ALPHAVILLE, a new journal of film and screen media

A poster of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)

Alphaville is the first fully peer-reviewed online film journal in Ireland. It is edited by staff and PhD students in Film Studies at University College Cork. It will be published twice a year, in Summer and Winter, with both open and themed issues that will aim to provoke debate in the most topical issues in film and screen studies. [More about Alphaville]

There is no better title [...] for a new journal that proposes to explore the constitutive hybridity of the moving image—analog and digital, commercial and avant-garde, mainstream and independent, popular and elitist—without forgetting how its roots spread in artistic and productive practices that have always been far more composite and multilayered than our critical categories seemed to wish to account for. Calling for the breaking down of disciplinary boundaries, media fields and critical categories, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media aspires to be a laboratory for new interpretative ideas on the moving image of yesterday, of today and of tomorrow. This inaugural issue, in particular, foregrounds cultural, spatial, productive and aesthetic issues that aim to set in motion our thinking about European cinema within multilayered critical, cultural and geopolitical models, and in light of the complexity of the flow of images that characterises our media landscape. The transnationality, transculturality and transmediality of contemporary European cinemas are undoubtedly going to shape and occupy the research agenda for some time to come.  [Laura Rascaroli, 'Back to the Future: The European Film Studies Agenda Today']

There's a new open access film journal on the block, everybody! Great news in Film Studies For Free's humble opinion. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media has just published its first issue, along with calls for papers for two further issues, to boot.

The first issue is themed, and here's what its editors say about their choice of organising topic:

Alphaville Issue 1, European Cinema: Transnational, Transcultural, Transmedial stems thematically from an international graduate film studies conference that we co-organised in May 2010 at University College Cork. The conference addressed the permeability of European spaces—geopolitical, sociocultural, productive and aesthetic—within a post-1989 cinematic context. This Issue, however, moves the focus beyond such a specific—albeit multilayered—epoch, encompassing research on both past and contemporary filmmaking, in a bid to showcase the “movement” that was and still is at the heart of European cinema with regard to its interrelationships of geography, culture and form. Inspired by the many seminal works on European cinema that have gone before it, we seek to contribute to the debate a collection that is at once original, in its theoretical and thematic scope, and fresh, in its demonstration of inspiring new work by early career scholars (an attribute that affords us the knowledge that this thriving area in our field will continue to be so).

FSFF thinks it's a great issue packed with items of interest for film scholars, beginning with Natalia Pinázza's brilliant article on Sandra Kogut’s multinational coproduction documentary Un passeport hongrois/The Hungarian Passport (2001).

Tu es très bienvenu Alphaville!

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media Issue 1 (Summer 2011)

Editorial:

• 'Back to the Future: The European Film Studies Agenda Today' by Laura Rascaroli
• 'Issue Editors’ Note' by Abigail Keating, Jill Murphy and Aidan Power

Articles:

• 'Transnationality and Transitionality: Sandra Kogut’s The Hungarian Passport' by Natalia Pinázza
• 'Paris, Borders and the Concept of Europe in Paris, je t’aime and Code Unknown' by Vivien Silvey
• 'Lindsay Anderson: Britishness and National Cinemas' by Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard
• 'The Fictive Archive: Kurdish Filmmaking in Turkey' by Özgür Çiçek
• 'Ideas of Sex: Discourses on Sexuality in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Cesare Canevari’s The Gestapo’s Last Orgy' by Nick Impey
• 'Cinema/History: Philippe Garrel, Bernardo Bertolucci and May 1968' by Michael Leonard
• 'Face to Face with the Muslim “Other”: European Cinematic Responses to Al-Qaeda' by Elena Caoduro

Book Reviews and Festival and Conference Reports:

[Compiled by Jill Moriarty, Deborah Mellamphy and Stefano Odorico, University College Cork]

• Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, by Yosefa Loshitzky (2010)  Reviewer: Aidan Power
• Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representations of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema, by Russel J.A. Kilbourn (2010)  Reviewer: Colm Ryan

• The “Biographical Narrative in Film and Television” Postgraduate Seminar Series University of Southampton, May and June 2010  Reporter: Victoria Kearley
• The Society of Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference 2011: Media Citizenship New Orleans, USA, March 10-13, 2011  Reporter: Deborah Mellamphy

• The Corona Fastnet Short Film Festival Schull, County Cork, 26-29 May 2011  Reporter: Barry Monahan
• Film 4 Frightfest, 2010 London, 26-30 August 2010  Reporter: Deborah Mellamphy

email: alphavillejournal@gmail.com

Issue 2, Winter 2011, Space and Time in Film.

Issue 3, Summer 2012, Sound, Voice, Music.

cfp: http://www.alphavillejournal.com/CallforPapers.html