Film Matters

Film Matters The magazine for future film scholars. Film Matters is an exciting film magazine, celebrating the work of undergraduate film scholars.

It is published three times a year, by students and for students, and each issue contains feature articles, as well as a healthy reviews section. In addition, with an undergraduate audience in mind, Film Matters will include occasional service-oriented pieces, such as profiles of film studies departments, articles that engage the undergraduate film studies community and prepare students for gradua

te study in this field, and resources and opportunities that undergraduate scholars can pursue. In an effort to give undergraduate scholars real-world, applied-learning experiences, all Film Matters feature submissions will undergo a peer review process (typically managed by undergraduate film and media students). We strive for inclusivity in all areas of our operations. Broadly speaking, we seek to empower undergraduates from diverse backgrounds (race, ethnicity, gender/gender identity/gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, and economic status are our primary concerns), engaging our mentors/editors from varied experiences of academia (community colleges, private colleges, public universities, tenure track, non-tenure track, adjunct, graduate student, etc.). If you want to write or edit for us, we want to work with you. We feel, however, during these changemaking times, that it is particularly important to state that Black Lives Matter. The views and opinions of all posts, including reviews and interviews, are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect those of the editors, the editorial board, or the advisory board. Film Matters is published by Intellect with support from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Last call for CFP 17.3! Deadline is September 1! Undergraduates, submit today -- we look forward to hearing from you.
29/08/2025

Last call for CFP 17.3! Deadline is September 1! Undergraduates, submit today -- we look forward to hearing from you.

Film Matters is pleased to announce an open call for papers from current undergraduates, authors who have been invited to revise and resubmit previous submissions (including authors who did not make it past our prescreening for a previous call), and recently … Continue reading →

FM Citation Ethics Editor M. Sellers Johnson has a new post up about the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Congrats!
27/08/2025

FM Citation Ethics Editor M. Sellers Johnson has a new post up about the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Congrats!

M. Sellers Johnson reports on the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

12/08/2025

YAY! Super pleased to report that we have officially submitted FM 16.2 (fall 2025) -- jointly edited by Chapman University and the University of North Carolina Wilmington -- for copyediting/typesetting.

In this issue, you will find:

PEER-REVIEWED FEATURES

* "Portrait of a Lady On-Screen: Self-Portraiture Through Self-Reflexive Documentary in Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès and Sandi Tan’s Shirkers" by Bridget Bell

* "Lolita in the Lens: Pleasure and the Male Gaze in Lolita’s Film Adaptations" by Kae Cohen

* "Rewriting History and Cultural Memory: The Influence of The Birth of a Nation on Southern Identity and Racial Narratives" by Joseph D'Andrea

* "From Scream Queen to a Queen of the Screen: The Star Persona of Jamie Lee Curtis" by Faith Hardie

* "Opening the Archival Closet: How Practices of Archiving and Collecting Queer Films Shape Public Memory" by Ronja Helen Blight

* "Visual Essayists in a Contemporary Climate and a Digital Future" by Jemima Kent

* "Skin Shields: Bodily Modification as Political Resistance in the Trans Horror Films of the 2020s" by Carol Liddle

* "How to Make People Care: Documentary Viewing, Connectedness to Nature, and Conservation Efforts" by Emma Soncini

* "Polluted Blood: Exploring the History of the Representation of Menstruation on Screen" by Yeliz Zaifoglu

* "Anatomizing Hiroshima mon amour (1959): Deleuze’s Cinematic Fossil as an Instrument of Human Rights Advocacy" by Vernita Zhai

FEATURETTE

* "Finding the Deserted, Screening the Forgotten: An Interview with Deserted Films" by Holley Anne Brabble

BOOK REVIEWS

* "'Keep ‘Em in the East': Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar New York Film Renaissance, Richard Koszarski (2021)" by Laura Marcy

* "The Paper Trail: A Close-Up on Kartik Nair’s Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror" by Izzie Barrett

DVD/BLU-RAY REVIEWS

* "Blue Velvet (1986)" by Lauren Cavalieri

* "A Film You Don't Watch, But Feel" by Dylan Limp

FM 16.2 authors, please keep your eyes out for the first proof, which we should be sending out at some point in September.

Want to be an FM author? Then we want to work with you -- take a look at our current opportunities!

https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/submit/

Advisory Board Member Margaret C. Flinn (The Ohio State University, USA) is a winner! But we knew that already. 😀Congrat...
29/07/2025

Advisory Board Member Margaret C. Flinn (The Ohio State University, USA) is a winner! But we knew that already. 😀

Congrats, Maggie!

The 2025 Eisner Awards were presented at San Diego Comic-Con, with a diverse pool of creators seeing their work recognized by their peers.

On Film Matters, an interview with Tom Gunning by Dason Fuller:"Terrence Malick is probably the current filmmaker that I...
04/07/2025

On Film Matters, an interview with Tom Gunning by Dason Fuller:

"Terrence Malick is probably the current filmmaker that I most admire. He’s a perfect example of someone who, although he tells stories, more important to him is the world they take place in."

I had the opportunity to meet with Professor Tom Gunning—author of The Cinema of Attractions and the forthcoming anthology The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde—over Zoom. We had an intriguing conversation on his … Continue reading →

On Film Matters, an interview with FM 15.2 author Yixuan Ma:"One resistance point I encountered was grappling with confl...
27/06/2025

On Film Matters, an interview with FM 15.2 author Yixuan Ma:

"One resistance point I encountered was grappling with conflicting interpretations of certain themes in the film. To overcome this, I engaged in multiple rounds of conversations with peers and mentors, repetitively revisited primary sources, and ultimately, allowed for room for interpretation in my analysis while acknowledging differing perspectives."

Film Matters: What research and/or methodologies do you incorporate in your article? Yixuan Ma: In my article, I employ a combination of qualitative research methods and critical analysis. I draw upon existing literature on hypercapitalism, South Korean society, and film … Continue reading →

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Our Story

Film Matters is an exciting film magazine, celebrating the work of undergraduate film scholars. It is published three times a year, by students and for students, and each issue contains feature articles, as well as a healthy reviews section. In addition, with an undergraduate audience in mind, Film Matters will include occasional service-oriented pieces, such as profiles of film studies departments, articles that engage the undergraduate film studies community and prepare students for graduate study in this field, and resources and opportunities that undergraduate scholars can pursue. In an effort to give undergraduate scholars real-world, applied learning experiences, all Film Matters feature submissions will undergo a peer review process (typically managed by undergraduate film and media students).

We strive for inclusivity in all areas of our operations. Broadly speaking, we seek to empower undergraduates from diverse backgrounds (race, ethnicity, gender/gender identity/gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, and economic status are our primary concerns), engaging our mentors/editors from varied experiences of academia (community colleges, private colleges, public universities, tenure track, non-tenure track, adjunct, graduate student, etc.). If you want to write or edit for us, we want to work with you. We feel, however, during these changemaking times, that it is particularly important to state that Black Lives Matter.