Film Matters Magazine

Black Swan (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2010)

Recently, Travis Merchant was able to catch up with Joanna Scholefield, who wrote her article, “Under the Skin: How Filmmakers Affectively Reduce the Space Between the Film and the Viewer,” for issue 5.1 of Film Matters. Her article explored Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), and how the camera’s movement, focus, and shot length explored the emotions and mental state of the characters in the film. Merchant was able to ask Scholefield about her article, along with questions about where she is at and where she is heading in her life.

Travis Merchant: How did you first hear about Film Matters, and what was the publication process like?

Joanna Scholefield: I heard about Film Matters when I learned that David Sorfa [senior lecturer and program director for Film Studies at University of Edinburgh] was going to be second marking my dissertation for my degree. Though, I had probably read the magazine many times in our university library without recognizing that it was Film Matters!
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An issue of Famous Monsters magazine, which Mr. Johnson referred to as material he read as a child and what initially grabbed his interest in the subject matter

I recently spoke with A. Randal Johnson, who is a past author for Film Matters magazine, about one of his particular articles he wrote for the magazine. Mr. Johnson was a part of the guest editorial board for the magazine in the spring of 2012, while he was attending the University of Kansas. He went on to write the article “Monster Kids Spawned in the Atomic Age,” which made issue 3.3 of Film Matters. After reading this, I learned that this was an intimate piece of writing by Mr. Johnson, as it related to his personal interests as a child and how he grew up in the subject matter. I contacted A. Randal Johnson to get a better understanding of his writing style and form and how he incorporated his personal references to create a strong featurette.

Jackson Gentry: I noticed in your article how you used several personal experiences; do you believe that by doing this you are able to relate more with the reader?

A. Randal Johnson: Not particularly, this article just happened to be from my personal point of view. The point of the article was to show “How I became a Monster Kid” by the zeitgeist I was born into, by osmosis of the popular culture.
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Casino Royale (Columbia Pictures, 2006)

In the summer of 2013, Film Matters published, “License to Joke: Parody and Camp in and Around the James Bond Series,” an essay focused on the longevity of the Bond franchise. Editorial board member, Lydia Plantamura, interviews author Craig Manning about his writing career and fondness for agent 007.

Lydia Plantamura: Where did you first hear about Film Matters magazine?

Craig Manning: I found out about Film Matters through a simple Google search. I wasn’t a film studies major, but an English major, so I wasn’t familiar with the various undergraduate journals for film. I was actually taking a really cool English class about parody, and for the major assignment of the semester, our professor gave us a lot of freedom to decide what we wanted to write about. Basically, he wanted us to take the definitions and elements of parody that we’d learned about over the semester, find an example (or several examples) to analyze, and then write an essay. What made the assignment unique was that he wanted us to write as if we were planning on submitting to an undergraduate journal. Actually submitting to the journal wasn’t a requirement, since the peer review process is lengthy and would extend past the end of the semester, but I figured it would be a good experience to have. Knowing that I wanted to focus on Bond, I searched for undergraduate film journals, and Film Matters was the first that came up.
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Lance St. Laurent’s review of A Hijacking, which was directed by Tobias Lindholm in 2012, was published in Film Matters issue 4.3 in the fall of 2013.  He is a freelance critic from Alma, AR. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in critical studies at the University of Southern California. His areas of study include contemporary comedy auteurism and the history of the New Hollywood.

Brianna Okamoto: In your article you said that the “audience is left ignorant to the actions of the hijackers”; how do you think that affects the film style?

Lance St. Laurent: The film maintains a very handheld, vérité sort of style about it, which really heightens the tension and sense of immediacy throughout. It’s a style firmly rooted in the point of view of the protagonists both on the boat and in the board room. The advantage of this is a strong feeling of authenticity and emotional rawness to the film. The troubling downside, though, is that it renders the hijackers themselves as this hostile, faceless “other” in the film.
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Avatar: The Last Airbender (Nickelodeon Animation Studios, 2005-2008)

Megan E. Jackson is a social media strategist for 360training.com and will be attending NYU in the fall to start coursework for an MPA. She also runs the YouTube channel College Uncomplicated. As an undergraduate she wrote her senior thesis on gender representation in the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was published in issue 4.2 of Film Matters in 2013. In the following interview, Megan discusses the beginnings of her article, gender representation, and works she has done outside the publication.

Rachel Wassil: How did you hear about Film Matters magazine? Why did you want to publish your work in it?

Megan E. Jackson: I had heard about Film Matters during my sophomore year of undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin. My instructor and mentor Anne Helen Petersen, who now does long-form articles for BuzzFeed, was teaching film history with a star studies twist. For one of our main papers, we had to do a case study of a celebrity who was in her/his prime before the 1980s. Naturally, I wrote my paper on the amazing Robert Redford, and after grading it, Annie suggested I submit it to Film Matters. That was the first time I had submitted a paper for possible publication, and I was excited to make it to the last round of reviews, but unfortunately it didn’t make the final cut. So when I started developing my senior thesis, which then became “(Gender)Bending in the Animated Series Avatar: The Last Airbender,” I knew I wanted to try to submit to the magazine again while I still had the chance!
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