Editorial NECSUS, Spring 2025
by Martine Beugnet, Greg de Cuir Jr, Ilona Hongisto, Judith Keilbach, Skadi Loist, Toni Pape, Maria Velez Serna, and Andrea Virginás
We are proud to present to you the Spring 2025 issue of NECSUS. You will notice that this issue has a condensed format, focusing on a special dossier for the audiovisual essay section alongside the three reviews sections. As we announced in the editorial for the Autumn 2024_#Enough issue, the decision to publish an issue without full-length research articles was determined by the need to operate on a reduced budget. We felt it was better to maintain the level of care and support for a smaller number of articles than to compromise on quality or stretch the capacity of our team, including our section editors and external reviewers, any further. The question of sustainable funding for Diamond Open Access publishing continues to be actual and we encourage our readers to get involved in discussions and dedicated actions, both within NECS and also within your individual institutions, scholarly networks, and national policy frameworks.
A smaller issue allows us to spotlight some of the sections that have made NECSUS a pioneering and unique publication. NECSUS was one of the first academic journals to embrace videographic scholarship, and it has also been publishing festival reviews since its first issue in 2012. It is thus a particular delight to present the online premiere of a remarkable collection of videographic works that bring these two interests together. A special dossier, edited by Kevin B. Lee, presents the outputs and reflections from the Cinema Futures conference at Locarno Festival in 2024, expanding the remit of videographic research to the domain of film festival studies. With a range of formal strategies and preoccupations, the video essays engage with the site of the festival, offering a grounded, critical perspective on its temporary occupations and longer traces. The impossibly large question of ‘survival’ is never far off frame, but perhaps is best approached through the humility of these tentative, sometimes playful sketches.
The two articles in the festival review section address a different type of survival – festivals themselves, as they become established institutions that grapple with a continuous precarity. The founders of Melbourne Women in Film Festival reflect on the challenges of sustaining an expanding event while relying on volunteer labour and intermittent project funding. Questions of financial sustainability and labour are also central to Ezra Winton’s forthright analysis of recent developments with the Toronto-based documentary festival Hot Docs. This critique is informed by Winton’s broader research on the role of Hot Docs in the ‘commercialisation of documentary cinema’, and pays close attention to the controversies and scandals that characterised the 2024 edition. At moments of planetary crisis, the review argues, the compromises required by the commercial entanglements of the festival frustrate its potential to do something different: to enable and materialise solidarity, both locally and internationally.
The exhibition review section shows how artists and curators are facing this contemporary unease by dwelling on the entanglements between human and non-human domains. A conversation between artist and researcher Ofri Cnaani, curator Or Tshuva, and section editor Annet Dekker problematises a ‘politics of distance’ as a throughline between colonialism, artworld etiquette, and everyday technologies, and theorises the ‘digital afterlives of cultural objects’ destroyed by climate and political catastrophes. Climate change and mass extinction as more-than-human hyperobjects are also discussed in Eline Doodeman’s review of Björk’s multimedia installation at Centre Pompidou. Meanwhile, Lorenzo Lazzari’s reflection on the exhibition Radical Software, which traces the pre-internet history of women in computing and electronic arts, shows how the apparently inexorable path of technological progress is only one of the possible outcomes, as experimentation gets curtailed by social structures of gender and other exclusions.
This indeterminacy of technologies is also explored in Simone Dotto’s book review of the edited collection Tacit Cinematic Knowledge (available from the open access publisher Meson Press), which offers ‘new reasons to keep asking ourselves “where is cinema?”’. Dotto considers the flexible use of the term ‘cinematic’, which shifts in relation to changes in audiovisual practices and dispositives. Digitisation and the ascendance of streaming platforms is one such transformation, and it has also unsettled definitions of the ‘national’, as explained in Emmanuelle Ben Hadj’s review of Is it French?, an edited collection on audiovisual productions from France.
Across all sections, this issue shows the fluency of NECSUS as a space for informed, timely cultural critique from a range of disciplinary perspectives, positions, and styles. The Autumn 2025 issue will feature full-length research articles within the special section #Age. Meanwhile, we will continue to explore and advocate for sustainable models that align with our commitment to openness and equality. Join us, and if you would like to support our mission please reach out at this address → necsus.info@gmail.com