nothing to see here.

The latest issue of UBC’s film journal, Cinephile, is out now:

Anime is a visual enigma. Its otherworldly allure and burgeoning popularity across the globe highlights its unique ability to be more than just another type of animation. Originally a novelty export from post-war Japan, anime has now become a subtle yet important part of Western popular culture. Furthermore, it remains a key area of audience and fan research that crosses all generations – children, teenagers, and adults. From Osamu Tezuka to Hayao Miyazaki, Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988) to Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995), anime’s extraordinary characters and oneiric content still enable it to be regarded as one of the most awe-inspiring visual spectacles going into and during the twenty-first century…

- Editor’s Note

For this issue I was a member of the editorial board, and helped with the web and layout editing, but this was officially my last issue of Cinephile with which I was involved, marking an end to 5 years, 7 issues, and countless hours helping shape Cinephile into the feisty little journal it is today. A whole new cohort of graduate students has enthusiastically taken the journal into their very capable hands, and I couldn’t be more proud of the journal.

Check it out at cinephile.ca

The latest issue of UBC’s film journal, Cinephile, is out now:

Horror cinema has always held a strange place in the mainstream. On one hand, it is reviled by the moral majority and seen as a tool for corrupting impressionable youth, and on the other, it is a source of ritual enjoyment bound up in nostalgic memories of drive-in theatres and Saturday night viewings with friends. Perhaps it is this dichotomy that makes horror films such a guilty pleasure for so many of us; despite their often misogynistic and gruesome elements, they’re just so damn enjoyable on the most basic of levels. This issue of Cinephile explores the ways that more recent horror films have attempted to break free of established conventions and mirrored elements of their own cultural surroundings, and attempts to explain some of the shifts these films have taken in modernizing and localizing horror’s tropes.

- Editor’s Note

I am happy to say I was barely involved with this issue — apart from advising — as my tenure at Cinephile is sadly coming to an end.

Check it out at cinephile.ca

As assistant editor at Rodopi on the Contemporary Cinema series, I proof-read, copy-edit, and format, then do layout for print and design the cover. The second book I worked on, after Theorizing Bruce Lee, is Cristina Johnston’s French Minority Cinema, a probing analysis of the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality in contemporary French cinema.

More info at Rodopi | Amazon | Worldcat

Through the prisms of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, French Minority Cinema explores key questions of identity and social interaction in the context of republican France, across two significant ‘minority’ cinemas:cinéma de banlieue and gay cinema. It offers the first comprehensive parallel study of these two bodies of film and their inter-relations, examining issues of national cinema and identity and the problematic status of minorities within the contemporary Republic. Against a backdrop of political and media debates on the PACS, parity, the affaire du voile and the French principle of laïcité, banlieue youth dissatisfaction, and gay parenting, French Minority Cinema charts the negotiatory discourse that has emerged through, and around, a core corpus of films released over the past two decades. This study will be of interest to scholars and students alike, working in the fields of French, Film, and Gay and Lesbian/Queer Studies.