Screen Machine

Feature

DOSSIER: Unseen Films

In an interview with David Walsh a few months ago for the World Socialist Website, Joseph McBride, film historian and author of a recent biography of Steven Spielberg, remarked scathingly: "A great deal of the academic writing in the 1970s on film was just appalling. The field was taken over by people … it’s difficult to characterize them in one sentence … but, for example, I remember reading one book on film theory that after thirty pages hadn’t mentioned a single film yet. I stopped reading the book. In the introduction of another book on film theory the author said, more or less, 'I don’t have time to go to movies anymore because I’m spending all my time writing about them.' Film studies became a field populated by people who were not particularly interested in films, they were interested in something else, a fact that was not especially healthy for film studies." The statement intended by our publication of this series of papers on unseen films is, quite simply: Bring back those great, unhealthy days! In these five essays we explore the notion of the unseen film, and how questions of not seeing, seeing nothing (as in Dorian Stuber's essay), writing without seeing (as in the essays by myself, Daniel Fairfax and Goda Trakumaite) or the unseen films that seen films produce (as in the essay by Josefina Garcia Pullés) allow us to pose new questions both of the cinema and of its others, the latter encapsulated in McBride's scorned "something else": the others of cinema, the thoughts it provokes, creates, distorts or obfuscates, whose pursuit may finally be of greater value than 'seeing'. → continue reading

Reviews

Forgetting devices: An interview with David Blair

Matthew O'Shannessy speaks with the creator of the first narrative film put on the internet. → continue reading

Cowboys and Aliens and Rise of the Planet of the Apes

We can imagine an alternate ending to Cowboys and Aliens: The film would end with the alien proleteriat revolting against their masters and cooperating with the Apaches to throw the white men off their land. → continue reading

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