ISSN 2514-3123
https://doi.org/10.37186/swrks/11.1

Rolling Volume 11.1

We are delighted to publish our fifth entry to Vol. 11.1, Elisabeth Brun’s Thinking Through Form, a compelling exploration of essay film techniques. In this award winning experimental work, Brun explores how essayist film practice may be a way to think topographically. She suggests that through non-verbal techniques such as camera movement, camera position, montage and algorithm, films can think conceptually about place forms and place structures, as well as their projective powers for the imagination. Brun’s video essay is structured around three visits to her remote hometown in the Arctic North of Norway, exploring this site to build her ideas about how places are perceived, imagined and conceptualized.

Anatomy of a Mermaid: Subverting the performative image of the pregnant woman, by Adriana Páramo Pérez, is a video essay which explores the use of parody in the play Anatomía dunha serea / Anatomy of a Mermaid by Galician actress Iria Pinheiro to share the experiences of obstetric violence she went through during and after childbirth. Páramo Pérez interrogates how the use of humour to portray pregnant women in films has helped to perpetuate a performative image of this experience rather than subverting the imaginary, opening up a conversation about how to portray this uncomfortable topic on screen.

Mirrors and Tears, is a short film by Pavel Prokopic which explores the potential of film to give rise to a feeling of meaning (affective significance) by combining chance, aspects of audio-visual style and nuances of performance – offsetting, in the process, a coherent sense of space, story and fictional characters. Rather than constructing a story, this approach leads to a new disconnected, alogical structure – forging a sense of meaning that is felt before it can be thought.

Chek Lap Kok (Hong Kong Airport) 21.00 01.12.19 is a short video by Stephen Connolly which documents a walk to Hong Kong Airport from the Expo centre on the airport island, by means of slow travel, under makeshift conditions, and without carbon expenditure. The video offers a brief exploration of the materialities and grounded infrastructures of aviation at a moment of pandemic-led change and invites us to look anew at the familiar and banal physical geography of the airport and how we move within it, drawing on Lefebvre’s Production of Space and theories of ‘Spatial Cinema’.

Iakovos Panagopoulos’ visually arresting Flickering Souls Set Alight is a thirty minute fiction film following the life of a Greek family during the toughest years of the financial crisis. With her husband on a life support machine, the film depicts Persephone’s financial and emotional struggles, drawing attention to a lack of support for people suffering from ALS. This practice-research enquiry asks how modernist techniques, such as Brechtian alienation, can comment on contemporary Greek social issues. Highlighting the cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, Andrei Tarkovsky and Abbas Kiarostami as references, Panagopoulos’ research statement details his production process through the lens of a total filmmaker approach and proposes a new wave of political cinema in Greece.

We are accepting submissions for Volume 11.1 until August 2021. 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 [email protected] with “Submissions” in the subject line.

Contents

This volume is supported by the Moving Image Research Group and the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England, UWE Bristol.

Peer-Review for Practice Research

Welcome to Screenworks – the peer-reviewed online publication of practice research in film and screen media, edited by Dr Charlotte Crofts (UWE Bristol) and Associate Editors: Will DiGravio (The Video Essay Podcast); Shweta Ghosh (PhD Candidate at University of Reading); Catherine Gough-Brady (PhD Candidate at RMIT, Australia); Dr Matthew Hawkins (London Southbank University); Dr Alexander Nevill (Nottingham Trent University); Dr Estrella Sendra Fernandez (SOAS, University of London and Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton). Screenworks publishes practice research that produces new knowledge in Communication, Media and Cultural Studies, Art and Design, Performing Arts and related fields. We offer a forum for the dissemination and discussion of practice research that includes space for reflection on research contexts. Work is published alongside a research statement, which offers a ‘route map’ of the research process, together with two anonymous reviews, which provide critical feedback on both the work itself and its research context.

We accept submissions on a rolling basis as well as for Special Issues. Please see the Submissions page for further information about current calls, deadlines, the peer review process and how to submit your work. Go to our Archive to explore previous volumes, including the full supporting research statements and peer reviews for each volume.

What is unique about Screenworks is that the work is subject to academic peer review, just as an academic journal article would be, thus providing evidence of the impact, significance, originality and rigour of the practice as research. In addition we operate an open single blind review policy, where anonymous peer reviews are published alongside the research statement so that the review process is transparent. Our intention is to create a supportive, yet rigorous research environment for the academic community researching screen media through practice, whilst at the same time engaging with wider audiences. You can read more about Screenworks‘ evolving editorial approach in Crofts and Nevill (2018).

Screenworks was originally convened in 2006 by Professor Jon Dovey, and Associate editor, Dr Charlotte Crofts, and took the form of a DVD that was distributed with the Journal of Media Practice (JMP) by Intellect Books. Volume 1 was published with JMP (8:2) in Autumn 2007, and Volume 2 with JMP (9:3) in December 2008. Extracts of the works in Volumes 1 & 2 were published online, where possible, when the website was relaunched under the banner of JMPScreenworks.com at the JMP Symposium 2011.

