Open Screens
Datos de la Revista
| Tipo | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Editorial | Open Library of Humanities (GB) |
| ISSN | 2516-2888 |
| Wikidata | Q96722234 |
| OpenAlex | S4210236874 |
| MAG | 4210236874 |
| Sitio web | https://openscreensjournal.com |
| Total de publicaciones | 70 |
| Periodo de cobertura | 2020 - 2026 |
| País | GB |
| Idioma | EN |
| Acceso | Open Access |
| Indexación | Indexada en DOAJ |
| Factor de impacto | 0.19 |
Open Screens is a journal likely focused on screen studies and media. This falls under cultural studies and visual anthropology, which are cognate fields with regular intersection with social anthropology
African history and culture studies · Cinema and Media Studies · Copyright and Intellectual Property · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Digital Games and Media · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Intellectual Property Law
Framing the Periphery in Chinese TV series To the Wonder
Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn as a Cinematic Study in English Class Conservatism
This article examines Emerald Fennell's Saltburn (2023) through the lens of English conservatism, exploring the film's portrayal of rigid socio-economic hierarchies and class stratification, and their interaction with British cultural institutions. Central to this analysis is the main character Oliver Quick, whose nefarious bourgeois aspirations of coveting the aristocratic seat of Saltburn, and whose antagonistic manipulation of the titled Catto…
Selling Cabiria in transnational markets
When pirates put the infant Cabiria on sale in the Carthaginian market early in the second episode of the Italian epic Cabiria (1914), she is swiftly bought by the High Priest of Moloch. But selling the film to non-Italian audiences in and beyond 1914, given its colonial rescue fantasy and its spectacular celebration of a nationalist war of empire in Africa through the vehicle of Roman history, was more of a challenge. Cabiria was purchased for B…
The Video Essay About The Show
A multipart video essay both examining and imitating The Show About The Show, a long-running cult webseries created by independent filmmaker Caveh Zahedi
An Unruly Diplomat
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This review essay considers the contributions to scholarship on film and internationalism made by three recent monographs: Rielle Navitski’s Transatlantic Cinephilia: Film Culture Between Latin America and France, 1945-1965 (2023), Miia Huttunen’s Politicised Cinema: Post-War Film, Cultural Diplomacy and UNESCO (2022), and Masha Salazkina’s World Socialist Cinema: Allia…
Rude Awakening
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This review examines María Fernanda Miño Puga’s groundbreaking monograph Ecuadorian Cinema for the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), which offers the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of Ecuador’s emerging film industry during the early 21st century. Miño Puga, a distinguished film critic and scholar, addresses a significant gap in Latin American Film Studie…
TV depictions of student life
An increasing amount of scholarship explores how higher education (HE) is represented in fictional cultural artifacts like television (TV). This work acknowledges the importance of understanding the socio-cultural messages embedded in these portrayals across different times and countries, especially in a context where HE plays a key role in increasing social mobility. However, little research has compared these representations across nations. Muc…
The Emergence of the Student in Colin in Black and White & Top Boy
This article considers the relational and positional emergence of the student in two shows (markedly different narratologically and socioculturally): Colin in Black and White, which features and is based upon the life of NFL player turned activist Colin Kaepernick; and Top Boy. Both shows are concerned with the intersection of race and class and with the role of place (as particularized geographic location) and space (as cultural, ideological, di…
School Spaces and Subjecthood in Netflix’s Baby
This article works through understanding representations of subjecthood in Netflix’s 2018 Italian teen drama Baby through a detailed investigation into the ways that the multiple spaces of an elite private high school in Rome’s upper class Parioli neighborhood control and are controlled by the students who occupy them. The three season series, a fictionalized version of a real life Italian underage prostitution ring in Rome, explore all facets of…
‘100 Percent Selection Guaranteed’
Since the 1980s, Kota, Rajasthan has gradually emerged as the shadow education capital of India with an exponential rise in coaching institutes that prepare students for competitive examinations particularly in the fields of engineering and medicine. The popularity and success stories of Kota’s coaching institutes have reshaped the social understanding of schooling and education to promote a model that is rigorous, intensely competitive, and even…
Filmic figurations of the ‘non-traditional’ student
Films offer useful entry points into how the university and the university student may be understood within the social imagination. In this article, we explore the 1980s film Educating Rita (1983), which many commentators argue offers a ground-breaking portrayal of the ‘non-traditional’ higher education (HE) student. Educating Rita’s success, in part, arose from its novel depiction of an older working-class woman who transitions to study at an el…
The Pleasure of Prohibited Spaces – Playing School Student Characters in Video Games
The playability and use of a space in game depends on a variety of elements. Two ofthe most important are the character and their abilities and the gameplay stylerequired to succeed within the game. This article looks at the use of theschool student character within game, focussing upon the contextual use of theeducational location and social and cultural mores thereof. Using a curated selectionof games which use characters positioned or explicit…
