film|minutes

Series editor: Bernd Herzogenrath (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main)

film|minutes is a book series in the short monograph format, with each volume of c. 25,000–40,000 words focused on one particular film. Volumes in the series cut up films into segments of exactly one minute and transform each minute into a fruitful, innovative tool for thinking with the film. Each volume works rigorously with the concept of “the minute” as a non-cinematic scale/quantity and a means to look awry, to zoom in on (dis)orderly fragments that do not necessarily respect the confinements of (good) cinematic form or meaning. As a critical practice, the focus on minutes causes disruptions and displacement that create novel connections and perspectives that help us uncover hidden traces and make it possible to see each film anew.

About the Series

Academic books about films more often than not are subordinate analyses that (mis)use the film to illustrate a thesis or theory. film|minutes, however, pushes authors to think with film from a decidedly film-philosophical perspective as a kind of practical aesthetics. By focusing on the simultaneously arbitrary and meaningful unit of “the minute,” volumes in this series allow films to become critical interlocutors that emerge as something more than the sum of their parts. The series acknowledges the contingent fantasy that every single minute is simultaneously complete in its own terms, and part of a larger whole. The merciless grid of the minute causes disruptions and displacements that create new connections and novel perspectives, making it possible to see each film anew.

film|minutes facilitates a playful, even joyful, engagement with the breadth of cinematic experiences and the forms that structure it, laying bare minutiae—for example, of sound, light, expression, color, affective resonances, and more that might otherwise go unnoticed—made visible through this mode of “slow screening” while never losing sight of the film as a whole. Such a delightfully eclectic approach to the minute as a series of varied and form-giving punctums can reveal the multiplicity of layers that, together, we call film. In this way, the minute becomes a code for unlocking a series of revelations about film not as an object of, but as a medium for, idiosyncratic ways of thinking. Authors are also encouraged to think creatively and experimentally with(in) the minutes of their films and are not tied to a linear presentation of the film.

Each book in film|minutes will focus on a single film and consist of as many short, critical vignettes of c. 300 words as the number of minutes of the film’s length. Films considered for inclusion in the series can come from any period in the history of global cinemas and may range across genres and production categories: from blockbuster Hollywood films to art-/grindhouse features, Bollywood musicals to South Korean dramas, 1970s exploitation to early silent film, indie auteur cinema to tentpole franchise entries—and everything in between. The average length of a manuscript about a typical c. ninety-minute film is expected to be c. 25,000 words, with the length of each volume tied to the length of the film under consideration.

Publish with film|minutes

If you have a project that might be a good fit for the film|minutes series, please reach out to the series editor, Bernd Herzogenrath (herzogenrath@em.uni-frankfurt.de), and to Lever Press’s acquiring editor, Sean Guynes (sean@leverpress.org), to describe your project.