Screenworks migrated to the present website in 2016. We now publish exclusively online in order to disseminate work more widely, save costs and to fulfil the current AHRC and REF research agendas of open access, impact and public engagement. We hope that this new home will enable Screenworks to continue to flourish and grow as both an online publisher of academic film and as a forum for championing screen media practice research with in the academy.

References

Charlotte Crofts & Alexander Nevill (2018) Publishing screen media practice research: evolving processes of contextualisation, peer review and future proofing in Screenworks, Media Practice and Education, 19:3, 283-297, DOI: 10.1080/25741136.2018.1529478.

Academic Reviewers

We are very keen to expand our pool of academic reviewers, particularly in terms of international scope, so if you would be interested in getting involved then please email with “Screenworks Reviewer” in the subject line, outlining your area of interest / expertise and your institutional affiliation.

Supported by the Moving Image Research Group and the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England, UWE Bristol.

Call for Submissions

We invite submissions of moving image work on film, video and new media platforms. We feel strongly that the function of Screenworks is to provide an opportunity for practice research to undergo the equivalent rigorous peer-review process to that of traditional publication, and fully understand contributors’ need to evidence the impact and significance of their practice as research. Where submissions are documentation of interactive or installation work we encourage producers to consider the problems of documentation as part of the research process. We welcome work from doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers, as well as those at the cutting edge of practice research both nationally and internationally.

Guidelines for Contributors

Please submit via the online submission form linked above and read the following guidelines:

Practice Component

Videos or video documentation of other practice must be uploaded to Vimeo, even if it is available online elsewhere. If you do not already have an account, you will need to join in order to upload your work. Please see the Vimeo Compression page for guidance on optimising your upload. You can then include the URL and, if necessary, the password for the video in our online submission form. Only if and when your work is accepted for publication will we make it available on the Screenworks website.

Please note that should your work be accepted for publication you will need to update the Vimeo privacy settings to allow us to embed it on our website. Contributors take full responsibility for ensuring that their submissions adhere to UK copyright guidelines.

If your work is web-based, then simply supply the URL for review purposes. If your work takes any other form (e.g. an app, screen-based art installation or performance) or you have a problem with uploading it to Vimeo, then please contact us to arrange an alternative review method. We are keen to showcase as many pieces of high quality practice research as we can. Where submissions are documentation of interactive or installation work we encourage contributors to consider the problems of documentation as part of the research process.

Supporting Research Statement

Statements of up to 2000 words should outline Research Questions, Context, Methods, Outcomes and Impact – although we also welcome the development of alternative ways of writing about practice which can identify new knowledge, research contexts and rigour – as long as they clearly identify the research in your submission. Please refer to our style guide before submitting.

There are many different kinds of screen media practice research. Our aim is to generate “new knowledge” in Communication, Media and Cultural Studies, Art and Design, Performing Arts and related fields. The purpose of the statement is not to “explain” the screenwork, but rather to offer a “route map” of the research process, as well as a means to provide evidence for the dissemination and wider impact of the practice.

Peer Review Process

All work submitted to Screenworks undergoes rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and refereeing by at least two anonymous referees. Both the statement and practical work are subject to open but anonymous peer review selected from our growing list of academic reviewers representing scholar practitioners working across the field of screen media both in the UK and internationally. Reviewers will have the choice of recommending publication of both work and research statement, acceptance of work with minor rewrites of statement required, invitation to resubmit both in reworked form or of rejecting.

In the case of successful submissions, the reviews are published online alongside the practical work and supporting research statement. The aim is that, through this process, criteria for research will be generated by the community over a period of time – that we will use a dialogic model of criteria generation and research. The process of open reviewing is intended to promote an active, concrete dialogue within the community of screen media scholar practitioners as to how our research is constituted, defined and disseminated.

Submission Deadlines

Screenworks is published on a rolling basis. This means that in the spirit of reactive online publishing we will review and publish work as it is comes in, rather than waiting for a full volume before publication. In addition to the rolling volume, we also publish themed Special Issues, the first of which Volume 7.3 was on Aesthetics/Politics/Activism/Art: What is Radical Filmmaking? Our second Special Issue, Volume 8.2, was on the theme of Digital Ecologies and the Anthropocene edited by Alex Nevill in partnership with guest editors Charlie Tweed (Bath Spa University) and Joshua McNamara (University of Melbourne). Our third Special Issue Volume 10.2 is on the theme of Practice Pedagogies, edited by Lucy Leake, in collaboration with the Journal of Media Practice and Education. If you are interested in collaborating on a Special Issue then please contact the Editorial Team.