This issue of Tecmerin. Journal of Audiovisual Essays includes six works that are formally and conceptually heterogeneous. First, in “Still Lives of Jeanne Dielman,” Viktoria Paranyuk approaches Chantal Akerman’s iconic film Jeanne Dielman by extracting its protagonist from the film’s audiovisual fabric, suggesting undercurrents of violence inscribed in the images of domesticity. “The Sacred Text: Adapting Bordwell’s Cinephilia” by Will DiGravio pays tribute to the recently deceased David Bordwell, proposing a videographic version/adaptation of the renowned scholar’s famous article on Rio Bravo. In “The Chilean Dictatorship on Screen: Nostalgia for the Light (2010) & No (2012),” Mariana Cariñena Machado, Paula Díaz Santos, and Gabriel Villaveces Galofre examine two works—Patricio Guzmán’s documentary and Pablo Larraín’s fictional work—that depict the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship from different perspectives. Meanwhile, Colleen Laird uses the complexities of the Japanese logographic character 家 (“home”), which titles her work, as a starting point to examine different visions of home in the work of various contemporary Japanese female directors. Antonio Villalba addresses the transition from classical to mannerist cinematic narrative through the study of the actor’s gesture in “Gazes into the Abyss.” He specifically focuses on Deborah Kerr’s performances in the films Separate Tables (1958), The Naked Edge (1966), and The Innocents (1961). Finally, “Dynamics of Sensemaking” is a multimodal piece that uses the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze and Cristóbal Escobar as tools for artistic practice and misosophic thinking.

Curated by Viktoria Paranyuk, along with our regular editors, this special, “Also Starring…” edition of the Screen Stars Dictionary, concentrates on lesser-known performers: background actors, character actors, stuntmen. “Also Starring…” brings to the fore their key contribution to the history of cinema in a variety of national film industries and production contexts, hoping to shine a light on these hard-working, talented, unsung actors that are so integral to the films we love. Wickham Flannagan delivers a piece celebrating the scene-stealing Tom Hollander; Paranyuk approaches the extensive career of Thelma Ritter, one of old Hollywood’s quintessential character actresses; Adnan Şahin focuses on the significant contributions of stuntman Dar Robinson; and both Maksim Selezniov and Irina Trocan take us on the journey of the colossal career of Hungarian actor László Szabó. In addition to the “Also Starring…” section, also included in this issue is Charlotte Crofts’s delightful piece on Cary Grant’s “Charm”. 

In “From the Archive”, Asier Gil Vázquez revisits the short film Eulalia, with which actress Inma de Santis made her debut as a director in 1985. Despite her brief career, cut short by a fatal accident at the age of thirty, Inma de Santis remains a fascinating figure due to her dual role as actress and filmmaker and her place in a new generation of female directors who began to make their mark in the early years of Spanish democracy,

Finally, in the “Student Showcase”, we present two projects. The first one, “La violencia en el cine coreano,’ by Natalia Benavent, Marta Castellanos, and Sandra Chavarrías, explores the prominence of an aesthetic of explicit violence in several key contemporary films from this Asian country. The second, ‘(d)eficiencia ficción,’ by Cynthia Cabañas, Iñaki Gómez, and Samuel de la Riva, examines how various Spanish filmmakers have used precariousness and lack of economic resources as creative tools in a variety of fiction films from the 1960s to the present.