This tenth issue marks the celebration of the fourth anniversary of Tecmerin. Journal of Audiovisual Essays. Since 2018, this project has published more than 60 video essays, with a great diversity of authors from around twenty different countries. To celebrate this milestone, the usual sections (Video Essays, From the Archive, Student Showcase) are complemented with a monograph entitled “Women in Contemporary Media,” promoted by the University Institute of Spanish Cinema of the Carlos III University of Madrid and coordinated by Ana Mejón, Elena Oroz and Asier Gil Vázquez (UC3M).

In the Video Essays section, Maria Hoffman compares the Hollywood film The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) with the little-known original German film, The Trapp Family (Wolfgang Liebeneier, 1956) in her essay “Maria’s Maria”. Secondly, “Audiovisual Consumption in the 21st Century: Critical Factors in Scientific Dissemination” by Almudena Muñoz Gallego and Suelayne Cris M. de Sousa, questions the scarcity of science-related contents in contemporary audiovisual programming. Finally, Víctor Santos López explores the material dimension of cinema with his work “The Matter that Composes Your Memory. An Essay on Intimacy, Media and Remembrance,” specifically in the context of the Super-8 film format. While the first and third works are fundamentally experimental pieces, the second audiovisual essay is a detailed study of a pressing problem in our current mediascape.

Like its cinema, feminist film theory has been evolving and raising new questions from which to challenge the ways of making and thinking about the images that surround us. This issue’s monograph looks at “Women in contemporary media.” The Brazilian documentary filmmaker Helena Solberg, whose filmography approaches feminisms from an intersectional point of view, states in an interview that the rebirth of the movement “is gaining humanist contours, assuming guidelines that go beyond the question of equality between men and women: gender struggles, racial issues, and socio-environmental development, among others.” These words are in line with the ideas developed at the International Conference “Women and Cinema in Ibero-America: politics, representations, histories, intersectionalities,” held at the Carlos III University of Madrid in September 2022. Following this meeting, this monograph brings together disparate and interdisciplinary views within the field of film and women’s studies, which seek to go beyond classical formulations.

The entry of women into film industries and cultures goes beyond statistics and figures. From the plurality of individual and collective experiences, new perspectives are opening up from which to think about film and society, where the contribution of women means looking in directions that scholarship has not always acknowledged. Thus, the essay “Three ways to dine well” by Alison Peirse, explores the meanings of food in horror films, questions notions of classical authorship and Eurocentric visions, giving visibility to the work of professionals from different trades and disparate geographical origins. Similarly, aiming to revisit and reshape the contribution of women within creative fields that go beyond directing, Carmen Ciller and Irene Azuaga, in their work “L’unique. Maria Casarès. 1922-2022,” bring to the fore the figure of this Galician actress, exiled in France after the civil war, to reflect on the filmic character of the free woman she composed on the big screen. Next, the piece “Deconstructing the Construction: The Female Images in Chinese Detective Films, 2010-2020” by Ying-Hsiu Chou also gives voice to actresses in order to question tensions of gender and race in the female representations of detective films produced in China. Genre is also the space from which to rewrite life narratives, as Rob Stone explores in the trilogy of video essays “Philosophical Frameworks and Feminist Praxes in Lady Bird” (Gerwig, 2017), where questions of female self-determination and mother-daughter relations (tropes uncommon in coming-of-age cinema) are explored, This dossier closes with “From one shore to the other”, where Valentín Vía Vázquez uses the liminal space of the shore to explore the connections between filmmakers from different geographies on both sides of the Atlantic, breaking away with national conceptualizations of (women’s) cinema. 

Finally, the section From the Archive, curated by Elena Oroz (UC3M) focuses on The Emerging Woman (1974), directed by the Women’s Film Project, a collective organised by Helena Solberg, to examine how this compilation documentary – a practice that has received less attention than found footage – contains important doses of reflexivity linked to a feminist intervention on the archive and a historiographical interrogation from a gender perspective. 

With this diverse issue, the team of Tecmerin. Journal of Audiovisual Essays thanks all the video essayists who have placed their trust in this academic project during these first four years, as well as those who assiduously view the published video essays and collaborate in the review process.