Cinephile 8.2 “Contemporary Extremism” is now available! Featuring original articles by Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, Tim Palmer, and Dave Alexander, the issue seeks to expand the discourse around extremist cinema beyond its traditionally European borders. You can pick it up in Vancouver at Brigid’s Books, Mayfair News, Pulp Fiction Books, Tanglewood Books, UBC Bookstore, and Zulu Records. If you prefer to have the issue delivered directly to your door, subscribe to the journal and receive the most recent issue and three forthcoming issues, plus a complimentary back issue of your choice, for $30 CDN. For more information, please click here.

Since the early 2000s, with the onset of The Sopranos and Sex and the City, serialized television has captured the attention of viewers and scholars alike.  The popularity of shows such as Six Feet Under, Lost, The Wire, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones suggests that these complex shows are by no means restricted to a specific genre.

‘Puzzling’ narrative structures, intricate plotlines, engaging characters, predetermined endings and higher production costs are some of the features that most of these shows share. While these features appeal to sophisticated TV audiences, they also counter many established television norms. For example, the TV procedural, a production-line format that has been adopted by countless sitcoms and cop shows over the years while maintaining its label as the industry standard, favours so called ‘stand-alone’ or ‘case of the week episodes’ over complex multi-season story arcs and character development. Modern shows have also been praised for adopting a ‘cinematic’ style. Does this indicate that the distinctions once separating cinema from television have been blurred?

Today viewers are better able to control the method in which they access their content, leading to an increase in television ‘marathoning’. This, combined with a fan’s ability to participate in the show’s livelihood via the social media sphere, is forcing us to consider the significance of television reception more than ever before.

Our spring 2013 issue aims to ignite a discussion regarding the current state of modern serial television while paying careful consideration to the future of a medium that was once considered restrictive and subpar to film. We would like to welcome papers that explore themes such as the ‘cinema-zation’ of dramatic serial television, narrative forms in television, the complexity of modern TV protagonists, and viewer engagement.

Incoming editors: Andrea Brooks & Oliver Kroener

Incoming artist: Max Hirtz

More details here

The last decade has marked an escalation in the treatment of extreme subject matter in European cinema, heralded by the graphic violence and sexuality of French New Extremism at the turn of the millennium and increasingly apparent in films from across Europe. While extreme violence and graphic sexuality have long played a part in the European film tradition (Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel 1929); I Am Curious (Yellow) (Sjöman 1967), Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci 1972), Salò (Pasolini 1975), etc.), these contemporary films are exceptionally abrasive in the use of transgressive material, employing the sensory capabilities of cinema to impact the spectator on a visceral level. Scholars such as Martine Beugnet, Tanya Horeck,Tina Kendall, and Tim Palmer have pointed to New Extremism as a burgeoning cinematic trend that seeks to re-examine our relationship to the body and to the film screen itself. Onscreen penetrative sex, sexual violence, and explicit gore are central features of films like Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009), and Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), to name a few films that can be situated within the New Extremist canon.

With the Fall 2012 issue of Cinephile, we wish to interrogate the parameters and significance of New Extremism. In doing so, we are willing to extend our questions beyond Europe with the hopes of inquiring into Extremism as a global phenomenon.

Incoming editors: Chelsea Birks & Dana Keller

Incoming artist: Matthew Wise

More details here

Cinephile 8.1, “The Voice-Over” is now available! Featuring original articles by Sarah Kozloff, Stephen Teo, Laura Beadling, Alexander Fisher, and Carl Laamanen, our Spring issue studies the various potentials of the voice-over in global cinema. Available in Vancouver at Pulp Fiction Books, Zulu Records, Mayfair News, and the UBC Bookstore. If you prefer to have the issue delivered directly to your door, subscribe to the journal and receive the most recent issue and three forthcoming issues, plus a complimentary back issue of your choice, for $30 CDN. For more information, please click here.

Cinephile 7.2, “Contemporary Realism,” is now available! Featuring original articles by Ivone Margulies and Richard Rushton, with beautiful 35mm photos by Hanahlie Beise, this issue resituates the notion of filmic realism for a post-film era. Available in Vancouver at Pulp Fiction Books, Zulu Records, Mayfair News, Does Your Mother Know?, and the UBC Bookstore. If you prefer to have the issue delivered directly to your door, subscribe to the journal and receive the most recent issue and three forthcoming issues, plus a complimentary back issue of your choice, for $30 CDN. For more information, please click here.

During the past three decades, studying the voice has intrigued many film theorists and thinkers. Arguing that the cinematic image is an audiovisual space largely structured according to human body and voice, some scholars (Mary Ann Doane, Sarah Kozloff, and Michel Chion, among others) have been drawn to the various manifestations and mysterious connotations of the non-visualized voice.

If off-screen voices foster a need to categorize and perhaps control their elusive nature, then the voice-over raises some challenging questions about its uncanny attributes and powers. Defined by a paradoxical present-absence, the voice-over adds layers to the narrative discourse of film that require further and closer analyses.

For our Spring 2012 issue, Cinephile welcomes essays aiming to critically organize and academically explain the variety of off-screen voices, study the evolution of voice-over in the history of global cinema, analyze the narrative and non-narrative applications and functions of it in different audiovisual experiences, and delve deeper into the socio-political and psychoanalytical aspects of this technique with regards to race, class, and gender implications.

Incoming editor: Babak Tabarraee

Incoming artist: Soroosh Roohbakhsh

More details here

Cinephile 7.1, “Reassessing Anime,” is now available! This issue features original articles by animation scholars Paul Wells and Philip Brophy, and illustrations by Vancouver-based artist Chloe Chan. Arguably one of the most impressive pop culture exports from Japan since the post-war era, anime still merits further inquiry, debate, and scholarship into its complex history, intricate meanings, and overall impact on film and visual culture. Purchase a copy of Cinephile 7.1 and discover some of the most contemporary insight into anime.

In Vancouver, Cinephile 7.1 is currently available for purchase at Pulp Fiction Books, Mayfair News, Does Your Mother Know?, and the UBC Bookstore. If you prefer to have the issue delivered directly to your door, subscribe to the journal and receive the most recent issue and three forthcoming issues, plus a complementary back issue of your choice, for $30 CDN.  For more information, please click here.