We are delighted to kick off our brand new rolling volume, Volume 16.1 with three new Screenworks. Cassandra Tytler's Oops! is a video installation and single-screen work that examines how interruption functions as a political and ideological intervention in video art practice. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theorisation of epic theatre and Soviet montage theory, the work employs abrupt cuts, spatial disjunction, and embodied spectatorship to expose ideological structures. Through a feminist and queer lens, Oops! disrupts fixed narratives, positioning interruption as a gestic action that critiques power relations in contemporary Australian domestic and social contexts. This practice-led research demonstrates how video art can intervene in hegemonic structures by unsettling spectatorship and reframing the politics of perception.

David H. Fleming's video essay Danse Macabre: Of the Dying and Death of Philosophers on Film explores cinematic representations of death through a film-philosophic lens. By poetically compos(i)ting imaging-imaginings of real philosophers’ deaths and dying acts into a Danse Macabre this video essay expressively ponders philosophy’s entanglements with, and conditional/continual rebirths through, different media forms. If philosophy’s age-old entanglement with death unravelled alongside modernity’s privatisation of dying, films featuring global philosophers appear to pick up this ancient ‘necromantic’ baton. 

Miguel Mesquita Duarte’s video essay Remediations: Specters in/of/around Godard extends Godardian videographic criticism by focusing specifically on his political documentary cinema. By positioning the videographic essay as a direct heir to the essay film, Remediations intersects the performative exploration of self and other with the critical activity of historical reflection through re-readings and transformations of images and words, offering a new way to experiment with Godardian conceptual imagery and videographic essayistic methodologies. Remediations illuminates the essayistic methodologies of Godard’s political documentary films and creatively extends them through the dramatization of an impossible encounter with Godard himself.

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.