Navigating Anxiety
According to the World Health Organization (2022), one in eight people worldwide experiences a mental health condition. For these individuals, they may experience significant challenges with thinking, emotional regulation, or behaviour. This article explores the representation of adolescent mental health conditions amongst students in two Netflix-based television shows: The Healing Powers of Dude (2020) and Sex Education (2019). The former follow…
Navigating Dark Academia
This article explores the convergence of contemporary student engagement in the dark academia community online with fictional portrayals of elite higher education institutions found in neo-Victorian novels. Using Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992) as a case study, the article investigates how reference points reveal the allure of social and economic privilege as well as Eurocentric ideas. In analysing users' creative contributions to the sub…
Revolting Youth
The Netflix series The Chair (2021), created by academic Annie Julia Wyman, and actor, writer, producer Amanda Peet is set in the privileged enclave of an American liberal arts college. The anxieties portrayed in The Chair are varied, but the primary one is the students. Students in this story determine directly or indirectly who is vulnerable to firing and the shape of the curriculum; academics are terrified to be alone with a single student in …
A Gendered Understanding of School Shootings on Screen
Defined as an attack against the institution itself (see Newman et al.2004), school shootings have increased in prevalence since the 1990s. In line with this, films and television shows have sought to further understandings about this type of mass violence. Reflecting real life trends about school shooters, representations in Excursion,One Tree Hill and Run, Hide, Fight have positioned disgruntled male students as the attackers. In direct contras…
Unravelling the Thread of Elegant Lies
This article explores the 2014 film adaptation of Thread of Lies (directed by Lee Han), a popular young adult novel written by Kim Ryeo-Ryeong (2009) of the same title. The story centers on the aftermath of Cheonji’s death. Cheonji—a thoughtful, quiet, and academically successful 14-year-old student—died by suicide using a red scarf that she knitted. Her widowed mother (Hyun-Sook) and her older sister in high school (Manji) are faced with “elegan…
Sticky
Sticky combines the investigative point of view of the desktop documentary with horror elements from recent screenlife films such as Unfriended (2014), Cam (2018), and Host (2020); using two documentary films about the highly mediated remembrance of societal disasters as a point of departure, it addresses the problems that arise when medial representation paradoxically prevents meaningful engagement. In Philip Scheffner's Havarie (2016), a 3.5-mi…
The Cinematologists present
This special episode of The Cinematologists podcast contributes to the Students on Screen project, curated by Dr Kay Calver and Dr Bethan Michael-Fox, in conjunction with a themed issue of Open Screens. Host Neil Fox revisits his doctoral research on film student portrayals in anglophone cinema, offering both a scholarly paper and this audio companion as a critical artefact. The episode features in-depth conversations with Calver, Michael-Fox, an…
Big Blocks and Blind Spots
The critically acclaimed television series The West Wing features two episodes that revolve around the concept of 'Big Block of Cheese Day', an initiative aimed at providing access to marginalised groups and individuals who would not typically have the opportunity to voice their concerns directly to the White House. This article explores the deeper implications of these episodes, examining the complexities of power, knowledge, and democratic part…
Moderating Glamour
‘Femme fatale’ is an enduring and evocative term connected with femininity, glamour, danger and sexuality. Although it is most often theorised in relation to cinema, literature and art, ‘femme fatale’ is also used in advertising and online shopping, as well as lifestyle media, reality competition shows and beauty tutorials. Here I examine a range of these examples and argue that such appearances not only produce meaning about the femme fatale as …
Structuring the personal in Life-Work
This paper investigates my practice research Life-Work (Cornall,2022) and offers a reworking of its original exegesis. The aim is to reexamine the creation of the work in 2020, emphasising its practical aims that were missed when I presented the film at a conference. The discovery is an idiosyncratic attempt to create a personal structural film and respond to Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971). Working from Barbara Bolt’s material handling (201…
Unorthodox and disobedient Jewish cosmopolitans on our screens
This article explores the relationship between cosmopolitanism, and secular and orthodox Jewish identities in recent Jewish film and television dramas with a focus on the Netflix series Unorthodox (Schrader 2020). It argues that Unorthodox presents a cosmopolitan image of Berlin and has Jews constitute an affirmative, symbolic and embodied presence in the multicultural city. The article demonstrates how this stands in contrast to historical negat…
Suffocated But Screaming
This video essay explores how the ageing woman is made monstrous in kaibyō eiga (Japanese ghost cat films). The supporting statement reflects on the scholarly rationale for, and the making of, the video essay and then makes a case for its original contribution to horror studies and videographic criticism
A film-maker not a note-taker
Script supervision is a vitally important but often unheralded or misunderstood area of work within film and television production. This discussion among seven exponants of the craft (six women and one man, reflecting the role's broader gender ratio) provides new insights into many different aspects of their work as well as the particular challenges their profession faces in the current moment
Sin publicaciones prominentes en esta página.
