Ethical Code

University of Massachusetts Boston

Sarah Keller is Associate Professor of Art and Cinema Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on experimental forms and feminist issues in cinema. She co-edited the collection Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, and in her book Maya Deren: Incomplete Control she examines the role of unfinished work, focusing on Deren’s oeuvre. Most recently, she published her book Anxious Cinephilia (2020), which centers on the intertwined role of love and anxiety in encounters with cinema, and she has just completed a manuscript on the career of experimental filmmaker and artist Barbara Hammer (forthcoming 2021).

Università di Pisa

Università di Pisa

Giulia Simi is an independent researcher and curator. She obtained her Ph.D in History of Art and Media at the University of Pisa in 2014, with a thesis focused on the relationship between amateur cinema practices and the Rome- based 1960s Avant-Garde. Her research interests include the Post-War Italian arts scene and its relations with cinema and media image, experimental cinema and amateur practices and feminist theory. She has published articles and essays in international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes and curated a programme on women’s experimental cinema in Italy from 1960s up to the present for the 54th Pesaro International Film Festival. As a digital communication consultant, she worked for ten years with film production companies, non-profit organisations, museums and publishing houses.

California State University

Rebecca A. Sheehan is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. Her book, American Avant-Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-Between (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the intersections between American avant-garde cinema and film-philosophy. She is also the co-editor of Border Cinema: Reimagining Identity Through Aesthetics (Rutgers University Press, 2019), a collection that looks at border studies through the lens of media aesthetics. Her work on topics ranging from experimental cinema, sculpture and cinema, epistolary cinema, the biopic, and border cinema has appeared in edited book collections and various journals including Discourse, Screen, Film Studies and Screening the Past. 

For Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, the human body is essential to cinema’s ability to advance thought, but the American avant-garde filmmakers Marie Menken, Maya Deren, and Sara Kathryn Arledge go much further in locating thought in embodiment rather than beyond it, even as their films are generally absent from Cavell’s and Deleuze’s writings. For instance, as Menken’s hand-held camera emanates with the movements of her body, her fidgetiness expands upon the metaphysical restlessness Cavell describes as essential to thought. Menken’s camera’s immersion in her bodily movements (rather than standing apart from them) joins her work with Deren’s Bergson-inspired films as, for instance, the context of outer space in Very Eye of Night (1952) is impossible to stand outside of or apart from, analogous to Bergson’s notion of the body in the stream. Arledge’s Introspection similarly situates the body where what T.E. Hulme might describe as a ‘complex sense of varying directions of forces’ replaces a sense of distanced sight. While Deleuze pronounces, ‘Give me a body then… The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking...’ and turns to Antonioni’s, Warhol’s, and Cassavetes’ tired and waiting bodies as exemplary, I argue, it is Menken’s, Deren’s, and Arledge’s dancing, fidgety bodies that perform Deleuze’s epiphany.

University of Waterloo

Shana MacDonald is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her interdisciplinary scholarship is situated between film, media and performance studies, and examines feminist experimental media. She has published in Feminist Media Histories, Media Theory Journal, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review, and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. She runs the online archive Feminists Do Media (Instagram: @aesthetic.resistance). She is an internationally curated artist who explores the community-building potential of practice-based research through her work with the qcollaborative (www.qcollaborative.com), a feminist design lab dedicated to developing new forms of relationality through technologies of public performance. 

This article reads together the work of Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann, as situated between film, performance, as well as dance and painting, considering what their work reveals about a specific intermedial feminist aesthetics developing at this time. It argues these traits in their work are not isolated commonalities but are shared with a wide range of feminist artists working in the 1960s and 1970s and are still echoed in contemporary feminist art. Further the article proposes to think through these intermedial relationalities as a mode of feminist aesthetics. It argues Schneemann and Rainer successfully extend the position of the female body in cinema beyond the traditional role as object to include both an embodied form of authorship, and a complex, affective performance of woman onscreen and provides the historical foundation and influence for my reading of the embodied, intermedial experiments found in feminist experimental film and media in the ensuing decades. The comparative reading of Schneeman’s film Plumb Line and Rainer’s film Lives of Performers index the artists’ shared positioning of their own bodies in the dual roles of performer and author within their films. In my analysis, this aesthetic innovation actively engages with the different embodiments of the artist/performer, the bodies onscreen and the embodied spectator the films address.

Yale University

Oksana Chefranova is a postdoctoral Associate Research Scholar in Film and Media Studies, Yale University, where she works on her first book, From Garden to Kino: Evgenii Bauer, Cinema, and Genealogies of Built Environment in Russia Circa 1900. The book studies the mutual history of image-making and designing milieu between 1876 and 1917 while offering a new approach to cinema through practices and theories of built environment. This research is supported by Andrew Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Oksana’s other projects focus on artists’ moving image.

