About Offscreen
Offscreen has been online since 1997, along with its French language sister journal Hors Champ. Based in Montréal, Offscreen is a wide-ranging film journal that covers film festivals, retrospectives, film forums, and both popular and more academic events. Part of our mandate is to cover the Montreal film scene, but within an international context. The scope of its content, and the type of material featured and promoted in Offscreen can be summarized as follows:
- personal and independent film above big budget, formulaic film
- the under-represented (young, up and coming filmmakers)
- films with creative design and broad social commitment
- local and Canadian films/filmmakers
- Asian and alternative cinemas (horror, exploitation, esoteric,
experimental, documentary, etc.)
Unlike most online journals that offer the brief review format, Offscreen features extensive interviews, in-depth festival coverage, and lengthy, well-researched essays. The latter is in line with the guiding editorial policy
at Offscreen, which is to allow for the flexibility to feature rigorous, well-researched texts alongside material that does not fit into traditional scholarly formats (director interviews, film festival reports, DVD reviews, etc.).
In short, our goal is to produce intelligent, thoughtful, and combative film criticism, analysis, discussion, and theory. We are driven to this end because we feel strongly that, within today’s image saturated info-entertainment landscape, cinema needs to be rigorously discussed in order to continue being an important voice of cultural and artistic expression well into the 21st century.
Offscreen is edited and maintained by Donato Totaro, Ph.D, who has also been a film studies lecturer at Concordia University since 1990. Through the years Offscreen has been fortunate to establish a core group of fine writers who have contributed significantly to the development of the journal with consistently fine texts. They include: Peter Rist (Associate Professor in Film Studies, Ph.D), Randolph Jordan (MA, Ph.D Candidate), Roberto Curti (freelance writer based in Italy), David Hanley, Elaine Lennon (Film Historian, PhD), and Daniel Garrett (freelance writer based in New York city). With luck, this group will continue to grow.
For copyright purposes, Offscreen has an ISSN number of 1712-9559.
The use of visual material (photographs or film stills) which are not under the copyright of the author or credited photographer falls under the Canadian Copyright Act, RSC 1985, c C-42, under the Exception of Fair Dealing for the purpose of criticism or review.