‘In the Field’ is our virtual take on a talent campus — programs that many film festivals these days are implementing — with the aim of supporting young scholars and emerging writers. So please join us in welcoming our new authors, and in our efforts to champion these budding artists by reading their posts and joining the conversation. We welcome your comments and thoughts!
Without further ado, we give you our full roster of ‘In the Field’ correspondents:
Janine Gericke is a rabid proponent of film preservation and is currently working as a film preservation specialist with Premiere Pictures International. She has worked with Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Media Archives, SFMOMA, Pacific Film Archive, and Canyon Cinema. She received a BA in Film Studies from UNCW, and her Master’s in Library Science from SJSU. She loves silent film, cinema of the 1970s, and anything with zombies.
Brandon Konecny graduated from the Film Studies program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is a two-time scholarship recipient of the Fluor Scholarship Foundation and recently completed his honors thesis Images of Marginality: The Representation of Youth Subcultures in American Cinema, 1953-1994. He has also presented at the Visions Film Festival and Conference wherein he received the excellence in scholarship award. He frequently writes about film and researches such topics as postwar American avant-garde film, Eastern European cinema, Cinema Novo, Romanian New Wave, Israeli cinema, youth subcultures in film, and Cold War Era science fiction. He soon plans to attend law school and pursue a career in transactional entertainment law.
Sam Littman received his BFA in Film from Syracuse University where he was the film critic for The Daily Orange and co-host of a weekly film-centered radio talk show Yesterday’s Popcorn. Based on his academic achievements as an undergraduate he was one of two film students selected to attend the Sorkin in L.A. Learning Practicum (“Sorkin Week”), a week-long immersion into the film industry fully funded by SU Drama alum Aaron Sorkin. Currently a graduate student in the Film Studies program at Columbia University, he is writing his thesis on the long take as a reaction to the past in contemporary Romanian cinema and spent the last summer studying Romanian cinema in Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest. Recent academic publications include two articles in the July 2014 issue of Senses of Cinema. His research and otherwise purely cinephilic interests primarily lie in psychoanalytic theory, the evolution of transmedia storytelling and aesthetics, the work of Michael Mann and the art of the long take. His favorite directors are Nicholas Ray and Kelly Reichardt.
William Repass currently attends the MFA Creative Writing program at Hollins University, where he writes both poetry and prose. His interests include political aesthetics and representations of the body in various media. He particularly enjoys Experimental, Early Soviet, and Third Cinema.
Jude Warne earned her BA in Cinema Studies and Art History from New York University. She is currently earning her MA at NYU’s Draper Program of Humanities and Social Thought, with her thesis focusing on American characters dealing with disappointment in the works of Sherwood Anderson and Bruce Springsteen. She has written several reviews for Film Matters, Senses of Cinema, Journal of Popular Music & Society and Scope. She is also a contributing writer at The Vinyl District.