Film Matters Magazine

Film Matters is pleased to release issue 6.3 (2015), our final 2015 issue before we start on 2016 with volume 7!

In this issue, you’ll find the following peer-reviewed feature articles:

• The Horrors of John Carpenter’s Halloween by Andrew Deacon
• The Production Code Administration and Sexualized Spaces in East of Eden
  by Theresa Heitz
• Crime and Punishment: Challenging the Cinematic Male Gaze with Takashi Miike’s Audition by Jonah Jeng
• The Otaku-Hero by Ekaterina Kormilitsyna
• Censorship: Representations of Justice in James M. Cain Adaptations by Dillan Newman
• Spectatorship and Synchronous Sound Before the Transition: A Contextual Analysis of Chronophone, Phonofilm, and Movietone Shorts by Nace Zavrl

Two “Mapping Contemporary Cinema” articles:

• The Star Producer, Abortion and Obama in The Ides of March by Rosemary Koper
• The Industrial, Political and Generic Economics of Killing Them Softly by Ben Skyrme

These featurettes:

• Astolat ki Lekhi (Speaking in Tongues): An Interview with Language Creator David J. Peterson by Christopher Schammel
• Massaging the Ears: The Centrality of Sound in Raise the Red Lantern by Rocco Tenaglia III
• From Big Budget to Independent: An Interview with Terrie Batson by Chic Scaparo

A dossier on censorship, which includes the following featurettes:

• The Censorship of Art After Death: Looking at Stanley Kubrick’s History with Censorship by Travis Richard Merchant
• Creating Art Not War in a World Where Art Is War: An Iranian Filmmaker’s Strive for Justice by Karsu Nalbantoglu
• Raise Ravens and They’ll Peck Out Your Eyes: How Spanish Filmmakers Bypassed Film Censorship During the Franco Dictatorship by Brianna Okamoto
• Censorship: An Interview with Ryan Prout by Brianna Okamoto
• Blood, Guts, and Disgust: The Effects of Censorship Changes on American Horror Films by Lydia Plantamura
• Films with a Criminal Record: An Investigation of Exploitation Films by Rachel Wassil

An exciting new venture, “High School Spotlight,” which includes:

• Preface by Kailyn N. Warpole
• Teenage Movies and Finding the Meaning of Life by Katherine Kossoy

Yet another dossier, this one on Robin Williams, which includes the following featurettes:

• Carpe Diem and Coming-of-Age in Dead Poets Society by Abigail Anundson
• The Improv Genius Himself: How Robin Williams Changed Show Business by Jackson R. Gentry
• A Performer Who Influenced a Generation by Chance Saller

As well as book and film/DVD/Blu-ray reviews by:  Kevin Bahr, Rachel Beaney, Victoria Berndt, Paige Blankenship, Meredith A. Bryant, Joseph Bye, Sean Campbell, Robert J. Chase, Dominic Clarke, Wiebe Copman, Sophia Gant, Oscar Garza, Adam Getz, Matthew Grant, Philip Guglielmi, Yeng Hang, Brent Holmes, Mars Incrucio, Cody Jarman, Justin Ray Jonathan King, Mynt Marsellus, Richard F. Martin, Sarah McBain, Aaron Miller, Taylor K. O’Steen, Afra Siddiqui, Kailyn N. Warpole, and John Garland Winn.

It’s a big issue!  For more information about issue 6.3, please visit Intellect’s website: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-issue,id=3067/

Film Matters is always looking for new authors and guest editors.  Please get in touch with us today!

In honor of Masoud Yazdani, Chairman of Intellect, who passed away in 2014, Film Matters recently commissioned its inaugural Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Scholarship.  This tribute reflects Masoud’s keen interest in and support of Film Matters and — by extension — undergraduate scholars.  This book award will now be given annually to a Film Matters author who has published a feature article during the previous volume year.  The winning author receives a book from the field of film studies, in recognition of his/her achievement.

Film Matters is very pleased to report that, following a lengthy judging process (conducted by three individual academics based at institutions of higher education worldwide), the winner of the first Yazdani Award is Christina Newland, for her FM 5.1 (2014) article, “Archetypes of the Southern Gothic: The Night of the Hunter and Killer Joe.”  Congratulations to Christina on her fine achievement, among what was an exceptionally high level of writing across the entire group of essays.

Christina will be receiving a copy of Valeria Belletti’s Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s, published by the University of California Press in 2006. This book will support her ongoing research for a forthcoming project.

We would also like to thank our diligent panel of judges, responsible for assessing an entire calendar year of FM articles: Michael Benton, part of the faculty of the Humanities Department at the Bluegrass Community and Technical College in Kentucky, USA; Stephen Charbonneau, Associate Professor of Film Studies and Associate Director of the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, USA; and Scott Wilson, Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer at the Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand. Their service was instrumental to the award process.

Judging for the 2016 award (for volume 6, 2015, feature articles) will be underway soon.

Film Matters is pleased to announce the release of issue 6.2 (2015), guest edited by The Ohio State University’s Margaret C. Flinn, with Associate Guest Editors Paige Piper and Matthew Roesch.

In this issue, you’ll find the following peer-reviewed feature articles:

• Bodies at the Margin: Rethinking Corporeal Cinema in Claire Denis’s Les Salauds by Jules O’Dwyer 
• “Disciplined Silence” and “Wandering Talk”: Poetry and Punctuation in the Films of Abbas Kiarostami by Roxanna Haghighat 
• Howl’s “Kaleidoscopic Facets”: Accessing the “Multitrack” Elements of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry through Animation by Anna Varadi 
• Gothic Melodrama, Hindi Cinema and Subversions of Genre in Madhumati by Nooreen Reza 
• Creating Interiority in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan: An Issue of Composition, Space, and Visual Distortion by Alice Vignoles-Russell

These featurettes:

• Wexner Center Interview with Director of Film/Video David Filipi and Curator of the Film/Video Studio Program Jennifer Lange by Bob Adrion
• Graduate Program Review: School of the Art Institute of Chicago: MFA, Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation by Mikayla Bungard
• Graduate Program Review: CalArts School of Film/Video by Chris Wittum 
• A Look into the Journal of Short Film by Thomas Gardner 
• Don’t Screenwrite Grad School Off: An Assessment of the MFA in Screenwriting from USC and UCLA by Cyrus Adeli

As well as book and film/DVD/Blu-ray reviews by:  Cyrus Adeli, Stephen Belden, Eoin Bell-Games, Franz Ross, Ha Eyn Song, and Chris Wittum.

For more information about issue 6.2, please visit Intellect’s website: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-issue,id=3007/

Film Matters is always looking to work with new guest editors from institutions around the globe.  Please get in touch with us today if you want to bring this unique applied learning experience to your campus and undergraduate students!