The article explores women’s interventions into landscape through the experimental practices of Cuban American multimedia artist Ana Mendieta and contemporary Brazilian visual artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz. Interested in the material and metaphorical intersections among film, landscape, and geology, I focus on the geological imagination of landscape partaking in Mendieta’s and Vaz’s art while asking what sorts of aesthetic regimes and formal strategies they choose to express it. Mendieta’s comprehension of earth as matter, medium, and a deep surface for inscription of traces comments on the materiality of film as a recording medium from the point of view of geologically oriented art. Vaz’s landscape, inflected with human interventions, emerges as an enormous living medium of memory, linking its exploration to a geological approach and the work of excavation while transforming deep time into what the artist calls ‘cinematographic multiperspectivism’. The article argues that it is the attention to the geological that unites these two artists in their critique of the position of exteriority and of landscape as an object of contemplation. Mendieta and Vaz depart from traditional aesthetics of landscape as a view by moving toward landscape as a network of relations among humans, memories, and times. 

The essay is focused on how Duras’ film writing is a visual expression of the central themes of her literature (love and desire) and how certain practices of aesthetic aniconism – and their theoretical reading – refer to the manifestation of emotional and sentimental control. End of love, end of representation. The essay will also analyze how the field of feeling in Duras’ cinema is characterized by a double process of taking the loved object off the frame, from the early films to the iconoclast L’Homme atlantique (1980), the French writer’s cinematic testament.
The process is accomplished in this film, the most radical and experimental of Duras’ film works, in which thirty minutes out of the forty are characterized by a black screen. The process of rarefaction of the constituent components of cinema has been achieved by denying the image itself. The anti-narrative begins to approach the idea of an iconoclastic cinema, devoid at the same time of narrative and images. This essay intends to deepen precisely this path towards the annihilation of cinema as an act of provocation.

Washington University in St. Louis

John Powers is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His writing on experimental cinema has appeared or is forthcoming in Cinema Journal, Screen, October, Millennium Film Journal,and A Companion to Experimental Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell). He is currently preparing a book manuscript on semiprofessional film technology and the postwar American avant-garde.

This article makes a case for Caroline Avery as one of the most compelling experimental filmmakers of the ‘minor cinema’ generation through a close analysis of her magnum opus, Midweekend (1986). In 2018, I conducted the first interviews with Avery since she began making films in 1982. Based on those interviews, this essay offers an historical and theoretical perspective on Avery’s work, situating her within the context of the 1980s-era avant-garde, investigating her memory-based poetics of cinema, and demonstrating her relevance to contemporary experimental media culture. More specifically, this article examines Avery’s contributions to what I call, following Tom Gunning, ‘submerged narrative’, an attenuated approach to narrative construction that privileges sense impressions, affective environments, and haptic surfaces over characters and causality — or, cultivating the ambiance of a story without providing an actual story. In the second half of the essay, I turn to the work of two contemporary artists, Michael Robinson and Mary Helena Clark, to argue that their similar ideas about affective narrative environments demonstrates the degree to which the ‘minor cinema’ has contributed to the establishment of a shared language within the avant-garde that younger artists can borrow from, revise, and extend.

Università degli Studi "G. d'Annunzio"Chieti – Pescara

Anita Trivelli is a Full professor of Cinema Studies at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University ‘G. d’Annunzio’. She was awarded US and by CNR (Centro Nazionale delle Ricerche) fellowships, and has taught in Italy and abroad. Her studies have mainly focused on experimental and research cinema, in the light of the issues of experientiality and nomadism, and of the questions raised by feminist film theory and gender studies. Speaker at international conferences (at the universities of Innsbruck, Mainz, Leipzig, Paris, Timisoara, Varshaw, Vienna, Yale, Pescara, Rome, Turin), and collaborator of film magazines (Imago. Studi di cinema e media, Bianco & Nero, La Valle dell’Eden,Cinema Sessanta), she is the author of numerous essays and three books (L’altra metà del sguardo; Sulle tracce di Maya Deren. Il cinema come progetto e avventura; Il cinema di Jane Campion. Dai cortometraggi a Top of the Lake). She realized the educational DVD Jonas Mekas e il New American Cinema, and translated the book by the same filmmaker My Night Life into Italian (La mia vita notturna). 

