Friday 2 August 2013

Cinema in the Interstices: Issue 5 of ALPHAVILLE

Frame grab from Mon oncle d'Amérique/My American Uncle (Alain Resnais, 1980). Read Angela Dalle Vacche's article which treats this film in the latest issue of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media
The interstice: something empty, something minute—a crevice, a chink, a narrow gap—yet, in spite of this definition of something apparently slight and inconsequential, one perhaps may make the claim that the interstice serves as a foundational element of film. The “intervening space”, as the OED defines it, in its celluloid form provided the connection between multiple images, allowing them to run together to form the illusion of movement. While this interstitial black strip that imperceptibly framed the moving image is no longer a constituent part of cinema in its current digital format, interstices continue to proliferate in screen media, perhaps to a greater extent than ever. Indeed, just as cinema originated in the interstices between theatre, painting, literature and photography, this intermediality takes on a redefined role in the digital era, with the lines between cinema, television, art, video and new media becoming increasingly difficult to define. [from 'Cinema in the Interstices: Editorial', Alphaville, 5, 2013, by Abigail Keating, Deborah Mellamphy and Jill Murphy (Issue Editors)]
Film Studies For Free is thrilled to announce to its readers that Issue 5 of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, a special themed issue on Cinema in the Interstices, is now available. The full table of contents, with links to all the excellent items, is given below.

FSFF particularly enjoyed Angela Dalle Vacche's essay, Laura Lee on the (digital) layering of media forms in Japanese cinema, Patrick Tarrant on Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Onde Jaz o Teu Sorriso, 2001), Pauline Marsh on the Australian coming-of-age film and complex issues of relations between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians, Veronika Schweigl on Henri-François Imbert’s essay film, No pasarán, album souvenir (2003) about the fate of Spanish Civil War refugees in France, Roy Daly on Jim Jarmusch, and Delphine Letort on Treme. Last but definitely not least, FSFF really appreciated Raymond Bellour's lecture on "the increasingly irreversible position of cinema within multiple image and sound dispositifs" through the prism of art installations by filmmakers and artists, including Marker, Akerman, Mekas, Kiarostami, Egoyan, Farocki, Svankmajer, Rist, Oursler, Beloff, Cardiff, Birnbaum, Viola and Castorf.

That is to say, FSFF particularly enjoyed everything in this issue.
Book Reviews (Editor: Ian Murphy)
Reports (Editor: Yuanyuan Chen)

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