Academic Filmmaking in the New Humanities

The article provides an introduction to the first of a pair of special issues devoted to academic filmmaking, which, apart from this introduction, contains eleven prose articles. The article describes the variety of filmmaking practice in the academy, and some of the venues where examples of the practice are published or exhibited. It gestures at the multiple origins of academic filmmaking with special reference to the tradition of the essay film, and finds a key reflexive moment in Eric S. Faden’s (prose) “Manifesto for Critical Media” (2008), which articulated the challenge of using “image, voice, pacing, text, sound, music, montage, rhythm” to create scholarly audiovisual work. The introduction goes on to set out the aims for the special issues, and to describe the contents of the eleven articles in the first issue and some of the features, concerns or approaches shared between and across those contents. The eleven articles deal with themes raging from academic filmmaking as activism, to vulnerability and embodiment, to the challenges of production and publishing, and of institutional legitimization.