World Picture Journal: Olivier Assayas

While meandering alone in the outer precincts of the World Wide Web, surveying long stretches of benighted digital landscape like one of W.G. Sebald’s history-haunted narrators, I happened across an unusual new biannual publication: World Picture Journal.  The editors are Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland, professors at Oklahoma State University, and John David Rhodes, based at the University of Sussex. I’m not familiar with their work, but a few names on the editorial board immediately popped out at me: Marxist theorist Ernesto Laclau, Homeland novelist Sam Lipsyte, and “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essayist Laura Mulvey all play an advisory role at WPJ. Apart from that, details are hard to come by. There’s no mission statement on the Web site (although a conference announcement mentions the journal’s interest in “the intersection of political and aesthetic questions concerning cinema, visual art, and visual theory”), nor is there any indication whether this is a print or online-only review. Thanks to a link at Film-Philosophy, though, I learned that it is a free, open-access digital digest.

Why do I bring this to your attention? Because the quality and range of the essays on the site are impressive.