Contributor Guidelines

Offscreen welcomes unsolicited original (i.e. not published elsewhere) submissions, but strongly recommends all interested parties read the description of the journal and take some time to peruse the site to get a sense of the journal’s interests. Submissions should be emailed to the editor, Donato Totaro following the format guidelines below. It is advisable that you contact the editor with your proposal prior to submission. Offscreen frequently produces special thematic issues (see past issues for examples). If interested you may query the editor for information on upcoming special issues.

Format Guidelines

Your text should be formatted in either rich text format or in Microsoft Word format — or, if you’re familiar with Textile syntax, you may submit plain text documents formatted as Textile.

All film titles should be in italics and followed by the director and date, e.g., Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922). To speed up the coding process for book and film titles you can use the textile codes rather than Word formatting, which means setting titles off with a single underscore before and after the title Citizen Kane (without any space between letter and underscore mark). This will convert the title to italics. For quotation marks please set your Word formatting to type straight rather than curly quotes (this can be changed under File Options). For citing your bibliographic references please use the parenthetical author system with conventional brackets, e.g., “In deference to the time I invested, I’m including, at the end of this essay, a list of films I’d planned to include in the film canon” (Schrader 35). And then include a bibliography at the end citing full bibliographic information, e.g.:

Paul Schrader. “Canon Fodder.” Film Comment. September/October 2006, 33-49.

Use endnotes only for explanatory and digressive comments. Endnotes must be inputted manually in the body of the text with doubled square brackets, e.g, “One can not accuse Schrader of being unduly biased to American cinema, since over half (31 of 60) of the films are non-American. [[Although from a wholly international/global perspective, one can argue that 29 out of 60 films is still too much.]] In this case the sentence in double square brackets will appear as an end note at the end of the essay.

Any accompanying photos should be included separately, in JPG or PNG format at a maximum size of 1000 pixels wide, 72 dpi resolution. It is the author’s responsibility to procure rights for any photographs submitted.

Minimum length requirements are as follows: 1000 words for book/film/dvd reviews and festival reports, 2000 words for articles/essays.

Upon acceptance we will need a brief author bio (70-100 words) and a photograph (400 by 400 pixels in size) that will appear at the end of the article in the author byline. Presently, Offscreen is able to pay contributors a small stipend according to word length, with the maximum being $100.00 Canadian currency. This could change according to our budgetary status.