (developmental) or collective (historical). (McCallum and Tuhkanen 6) The 2017 promotional campaign that launched Season Nine of Logo’s award-winning reality competition TV series RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) spoke directly to anxieties circulating within LGBT communities in the US and beyond as a result of the 2016 election of Donald Trump (LogoTV).... |
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Issue 15 - I-Docs as Intervention: The Poetics and Politics of Polyphony The idea for this special issue of Alphaville originated at the i-Docs 2018 Symposium, held in March 2018 in Bristol, UK, where we jointly convened a discussion on the potential engagement of the interactive documentary (i-doc) form with Mikhail Bakthin’s expanded concept of polyphony. As part of this, we presented a series of provocations with a view to generating a new theoretical framework for i-docs.1 These provocations were inspired by all aspects of Bakthin’s polyphony, from both a theoretical and a practical point of view.... |
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Issue 14 - For a Cosmopolitan Cinema The recent cosmopolitan turn in film studies has coincided with the emergence of a new set of valuable theoretical perspectives. Compared to other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, cinema has been relatively slow to adopt cosmopolitanism as a critical tool. Dimitris Eleftheriotis suggests that this delay is paradoxically due to the self-evident nature of cinema as a cosmopolitan medium, as films and cinematic culture... |
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Issue 13 - Screening Race Racial minorities have long been excluded, marginalised and misrepresented on the big and the small screen. Often, the representation of ethnic minorities is lacking authenticity and is still characterised by decades-old stereotypes. Our increasingly diverse global society is still not reflected in the shows and films we see on TV or in the cinema. However, the representation of race has changed over the last decade. The shifting global political and societal milieu... |
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Issue 12 - The New Old: Archaisms and Anachronisms across Media Transmedial and transcultural expressions of nostalgia are ubiquitous in our
contemporary popular culture. Revival styles, vintage fashions, retro phenomena,
skeumorphs and remediations are common presences in our increasingly digital cultural
landscape, which gives up the dreams of spotless perfection of the binary code for the
indexical ruins of the analogical... |
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Issue 11 - Cinema Heritage in Europe The safeguarding, preservation and valorisation of the cultural heritage has increasingly become associated with the process of making cultural heritage assets available online (“Towards an Integrated Approach”). The process of digitisation of cultural assets, while playing a key role in sharing knowledge, still represents a challenge for European and global heritage... |
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Issue 10 - Women and Media in the Twenty-First Century In celebration of its tenth issue, Alphaville is proud to introduce this special issue on Women and Media as a reflection of the journal’s enduring interest in, and desire to contribute to, this dialogue. The range of articles presented in this issue offers an insight into the expanded spectrum of work by and about women in the new millennium, providing a snapshot of the multifaceted ways in which women are working and being represented across the globe... |
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Issue 9 - Deviate! Prescribing Deviate! as a special theme is not to suggest that to deviate must always be an inherently radical action: deviational change often presents as a slight shift or a series of such shifts and transitions. Hence, the moving image is rethought and reworked incrementally; these small, persistent changes giving rise to new ways of seeing the world, which enhance our understanding of it and often challenge that understanding... |
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Issue 8 - Animation at the Cutting Edge Though for a long time marginal to the historical and theoretical concerns of mainstream film culture, animation has recently received increasing attention from critics and scholars owing to its prominent status in contemporary screen media culture and the dramatic expansion it has undergone in the digital age. The articles that compose this issue are remarkably consistent in querying animation as a mode that “destabilises the image”, that asks questions about the image and, in particular, about its relationship to reality... |
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Issue 7 - Corporeal Cinema Inspired by groundbreaking works that have helped to shift the critical discourse on corporeality and embodiment, this themed issue of Alphaville highlights a diverse range of fresh, original work from emerging and established scholars. In setting our mandate for the issue, we wondered how affective theorisations of cinema as embodied experience might usefully intersect with image studies of the human body as raced, gendered, and inextricably tied to broader social and cultural realities... |
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Issue 6 - Reframing Cinema Histories This issue of Alphaville originates in a one-day symposium, “Reframing Cinema Histories”, which was organised at University College Cork in March 2013. The aim of the event was to bring together a select group of scholars working on a range of historical projects and, through presentations of specific case studies and a round table discussion, highlight the variety of methodological approaches that may be adopted by the researcher studying and writing about cinema history... |
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Issue 5 - Cinema in the Interstices This special issue considers the interstice as a framework for the nonspecificity of film, as a method for the rehabilitation of the analogue image within digital film, as a device to interpret the change that has taken place between classical film and artist’s cinema, as representative of interculturalism in national cinema, as blurring the lines between fact and fiction, as a mode of transition between Asian concepts of the void and independent American film, and as a form of both temporal and spatial elision... |
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Issue 4 - Open Theme Issue 4 is Alphaville's first Open Theme edition. Despite this issue's open nature, however, thematic consistencies arise, with authors re-evaluating female roles and representations in filmic genres, engaging with issues developing from evolving modes of censorship, working through the complexities of filmic narrative and merging distinct analytic approaches with aesthetic readings of key films... |
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Issue 3 - Sound, Voice, Music It is a moment of rupture, when we become aware of the potential of film sound to reveal, and break out of, the apparatus to which it has been assigned. This special issue of Alphaville aims to be just one such moment, in which film sound, voice and music are singled out by the analysis in ways that both reveal their profound imbrication in the textual whole and shed light on the apparatus... |
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Employing with lucidity and conviction a range of methodological approaches, these articles challenge us to rethink texts and genres from the vantage point of spatio-temporal constructs and relationships, showing how, rather than annihilate the principle of identity, the filmic observation of the infinitesimal variations of the space-time continuum has the power to both establish and interrogate it... |
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Issue 1 - European Cinema: Transnational, Transcultural, Transmedial The inaugural issue of Alphaville stems thematically from an international Film Studies conference on European Cinema (UCC, May 2010), which addressed the permeability of European spaces from a number of diverse perspectives, showcasing the geopolitical, sociocultural, aesthetic and productive "movement" that was historically and still is at the heart of European cinema... |