The essay aims at offering a journey within the documentary heritage of contemporary Italian women filmmakers, a survey drawing a varied map of approaches to the film medium, which take part in the redefinition process of cinema and its paradigms. The movies of these female directors deploy an exemplary commitment to (audio)visually exploring places, both central and peripheral, pointing out their nomadic vision and an itinerant gaze upon the world that is able to capture the current challenges and complexities with passion and rigour. Their works modulate in an original way the relationship between authorial intervention and social, cultural, historiographical investigation. Moreover, they propose a viewing on the most opaque and elusive sides of the contemporary realities, an observation that overall constitutes an innovation in the field of cinema as well as a change in the image of women, who are fully subjects of history, culture, and agency.

Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana

Polina Golovátina-Mora, PhD, is Professor and researcher at Faculty of Social Communication-Journalism, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Medellín, Colombia. In her research she combines cultural studies, memory studies and social theory, art-based pedagogy and research methodology. She has been recently exploring relations with matter, organic artistic practices, questions of inner migration. She sees her artistic practice as a way of connecting to the world and learn about it and self in it. Exploring relations between different media, techniques, materials and the potentialities of such unity, she sees art as a story-making and searches to weave the textual storytelling into visual artistic practice. She is the author of articles and book chapters.

Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana

Ana María López Carmona, PhD, is Professor and researcher at Faculty of Social Communication-Journalism, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Medellín,Colombia. In her professional trajectory, she worked as audio-visual producer for television and documentary projects, and analyst of media of communication. Her research interests include topics of creative and art-based research, memory and territory, audio-visual narratives, unfolding of the collective memory and trauma in Latin American fiction and documentary cinema and modes of production in the documentary cinema and their aesthetics. She is the author of articles and book chapters, editor of the collective volumes and journal special issues, member of international research networks and professional associations.

Université de Toulouse

Bridget Sheridan, PhD, is a lecturer in visual arts at the University of Toulouse, France. She belongs to the LLA CREATIS research lab. Art walking and the body in motion are at the heart of her research, which incites her to explore collective memory via walking in the landscape, photography and video practice. Both in her research and with her artistic practice she invites to imagine a metaphorical process of weaving between creative work and theory that awakens a curiosity for historical, anthropological, philosophical and architectural subjects. She is the author of articles and book chapters. As an artist, she has exhibited her work across France and England.  

The present essay is an extended conversation between the authors, on the critical literature of the experimental women’s cinema and video and documentaries of Colombian female artists. The meaning of self, womanhood, and female artistic practices is in the focus of the conversation. Methodologically we approach this essay as warmipura, a female circle, or rather, as we propose, maternal space of kin and alliance-making with multiple others around and within us. It is the space of porous openness to the world, the community, co-working and co-knowing, all together the process of co-creating with multiple others both human and non-human. Openness to the other in self while seeing self in the other allows making new alliance, that in their turn open up the new worlds to explore, their potentialities. Experimental practice is seen as such maternal space, an assemblage using Deleuze-Guattarian term, of bits of life, adopting Smelik and Lykke’s words. Largely informed by the feminist new materialism and posthumanism, the essay explores the alliances, intentionally, intuitively, and organically happening in the maternal space of warmipura. The present essay focuses on the vitality of fragments and allies in the process of disassembling self through and with the video practice.

Yale University

Lydia Tuan is a PhD student in the Departments of Italian and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. She works on the formal and aesthetic developments of contemporary Italian cinema and at the intersection between new media and cinema. She has previously worked as a lectrice in the Department of English at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, as well studied at the Universities of Padua and Cambridge, the latter from where she received an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies in 2017. Her recent research on Paolo Sorrentino has been published in the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies and will be reprinted in the forthcoming edited volume Paolo Sorrentino’s Transnational Cinema and Television (Intellect, 2021).

This article explores the effects of spectatorship in the short film Noah, a nearly 18’ desktop film created by Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman that premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. My discussion progresses existing theories about the status of text in films and encourages us to rethink how Noah’s presentation of computer interfaces contributes to novel perspectives regarding the relationship between viewer and screen. Considering the computer screen’s remediation and its cinematic effects, specifically focusing on the acts of reading and watching in Noah, I propose that the remediated computer screen in Noah transforms reading into a viewable activity, thus recharacterizing text as moving image. Altogether, this article posits that, as a desktop film, Noah dismantles set connotations of screens across early and contemporary forms of new media and paves the way for contemporary cinema’s digital futures.

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano

Massimo Locatelli, Associate Professor, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. Founding member of NECS, the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies, he serves on the editorial boards of CS/Comunicazioni Sociali. Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies and Cinéma&Cie. His main research areas are the history of film theory and the social and technological history of Italian cinema. Among his publications, Cinema e sonoro in Italia (1945-1970) (special issue of CS/Comunicazioni Sociali, 2011, co-edited with Elena Mosconi).

Université de Lausanne