Film Matters Magazine

The monstrous mother in The Babadook (IFC Films, 2014)

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Elizabeth Riggs: This article is an examination of the monstrous mother, as portrayed in the films The Babadook and Lights Out. Specifically, it looks at how Kristeva’s theory of the abject can be applied to view the mothers in both films as abject due to their mental illness, and how the abject can create horror. Through contrasting each film’s outcome, it discusses the representation of single motherhood, as well as the problematic way that Lights Out depicts those with mental illness. Continue reading →

Murder Go Round (The Student Film That Never Was)

Murder Go Round (The Student Film That Never Was) is a feature-length student film produced by the liberal arts institution, St. Lawrence University (SLU), and directed by their 2018 film graduate, Austen Sprake. Like many, Sprake sparked his adoration for filmmaking during high school and since has budded into a writer, producer, director, actor, editor, and cinematographer. Granted the majority of student feature-length films are created in auspicious circumstances with accessible film tools at their disposal, Murder Go Round (The Student Film That Never Was) is unique for the reason Sprake was the first film major in the history of SLU. In the face of adversity, Sprake constructs a fruitful feature-length film, but during post-production he forsakes his initial narrative and conceives an invaluable visual medium for student filmmakers. Austen Sprake participated in this interview with Film Matters via email in summer 2018.

Lily Frame: Tell me about Murder Go Round.

Murder Go Round was my senior year project at St. Lawrence. After years of working on different short films, music videos and documentaries at school, I wanted to step up and work on a large scale (for our school at least) feature film, consisting of an all Saint Lawrence University cast and crew. The film would be a feature length version of my award winning short film Murder Go Round, and I would continue experimenting with the murder mystery genre in it. Continue reading →

Kenneth L. Freyer: Please introduce yourself.

Candace Grissom: My name is Dr. Candace Grissom, and I was born and raised in Cullman, AL. In August, I finished a three-year contract as a full-time Instructor of English at Motlow State Community College in Smyrna, TN. This summer, I relocated with my family to Cincinnati, OH, where recently I began teaching at Xavier University. In 2012, I received my PhD in English with specialties in American Literature and Film Studies from Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN. Additionally, I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of the South in Sewanee, TN, and a JD in Law from Samford University in Birmingham, AL. Continue reading →

Craig Batty and Susan Kerrigan’s book Screen Production Research: Creative Practice as a Mode of Enquiry explores screen production—filmmaking and screenwriting—as a research method. Made up of a collection of essays by international experts in field, the book defines and provides case studies of screen production research and defends its place in the academy. As editors, Craig Batty and Susan Kerrigan used their extensive knowledge on creative practice research and their passion for linking film theory and practice to create this comprehensive and timely guide for students and scholars alike. Craig Batty is associate professor of screenwriting at RMIT University, Australia, and is an award-winning educator, researcher, and supervisor in the areas of screenwriting, creative writing, and screen production. Susan Kerrigan is an associate professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and is a screen production scholar who specializes in creative practice research methodologies. Batty and Kerrigan participated in this interview via email in summer 2018.

Ashley Spillane: Please tell us about your book, Screen Production Research.

Craig Batty and Susan Kerrigan: Our book is intended to provide a robust, rich–and dare we say, foundational–account of what it means to do screen production research; what that looks like; and how it can be articulated. In particular, it is aimed at giving other practitioner-researchers a variety of ways of doing academic research with and through screen production, and writing about it in ways that suit the requirements of academia. The book features a range of practitioner-researchers from around the world, and covers all forms and genres, from the feature film to the screenplay, and from documentary to mobile media filmmaking. Continue reading →

Film Matters had the immense pleasure of discussing Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2017) with its one of its coauthors, Vito Adriaensens, in summer 2018. Comprising a variety of topics central to the intermedial crossroads of sculpture and cinema, Screening Statues is a highly investigative text delineating the confluence of sculptural models and film. Adriaensens generously made time out of a busy schedule as a visiting scholar and adjunct professor at Columbia University, in which to further discuss his contributions. Each of his fellow coauthors — Steven Jacobs, Susan Felleman, and Lisa Colpaert — offers his/her own discussions based on respective areas of research, as Adriaensens’s background in intermedial studies primes his own discussions of animated statuary in both horror and peplum films.  While leaving room for further expansion, Screening Statues is a key textual resource in exploring the ongoing relationship between sculpture and cinema. The text is split into two parts. The first of which outlines various historiographic topics of statuary aestheticism from each of the contributing authors, while the latter section provides an extensive reference gallery of 150 films.

Matthew Johnson: It’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to discuss the recent release of your coauthored text Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema. The subjects and discussions within this publication are markedly intriguing and engaging. We would be curious to know more of your experience in working with a collective of fellow authors in fleshing out this material. Has it been beneficial to approach this work as a collaborative venture? Had you envisioned your material alongside the contributions of others, or did this coauthorship develop out of previous, individual works?  

Vito Adriaensens: The book is one of a few outputs generated by a research project that Steven, Susan, Lisa, and I worked on from 2010 to 2014 at the School of the Arts, University College in Ghent, concerned with the visualization of art and artists in cinema. We quickly identified a number of tropes that ran across media and spilled over from visual and performing arts onto film, and we set out to bring them together and see where they stood within the realm of film history. Right away, for instance, the prominence of paintings in American films of the 1940s and 1950s caught our eye, and this resulted in the 2014 book The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir Gothic Melodramas and Ghost Stories of the 1940s and 1950s (Steven Jacobs and Lisa Colpaert, Ghent: AraMER). Working simultaneously on early cinema, I had been aware of the large amount of tableaux vivants and living statues used as transformational props, plot points, gags, and for pure aesthetics, and the continuity of motifs such as the Pygmalion myth and spaces such as the wax museum (the place for confusion between wax and flesh). We saw these motifs and others run through the whole of film history and translated them into chapters that correlated with our singular experiences. Since we had over a thousand films on our list, Lisa and I also decided to invest in a second part of the book, The Sculpture Gallery, a collection of short texts for one hundred fifty films that engage with sculpture in interesting ways, and we did not have room to discuss all of these in the book chapters. As such, Screening Statues was always perceived as a collaborative work, indeed because it took a substantial amount of time working together to identify the material and the tropes, and to compile a Sculpture Gallery that was well balanced.  Continue reading →