Blu-Ray Review
Girlfriends [Criterion Collection, 2020] (ClaudiaWeill, 1978), 88 Minutes, spine #1055, (Blu-ray)
The Place of Women’s Filmmaking in an Interdisciplinary Architecture Course
This paper explores the rich pedagogical potential of women’s filmmaking for interdisciplinary courses that explore the relations between cinema, architecture, and urbanism. While many courses on this subject tend to focus on white male filmmakers (e.g., Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Tati, Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang), in constructing a new version of this elective, I aimed to extensively incorporate women’s filmmaking to the curriculum, especially o…
Film as Sound Art
Teaching film often involves un-learning previously taught histories of cinema to find instead ‘herstories’ (Dovey, 2018) and theirstories of cinema. This video essay constitutes an illustrative example of this practice, showing how Lebanese woman-led film Caramel (2007) is taught at SOAS, University of London to emphasise the crucial role of sound in narrative while rethinking the film canon and encouraging critical reflection on the gaze. By cr…
Young (Woman) Filmmaker(s)
This 9 minute and 28 second video essay, prepared for the conference ‘Teaching Women’s Filmmaking’ in 2021 takes a literal approach to the conference theme. Using the film The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019) as an inspiration, the video essay explores the unexpected generational overlaps between learning to become a filmmaker as a young woman and then later teaching young women filmmakers in the university classroom. This personal video essay explor…
The Matrixial Screen Encounter
This article applies Ettinger’s (2001) notion of the matrixial to the documentary practice of Kim Longinotto. It considers this in relation to what I term the matrixial screen encounter, a model that expands the individualistic framing of the unitary auteur and acts as a counter to the notion of the impartial observer within the context of observational documentary. It applies this model to a scene from Longinotto and Mir-Hosseini’s 1998 document…
Teaching Nearby, Learning Nearby
Inspired by the Teaching Women's Filmmaking conference hosted by Istanbul Bilgi University in April 2021, this video essay considers the learning experience inside and outside the classroom as represented in Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir (2019) and Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). Both films demonstrate that pedagogy is most effective and most affecting when teachers and learners can share their experiences as equals, outside the …
Teaching Women's Filmmaking
This introduction to the dossier on Teaching Women’s Filmmaking contextualizes the contributions among recent work that examines classroom praxis and relevant innovations in film and media studies scholarship, such as videographic criticism and online publication. It considers three key components of building a course—what to study, how to run a classroom, and how to implement assessments—and discusses each area according to critical feminist ped…
Abraham Lincoln in the Hollywood cinema
Abraham Lincoln is a towering figure in American popular consciousness, one who acts as a rich and complex motif and metaphor across its cinema history. This essay is broad-ranging in considering Hollywood’s Lincoln but places particular emphasis on ‘classical’ representations. Its primary aim is to consider the cinematic uses of Lincoln (Lincoln as embedded in the style and rhetoric of a range of films) but a minor thread running through is why …
Tennis | House
“Tennis | House” extends my earlier work using medical imaging software to explore narrative film. As with digital humanities work, medical imaging “datafies” the body, reading the physical change of discrete organs, cells, molecules, and so on. Furthermore, medical imaging frequently does so by reading this evidence indirectly, as a proxy for other knowledge: in the absence of direct access to the body’s secrets, medical science finds other indi…
'Enter the Memory'
This article theorizes the cinematic essay as a fluid, self-reflexive form which addresses the spectator directly in order to engage them in an intellectual process of dialogical exchange. Because it encourages the active involvement of the viewer in the determination of essayistic meaning, the cinematic essay challenges traditional models of authorship. Asopposed to relaying information to a passive viewer from a position of authority and omnisc…
Flashes in the Pan
Using Elvis Presley as a case study, this essay examines the maintenance of transmedia star presence in 1960s America. In December 1968, NBC broadcast the Elvis special, a programme widely understood to be Elvis’s return from obscurity, so much so that it is now better known as the Comeback Special. This essay argues that Elvis’s supposed cultural absence during the 1960s has been overstated, and that he maintained a strong media presence through…
Smartphone film, memory’s connective turn and the aesthetics of embodiment in Do You Remember That Year? (2020)
Do You Remember That Year? (DYRTY?) is a short film about anxiety, privilege, and the difficulty of reconciling the internal and external stimuli that bombard us daily. DYRTY? probes the need to narrativize experiences that are recorded but not necessarily remembered in what Hoskins (2011) calls the memorial ‘connective turn.’ This submission examines the potential aesthetic and narrative responses to the ‘connective turn,’ defined asan ‘ontologi…
