We are delighted to publish five new articles in Volume 15.1! Marie Hallager Andersen's Arkiv Avis Mor (Archive Newspaper Mother) investigates the relationship between the filmmaker's roles as a mother, a dancer and a filmmaker. Embedded in dance and movement improvisation practice Arkiv Avis Mor follows an intuitive and embodied logic of how life events cross pollinate. The filmmaker grapples with the paradox of the body as an archive and the ephemerality of dance and motherhood.  

Vron Harris's three part film, The Staircase, investigates cinematic subjectivity and whether a film can simultaneously immerse us in a character's inner world while highlighting the inevitable chasm between their internal experience and outward presentation. By grappling with this fundamental tension between inner feeling and external facade, the film explores how our understanding of human psychology as portrayed through characters on screen.

Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon's About the Night explores fiction filmmaking as a means of innovative and inclusive storytelling, using About the Night as a case study to analyse collaborative processes. Through a reflexive approach, it emphasises the collaborative nature of meaning-making and advocates for safer, more inclusive production environments to foster creative freedom and inspire future filmmakers.

The Birds: Afterimages, After Hitchcock by Miguel Mesquita Duarte is an experimental video which digitally manipulates the very fabric of Hitchcock's The Birds, moving beyond critique to explore the image's composition and legibility. By transforming the camera into a dehumanized gaze, it probes the boundary between plausible and unimaginable realities, potentially revealing new historical significance within the familiar film.

Marcus Nicholls' Adaptation, Hauntology, and the Video Essay: Kubrick’s Shining - An Adaptive Poem offers a compelling exploration of hauntology through the prism of adaptation. By visually remixing Kubrick's iconic adaptation of The Shining and layering it with an ekphrastic poem that itself adapts the film, Nicholls embodies the concept of palimpsestuous hauntedness through formal and conceptual superimpositions. This project skillfully blurs the boundaries between theory and practice, setting ideas of adaptation's inherent spectrality in productive debate and offering a fresh perspective on the lingering presence of original works within their adaptations.

Alison Peirse's LOOK AT ME utilises videograhpic re-assemblage to excavate the emotional core of horror. By juxtaposing fragments from Censor, Peeping Tom, and Don't Look Now, this video essay reveals the films' shared themes of obsessive looking and suppressed grief. This experimental approach, inspired by documentary filmmaking, evolves into a powerful feminist critique, exposing the "patriarchal scopophilic regime" within the genre. Peirse's work demonstrates the power of audiovisual analysis to not only interpret film, but to reclaim and reinterpret it, offering a visceral and emotionally resonant understanding of horror through a feminist lens.

Jonathon Crewe, Marcus Nicholls, Dennis A. Olsen's The impact of gender on the representation of characters aged over 50 in British films between 2021-22 addresses an under-explored subject, aging and age on screen. The video essay offers a creative compilation of recent films at the intersection of age and gender, making us wonder: why are there not enough strong audiovisual portraits of older people? This underrepresentation is further compounded by gender bias, where older women are silenced, sidelined, and stereotyped, even in films that claim to celebrate them. This video essay offers a creative montage that encourages viewers to critically reflect on the on-screen depiction of aging.

Desirée de Jesús's video essay, The Black Ecstatic focuses on a pivotal sequence from Steve McQueen's critically acclaimed 2020 film, Lovers Rock. The essay highlights how the film, set against the backdrop of early 1980s Britain, captures Black joy amidst high unemployment and systemic racial oppression. By focusing on the film's soundscape, de Jesús invites viewers to reflect on the enduring spirit of Black diasporic communities, emphasising their dreams, resilience, and resistance across generations.

Samantha Close's Masochism of Play begins with the deceptively simple question: Why do players of video games, who often experience repeated failure while playing it, clearly take great pleasure in the process of play? This practice research uses both autoethnographic filmmaking and textual analysis to deconstruct the playing experience, focusing particularly on failure and emotion to understand the affects of failure. Close argues that even “ordinary” play of mainstream video games has something queer about it—particularly when it’s difficult.

Saul Kutnicki's Closing Time At The People Shop: A Saturn Dealership in Ruins, a video essay which examines the physical and cultural traces of the Saturn Corporation, particularly its abandoned dealerships and advertising campaigns. By combining historical footage, contemporary images, and personal reflection, the project explores the connection between Saturn's vehicles and American identity, while also experimenting with the potential of video as a medium for scholarly inquiry.

Cormac Donnelly's Sound Stack, Soundwalk, Southworth, is a videographic portfolio containing three works: a video essay, a video tutorial, and a soundwalk. The portfolio as a whole questions the extent to which a scholar (the creator) might go before they consider a piece of videographic research to be ‘complete’ or at least to have been engaged with as completely as possible. 

This volume of Screenworks is a rolling publication. Each rolling volume runs from September to July, with the editorial team taking a well-deserved break in August. To submit work please read our Submissions Guidelines and use our Online Submission Form. If you are interested in submitting your practice and want further advice, then please contact us on admin@screenworks.org.uk with “Submissions” in the subject line.