HistoRy
Framework has a strong history. The journal began in England in 1974 and many of its early directions, at that time unprecedented, have become de rigueur in cinema and media studies today. It trail-blazed in its coverage of early film theory, new television studies and international cinema, at times devoting entire issues to the films of China, Vietnam, Britain, India, Latin America, and Australia as well as those of American independents. Its interviews with African, Latin American and Asian directors were revelatory in the exposure of their work. Framework’s reprints of the early twentieth-century essays of long neglected cinema theorists such as Dorothy Richardson and Ricciotto Canudo re-vitalized the genre of artistically minded criticism. Key editors during this period were Paul Willemen, Don Ranvaud and Richard Allen, and Framework’s writers were as diverse as Sunila Abeysekera, Rustom Bharucha, Serge Daney, Umberto Eco, Behrose Gandhy, Claire Johnson, Laura Mulvey, Meaghan Morris, Zusana M Pick, Ashish Rajadhyaska, Lesley Stern, Michelle Wallace, and Peter Wollen. Many film directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Coco Fusco, Kumar Shahani, Yousseff Chahine, Roberto Rosellini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini also contributed their opinions and writings to the journal. Framework’s publication lapsed in 1992 and was re-launched in 1998. by Drake Stutesman
on Framework
PAUL WILLEMEN
In the context of British film magazines, Framework occupies a transitional terrain. In retrospect, its function as a bridging discourse, already very present to the consciousness of a number of the people associated with the magazine, has become abundantly clear. The starting point of the bridging operation is fairly easy to establish: the magazine was one of the many film journals that emerged in the early seventies from the encounter between the university student generation of '68 and the radical sectors of British film culture....