Şehnaz, Elmas, Mina, and the Others, Who Kill The Angel in Their Houses
My mother was killed by the Angel in our house. I know many other women who were killed in thesame way. Either to kill the Angel or be killed by her ... It is a matter of life and death for us, forthe women of Turkey. In this video-essay, I introduce you to some of us: Şehnaz, Elmas, Mina, andseveral others who dare to choose life. They are the fictional female characters of the new wavefilms produced by the new generation of female directors fro…
The Full Picture
Screen advertising production is a relatively neglected domain of British screen history, largely overlooked in extant studies of the UK’s film production sector. The Guardian ‘Points of View’ (1986) is one of the more acclaimed works produced by that production sector which continues to attract popular interest. This article conducts an archaeological investigation into the industry through a case study analysis of ‘Points of View’ and an in-dep…
Roundtable Discussion
On 8th July 2024, industry leaders Steve Davies and Steve Garvey met at the British Film Institute (BFI) to discuss research and policy issues with the PI and Co-I of the AHRC Hidden Screen Industries network (Emily Caston and Patrick Russell), along with Ian Cade of the BFI’s Research and Statistics Unit. Topics covered included tax reliefs, screen skills, diversity and inclusion, the lack of research on advertising screen production and branded…
Fashion Film and the Art and Archaeology of Screen Promotion
In this article, Marketa Uhlirova discusses some of the theoretical and practical challenges she faced in the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project on fashion film in the early 20th century she ran with fashion historian Caroline Evans and media theorist Jussi Parikka. In conversation with Emily Caston, Uhlirova probes some of the associated and different curatorial and historical questions faced in Caston’s AHRC research pro…
The Moving Picture Company
The UK’s postproduction industry is, according to professional trade association Screen Alliance (2019), lacking in research and suffers from being regarded as separate to VFX rather than the larger industry within which the VFX sector is rooted. This article examines the history of the British VFX industry through a case study analysis of the Moving Picture Company (MPC), founded in 1970, adding a video postproduction division in 1974. The analy…
Soho’s ‘other’ film industry
This article examines the concept of ‘hidden screen economies’ – economic activities related to screen media that occur outside formal structures, often involving concealment to evade legal and regulatory frameworks. Drawing on the author's ethnohistorical research into Britain's trade in hardcore pornographic films from 1960-1972, the article applies Actor-Network Theory to demonstrate how we might research hidden screen economies. The study rev…
Hidden Screen Industries
This is an introduction to the Hidden Screen Industries special dossier
‘Taken by my wife’ – Challenging the Amateur/professional binary in Wessex Film and Sound Archive’s (WFSA) Early Films (1895-1922)
Gaines’ phrase, ‘Women were both ‘there’ and ‘not there’’ (2018: 4), captures the paradoxical presence of women in early film history, central to this study on women amateur filmmakers in Wessex Film and Sound Archive (WFSA) up to 1950. Using an intermedial approach, this article seeks to expand recognition of filmmakers by re-examining clearly attributed records and questioning those around which there is ambiguity. Louisa Gauvain (1880-1945) is…
Revealing and Concealing Oil
This article explores the use of animation with oil industries and considers the various ways this could be understood as a ‘Hidden Screen Industry’. This article begins by reviewing relevant literature in animation studies and environmental and energy humanities to understand why this industry and the films arising from it have been largely hidden from scholarly work at the intersection of the two fields of study. Following this, it examines the…
Medicine on Film
This article explores the historical and contemporary significance of medical film in Britain, particularly its role in education and practice for medical professionals. The key areas of inquiry are the emergence of medical filmmaking, focusing on the increasing research interest and visibility of non-theatrical film and to date the lack of British focus. While there is substantial literature on American and European medical films, British films …
Foreword to the Special Issue
This piece is a Foreword to the Special Issue "Students on Screen"
Being Nick Von Sternberg
This article explores the complex and often contentious representations of film students in anglophone cinema, particularly as portrayed in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019) and its sequel The Souvenir Part II (2021). By examining the historical context of film education since its inception in the 1930s, it highlights the persistent tensions between academia and the film industry, which have shaped the portrayal of film students on screen. The ar…
The Process (2023)
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This article examines the process of collaborating with non-professional actors in the creation of a fictional audio-visual work (a documentary short film) representing forms of embodied vulnerability. It explores how non-professional actors and filmmakers can creatively and ethically utilise actors’ lived experience in the process of creating characters who themselves …