This article addresses the way noise has been deployed within the sonic practice of French filmmaker Arnaud des Pallières in his film Adieu (2004). According to des Pallières, the politics of his filmmaking resides in the way his films reflect on experiences of which he has no lived experience. With Adieu, des Pallières considers the experience of migration purposefully obliquely. The article examines how this indirect approach is achieved through noise that is harnessed to a political agenda, one that implicates spectators through the film’s own indirect address to listening in spectatorship. Through asynchronicity, the film tunes us to noises that continually arrive from an elsewhere, annoying our sense of place and integrating us within a world of strangers. Through a close reading of this film’s use of migratory noise, feedback and soundscaping, I show how des Pallières’ rigorous and singular approach to noise in Adieu is uniquely placed to open up questions about how we relate to sound and cinema’s address to listening in spectatorship. This consideration offers wider possibilities for understanding how cinema instigates more distant and radical forms of encounter through noise.

Elizabeth Ezra’s book expertly charts the gradual reshaping of once-established borders that exist between people and things. As objects have begun to develop a life of their own, people have become “prosthetically engaged with life beyond the human” (1). The moving global mass of communication has muddied the distinction between centre and periphery. Consumers ingest objects unabated, while sexual and racial objectification reduces “others” to objects of gratification, fascination and labour. By exploring how people relate to objects, it becomes clear how technology supplants human agency within a global economy. Consequently, for Ezra, globalisation becomes an ideal space in which to contemplate the fusion of technology and economics. Building on Jacques Derrida’s conception of “supplementation” through Bernard Stiegler’s notion of “prosthesis”, Ezra elucidates how objects, once designed as tools to complete people, have, in earnest, led to a paradoxical sense of deficiency. The human venture, to move beyond the national and onto the global, has exploited the in-built contradiction of the supplementary, which lends itself to the posthuman and the demarcation of any defining line in splitting the virtual from the actual. This book clearly illustrates how cinema is perfectly placed to trace the dehumanisation of the subject through the hyperconsumption of objects, “which begins as the supplementation of people by objects and results in the supplementation of objects by people” (8).

This issue of Alphaville centres on the work of displaced and exiled filmmakers and directors committed to challenging border violence. This is achieved in part through the work of the academic contributions in the main section, but perhaps most pertinently through the contributions of filmmakers in the two Dossiers. The editorial team in this issue practiced a form of borderless collegiality by imagining a scholarly publication that fosters empowering dialogues between academics, artists, activists and those with lived experience; debordering here begins with the vision of the editorial team and extends into the selection and configuration of contributions.

Over the past ten years, Mila Ganeva has written two books in the series Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual published by Camden House. Both studies map German visual culture in relation to female agency, starting with the Weimar years, 1918–1933, in the first book, and moving on to what the Germans call the “long decade”, stretching from 1939–1955, in the second. In the latter volume, Ganeva focuses on film and fashion from the perspective of German female consumers and spectators, and it is immediately obvious that her engagement with cinema is presented without any auxiliary theoretical discussion regarding the remits of either mass culture or visual studies. In particular, the study would have benefitted from a short introduction of the “rubble film” (films set in a city or landscape of ruins), preferably based on Robert Shandley’s study, which is also referenced in the book’s bibliography. I find it particularly odd that she does not link her own study more intimately with Hester Baer’s work on the topic in order to map out her subject matter for the reader, in the introductory chapter (Dismantling; “Film”).

The five-minute film Mouth of a Shark (Isobel Blomfield, 2018) conveys a young woman’s experiences and precarious situation while she awaits an outcome on her refugee status determination in Australia. Aasiya (pseudonym) lives in community detention. Her interest in creating the film stemmed from her own acknowledgement that she had a platform as a young, literate asylum seeker woman with a “strong” story, and was therefore in a position to portray asylum seekers in a positive light. However, she cannot be identified in the film, even though it depicts her story, due to concerns over safety and her claim for asylum. We use this example to illustrate issues of anonymity and representation, and suggest strategies in line with our commitment to avoid depersonalising tropes in filmmaking. While we are committed to ensuring that people from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds exercise agency in filmmaking, protecting Aasiya’s identity had to prevail. We wanted to avoid depersonalising tropes, and instead devised filming strategies that were more respectful of the protagonist and, within the constraint of anonymity, ensured that Aasiya could still represent her story in meaningful ways. We argue for an ethical model that reconciles the need for both anonymity and representation in filmmaking, especially through collaborative editing.

Representing stories through documentary film can offer a means to convey multilayered and sensory accounts of the lived experiences of people in extreme transition, especially former refugees. However, along with the potential of this medium comes the responsibility to engage with participants in an ethical and reciprocal manner. This article examines these prerequisites and applies them to two films about the experiences of people from refugee backgrounds in Australia. The first film, The Last Refuge: Food Stories from Myanmar to Coffs Harbour (2015), explores the Myanmar community, their sociocultural relationship to food and how this informs their identity. The second film, 3Es to Freedom (2017), documents a supported employment program for women from refugee backgrounds. Despite having different purposes and target audiences, the two films reinforced the importance of establishing informed and negotiated consent with marginalised people as the basis of all interactions and representations on film. Such negotiation seeks to minimise power imbalances and forms the ethical starting point for reflexive filmmaking practice that considers the filmmakers’ and participants’ intentions, and that promotes a heightened awareness of how knowledge is created through image-making.

wrote to Vivien Leigh, just as she commenced her career on stage and screen, to observe that her striking beauty might "always be more hindrance than help to your acting. Almost incidentally either it blinds the critical faculty or produces a perverse determination to pick holes" (Strachan xviii). His warning would prove prescient: it is Leigh's beauty-regarded as exotic and, with the knowledge of her mental and physical health problems, "fragile"-that still frames much of the biographical and critical discussion of her performances and of her stardom.

Defining the boundaries of practice-based and practice-led PhD programmes is often confusing. Undoubtedly, doctoral programmes are challenging, and feelings of “imposter syndrome” and anxiety tend to go hand in hand with such intense levels of study. Adding an individual’s arts practice on to this furthers the feeling of uncertainty. In this paper, I explore how notions of practice-based and practice-led research can be interpreted differently. I discuss my personal experiences as an artist navigating the field of academia and how I used the Practice-as-Research model within my research.

Rayna Denison’s comprehensive study Anime: A Critical Introduction constitutes an innovative and compelling approach to the study of anime not simply as a “genre”, but as a continuously shifting set of texts influenced by context and by the constant exchanges at work between the practices of the industry, the global communities of fans and the academic discourse around it. In Denison’s own words the subject of her book is “not just anime, but the ways in which anime is talked about by those enabling its creation and watching over its global dispersal—including industry professionals and academics, but also the trade presses, popular presses and fan communities supporting anime’s domestic and transnational life” (2). Starting with these premises, then, Anime: A Critical Introduction is not a study that simply focuses on the analysis of specific anime texts, but rather on the exploration of the primary sources cited above, with a privileged eye for places of popular debate rather than for the assertions of authoritative figures, such as anime directors, that tend to restrain debates on the meanings of anime instead of sparking further reflection.

The WHAT IF IT process is a unique concept development methodology that has been designed to facilitate the ideation of digital interactive narratives. While the production of narrative driven digital artefacts has been developing fast in the last fifteen years, very little research has been done on ideation processes, and no academic methodological evaluation has been shared to date. By sharing the results of a three-years-action research project where existing storytelling, design thinking and agile prototyping techniques have been mixed to create an innovative methodology, the aim of this article is to formulate a framework for interactive narrative development