Apparatus Newsletter 2022
Dear Readers and Authors,
The year 2022 was a particularly difficult one for our region. Russia’s war against Ukraine is entering its eleventh month. Apparatus has continued its mission to be an unbiased scholarly forum dedicated to promoting the free and civil exchange of knowledge and ideas about film, media, and digital cultures in central and eastern Europe. We all hope that 2023 will bring peace to Ukraine!
Publications
We published two provocative issues in 2022.
No. 14 (2022-06-20, in progress): “Soviet Playtime: Architecture of Power and Profligacy in DAU, Edited by Philip Cavendish, Natascha Drubek, and Irina Schulzki
Cover design by Alexandre Zaezjev
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17892/app.2022.00014
The DAU issue includes a wide variety of voices (drawn from artists, critics, curators, and scholars) discussing the DAU phenomenon in different formats (essays, articles, and interviews with the directors and other creative personnel), presenting a veritable cornucopia of DAU criticism complemented by exclusive visual materials. The issue also gives voice to those co-creators who usually stay behind the scene of the film process. The common ground to these discussions is how the material environment shapes human behaviour and experience, and how power is exercised through historical reenactment and the wasteful economy of film production. Additionally, the issue contains the article “Russian Book Tube'' and five book reviews.
No. 15 (2022-11-15, in progress): “The Haunted Medium I: Moving Images in the Russian Empire”.
Edited by Rachel Morley, Natascha Drubek, Oksana Chefranova, and Denise J. Youngblood
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17892/app.2022.00015
This issue, the first of two parts, features articles seeking to reconfigure the topography of cinema at the end of the Russian Empire and to interrogate the routine assignment of “Russian” nationality to prominent producers, directors, screen writers, actors—ignoring frequently complex biographies. The issue also includes articles on “Rallies in Absentia in Quarantined Russia” and on Goran Marković’s pandemic film Variola vera (Yugoslavia, 1992), as well as an interview with five Ukrainian filmmakers discussing cinema in time of war. It introduces the “Groundworks” section, featuring biographies or genre-bending essays (like the travels of photojournalist Lisa Larsen in the USSR in 1956). There are also five book reviews. Part II will be published in issue 16, 2023.
Departures
The year 2022 marked changes in the editorial board and staff. Sadly, our longtime board member Vladimir Padunov (University of Pittsburgh, USA) died June 26, 2022; for an appreciation of his life see https://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus/announcement/view/48.
We also bid farewell to editors Adelheid Heftberger [Head of Film Access at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, Germany] and Mario Slugan (Queen Mary University of London, UK), with warm thanks for their service and many contributions to the journal’s success.
Profile: Introducing Irina Schulzki
Our publishing director, Irina Schulzki, is an indispensable member of our team. Our authors rely on her to shepherd their articles through the publication process, and our readers benefit from her many activities behind the scenes. It seems long overdue to introduce her properly!
Before assuming the important role of Publishing Director, Irina Schulzki was Apparatus Review Editor from 2015 to 2020. Irina studied Russian Literature, Linguistics, Ethnology, and Intercultural Communication (Perm State University, Russia), and received her Master's degree in East European Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany). She is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School Language & Literature (LMU Munich) and a research assistant at the University of Hagen (Germany). She has published book chapters and journal articles on film and gesture, fan fiction, theories of the comical, phenomenology and media, the prose of Mikhail Shishkin and the cinema of Kira Muratova; co-edited the volume Fictions / Realities. New Forms and Interactions (with Jörg von Brincken and Ute Gröbel, 2011); the special issue of Apparatus 5 (2017), titled Mise en geste. Studies of Gesture in Cinema (with Ana Hedberg Olenina), and Apparatus 14 (2022). Soviet Playtime: Architectures of Power and Profligacy in DAU (with Philip Cavendish and Natascha Drubek).
Other News
The print subscription journal Studies in Eastern European Cinema invited Apparatus to contribute a brief article about our activities. See Denise J. Youngblood (2022), “Journal Report: Apparatus,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 13, no. 3: 310-13.
This seems an appropriate place to remind our readers that, unlike most scholarly journals, Apparatus is Open Access, without a paywall. Our journal is free to readers, but that does not mean it is free of production costs. These costs are covered by grants, institutional subsidies, contributions and also by the modest Article Processing Charge (APC), which partially covers the high costs of producing articles, especially those with images. For more information, check out ‘Submission Preparation Checklist’. Under certain circumstances, the APC can be waived (with application to the editor-in-chief, Natascha Drubek). In 2022, we began to offer an Apparatus Community Contribution (ACC) programme for APC waivers.
Plans for 2023
As already indicated, part two of the “Haunted Medium” will appear in Issue 16. We have also issued a Call for Papers “Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen” for issue 17, which is going to be a collaborative publication with goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Cinema.
We are always interested in reader and author comments and ideas for future issues. These may be posted on our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/apparatusjournal) or emailed to us at journalapparatus@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter @ApparatusJourn
