There are certain scenes which have the power to enthral, provoke, and delight—our cover captures one such titillating tableau. But what gives such a scene the ability to stand apart, to take on a life of its own? What is it about Robert De Niro’s “Are you talking to me?” scene that has such lasting cultural resonance? How does Gene Kelly dancing in the rain embody an entire ethos of escapism?

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Each essay in this issue focuses on a single scene, and an embedded video clip of the scene under analysis is included.  Brenda Austin-Smith looks at Alice in the Cities, Murray Pomerance considers Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, and Elena del Río includes her own short film in the Forward to the issue: What a Scene Can Do,  Other essays look at the Snuff Coda, Eastern Promises, That 70s Sequence, the Post-Mortem Western, and Joy Division and the Televised Performance Scene.

I was the web and layout editor once again, as well as a member of the editorial board.

…in this, our 5th anniversary issue, we set out to navigate the murky and uncharted depths of ‘alternative cinema’. But carving out an epistemology of this amorphous cinema is no small endeavour-and what do we mean by ‘alternative cinema’ anyway? On the one hand, it is always evolving, always repositioning itself outside mainstream modes of representation: once the mainstream appropriates elements of alternative style, new configurations naturally spring up in response. At the same time, it has no singular mandate, no fixed ideological underpinnings, and is beholden to no specific national cinema or film movement.

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Steffen Hantke on Hitler as Actor, Jerry White on From Ingushetia to the Finland Station, William Beard’s interview with Guy Maddin, and more, including Holocaust Exploitation, Post-Soviet Freakonomics, and Cinematic Prosthesis.

I was the web and layout editor, as well as a member of the editorial board.

Genre may be an easy or convenient starting point for analysis and interpretation, but how much does it really matter anymore? Maybe the core film genres have just been around too long; they’ve been maimed and manipulated to such a degree that they no longer resemble their ‘original’ self in any substantial way… We can’t really leave genre behind anymore than we can abandon modernism or industry or structuralism – we’ve just mutated it to the point that it somehow feels new or different. Maybe we should start thinking ‘post’ as less of a temporal marker and more like computational logic. Let’s think of it as an upgrade: Genre 2.0, based on the same fundamental hardware, but with such forward-thinking software that it hardly warrants comparison.

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The issue starts with Susan Ingram’s Cosmotrash: A New Genre for a New Europe, followed by a look at so-called ‘torture porn’ in Gorno: Violence, Shock and Comedy.  Barry Keith Grant was generous enough to share an excerpt from his forthcoming book Shadows of a Doubt: The Fallacy of the Crisis of Masculinity, while other essays consider Irreversible, A Cinema of Cruelty, Cinema from Attractions, The Wire, and The HBO-ification of Genre.  My own essay is also included, entitled The Geography of Melodrama, The Melodrama of Geography: The ’Hood Film’s Spatial Pathos.