Scott MacKenzie

After completing my PhD in Communications at McGill University, I went to Scotland to undertake a post-doctoral fellowship on minor national cinemas at the University of Glasgow. Before coming to Queen’s, I taught at universities in the UK and Canada.

My most recent research addresses global Arctic moving images cultures; film manifestos; process and handmade films; national and transnational identity in global cinemas; re-imagining Hollywood cinemas; and Situationist practices and moving image activism. My published books and articles reflect these interests. I have recently co-edited three books on Critical Arctic Studies. The first, Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (co-edited with Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Edinburgh University Press, 2015), is the first book to address the vast diversity of Arctic cinemas from a transnational perspective. With chapters on polar explorer films, silent cinema, documentaries, ethnographic and Indigenous film, gender and ecology, as well as Hollywood and the USSR’s uses and abuses of the Arctic, this book provides the first account of Arctic cinemas from 1898 to the present. The second volume, part of the Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History series, entitled Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene (co-edited with Lill-Ann Körber and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), offers a diverse and groundbreaking account of the intersections between modernities and environments in the circumpolar global North, foregrounding the Arctic as a critical space of modernity, where the past, present, and future of the planet’s environmental and political systems are projected and imagined. Investigating the Arctic region as a privileged site of modernity, this book articulates the globally significant, but often overlooked, junctures between environmentalism and sustainability, Indigenous epistemologies and scientific rhetoric, and decolonization strategies and governmentality. The third volume, Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (co-edited with Lilya Kaganovsky and Anna Stenport, Indiana University Press, 2019), examines the global history in Arctic documentary moving images. The project culminates with the co-authored monograph New Arctic Cinemas: Media Sovereignty and the Climate (w/ Anna Stenport, University of California Press, 2023).

Other areas of research include Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (University of California Press, 2014), which is the first historical and theoretical study of film manifestos and their influence on film production, distribution and circulation from the cinema’s emergence to the present. The book brings together approximately 175 key manifestoes of the last 110 years, alongside many little-known manifestoes that have nevertheless served to challenge and re-imagine cinema aesthetics, politics, distribution, production and exhibition. To this end, the book includes the major Europeans manifestos, Third Cinema political manifestos, those of the post-colonial nation-state independence movements and those of avant-garde filmmakers and writers. The book also includes thematic sections addressing documentary cinema, Hollywood, feminist and queer film cultures, film archives, aesthetics and digital cinemas and includes texts that have been traditionally left out of the canon of film manifestoes, such as the Motion Picture Production Code. Selected reviews can be found here, here, and here.

My forthcoming monograph Guy Debord: The Cinema, too, Must Be Destroyed (Manchester University Press) provides the first English-language account of Debord’s films, their importance to French cinema (especially to the French avant-garde, la nouvelle vague, and to post-’68 cinema) and their role in the development of Dedord’s concepts of psychogéographie, la dérive, détournement, and la société du spectacle. In this first English language account of Debord’s filmmaking career, I examine each of his six films, their relationship to the key avant-garde movements of the time (Letterist and Situationist practices, la nouvelle vague, post-’68 cinéma militant) in order to reclaim Debord’s importance as a filmmaker, the relevance of his cinematic practices to his Situationist thought and his central, yet nevertheless neglected, position in French cinema history more generally.

With Brenda Longfellow and Thomas Waugh, I co-edited The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), an anthology on the film, video, digital and activist works of queer filmmaker and agent provocateur John Greyson. My chapter addresses, in part, Greyson’s use of digital media as a means of détournement.

Earlier works on transnational and European cinemas include an anthology I co-edited on Dogme ‘95, with Mette Hjort, entitled Purity and Provocation (BFI, 2003), which considers Dogme in relation to national and transnational cinemas in light of globalisation. Cinema and Nation (Routledge, 2000), a central text in the field on cinema and national identity, co-edited with Mette Hjort, also addresses the way in which minor, ‘small’, national, alternative and oppositional cinemas can be understood through the emerging discourses of transnationalism, globalisation, multiculturalism and post-colonialism. My first monograph was entitled Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (Manchester University Press, 2004) which examines the role played by publicness and the public sphere in relation to contested notions of national identity in Québec cinema from its inception in the 1910s to the cinema of Denys Arcand and Robert Lepage.

My on-going engagement with experimental media includes Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), co-edited with Janine Marchessault.  Over the last twenty years, the significant resurgence of handmade film and the development of the concept of process cinema can be understood as a response in part to the rise of the digital, and the subsequent transformation of the analogue into an artist’s medium. Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age traces out the neglected history of handmade and hand processed film in historical and contemporary contexts, and from a global, transnational perspective. As a documentary film and media scholar, I have also recently published Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), co-edited with Gunnar Iversen, in which, by taking a global approach to the rockumentary, we contend that part of the disparagement of the rockumentary in documentary studies come from the portmanteau nature of the term. The strong claim we are making in the book is that ‘rock’ (and its pop cultural status) overdetermines one’s understanding of the genre, and that the rockumentary has as much -- and, at times, more -- to say about gender, politics, cultural appropriation, race, class, postmodernism, intersectionality, colonialism, cultural history, geopolitics, the epistemology of the image and the representation of the real as the documentary writ large does.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books:

Guy Debord: The Cinema, too, Must Be Destroyed (forthcoming, Manchester University Press).

New Arctic Cinemas: Media Sovereignty and Climate Crisis (co-author, w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport, University of California Press, 2023).

Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury (co-editor, w/ Gunnar Iversen, Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age (co-editor, w/ Janine Marchessault, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).

Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (co-editor, w/ Lilya Kaganovsky and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Indiana University Press, 2019).

Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene (co-editor, w/ Lill-Ann Körber and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (co-editor, w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (University of California Press, 2014; paperback 2021).

The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (co-editor, w/ Brenda Longfellow and Thomas Waugh, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).

Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).

Purity and Provocation: Dogma ‘95 (co-editor, w/ Mette Hjort, British Film Institute, 2003).

Cinema and Nation (co-editor, w/ Mette Hjort, Routledge, 2000).

Journals:

Public: Art/Culture/Ideas (co-editor w/ Christine Davis), “The End” 48 (2013).

Chapters in Books:

“Unframing The Unreal: Space and Spacelessness in Expanded Animation” (w/ Emily Pelstring) in Franziska Bruckner and Alla Gadassik, eds. Encyclopedia of Animation Studies Vol. II: Techniques, Processes, Environments (forthcoming, London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

“The Thriller that Came in From the Cold: Espionage, Geopolitics, Propaganda, and East-West Tension Ingmar Bergman’s This Can’t Happen Here” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), in Daniel Humphrey and Hamish Ford, eds., Companion to Ingmar Bergman (forthcoming, London: Wiley Blackwell, 2023).

“The Seal in Arctic Documentary and Global Media since the 1950s: Perspectives on Indigenous Sovereignty, Gendered Geopolitics, and the European Union’s Seal Regime” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), in Johannes Ricquet, ed. The Poetics and Politics of Contemporary Arctic Geographies (forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2023).

“Arctic Comic Books: Mapping Arctic Geographies Panel by Panel” (w/ Aviaq Fleischer, Johannes Riquet, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport) in Johannes Ricquet, ed. The Poetics and Politics of Contemporary Arctic Geographies (forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2023).

“The Craig Baldwin Educational Film Catalog” in Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta, eds. Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! (San Francisco: San Francisco Cinematheque, forthcoming 2023).

“False Endings” in Gunnar Iversen and Scott MacKenzie, eds. Mapping the Rockumentary: Images and Sounds of Fury (Edinburgh University Press, 2021): 64-81.

“Introduction: Images of Sound and Fury” (w/ Gunnar Iversen), in Gunnar Iversen and Scott MacKenzie, eds. Mapping the Rockumentary: Images and Sounds of Fury (Edinburgh University Press, 2021): 1-17.

“Eine Alternative filmgeschichte der nördlichen Polargebiete/An Alternative Cinematic History of the Circumpolar North” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport) in Dehlia Hannah, ed. Julian Charrière: Towards No Earthly Pole (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2020): 205-216.

“The Diasporic Cinemas of Ingrid Bergman” in Arne Lunde and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, eds. Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019): 126-140.

“‘Let’s Get a Swede!’: Peter Goldmann, The Beatles, and the Origins of Music Video” in Arne Lunde and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, eds. Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019): 76-84.

“Introduction: Process Cinema and Handmade Films” (w/ Janine Marchessault), in Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault, eds., Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019): 1-18.

“Tearing up the Screen: Pia Arke’s Post-Colonial Processes” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), in Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault, eds., Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019): 390-406.

“The Polarities and Hybridities of Arctic Cinemas” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), in Janine Marchessault and Will Straw, eds. The Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019): 125-146.

“Introduction: What is the Documentary Ethos and Why Does it Matter for the Arctic?” (w/ Lilya Kaganovsky and Anna Westerstahl Stenport), in Lilya Kaganovsky, Scott MacKenzie, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, eds. Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019): 1-28.

“Arctic Expressionism and the Poetic Documentary: The Northern Films of Arne Sucksdorff” in Lilya Kaganovsky, Scott MacKenzie, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, eds. Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019): 92-113.

“北极情节剧: 跨过北方的边境和女性的自我重新定位” (‘The Melodramatic Arctic: Northern Border Crossings and Women’s Self-Repositioning’, w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport) in Chuanfa Wan, ed. 媒体生态研究项目语境下的性别化表演研究新论 (Beijing: China Film Press, 2018): 58-65.

“The Cadaver’s Pulse: Cinema and the Modern Prometheus” in Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts, eds. Global Frankenstein (London: Palgrave, 2018): 149-166.

 “Méliès’ Dream Film and Strindberg’s Dream Play: Compressing Time and Space” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), in Anna Westerståhl Stenport, Eszter Szalczer, and Jonathan Schroeder, eds. August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text, and Theatre (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018): 95-112.

“Introduction: Arctic Modernities, Environmental Politics, and the Era of the Anthropocene” (w/ Lill-Ann Körber and Anna Westerstahl Stenport), in Lill-Ann Körber, Scott MacKenzie, and Anna Westerståhl Stenport, eds. Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 1-20.

“Films into Uniform: Dogma 95 and the Last New Wave,” in Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist, eds. Blackwell’s Companion to Nordic Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017): 417-235.

“Introduction: What Are Arctic Cinemas?” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport) in Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport, eds. Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (Edinburgh University Press, 2015): 1-28.

“The Creative Treatment of Indigeneity: Nanook as the North” in Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, eds. Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (Edinburgh University Press, 2014): 201-214.

“De Do Do Do, De Da Da Dadaism: Popular Culture and the Avant-Garde,” in Toby Miller, ed. The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture (Routledge, 2015): 175-186.

“‘Mental Prophylaxis’: Crawley Films, McGraw-Hill Educational Films and Orphan Cinema” in Gerda Cammaer and Zoë Druick, eds. Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014): 59-72.

“‘An Invention Without a Future’: Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures” in Scott MacKenzie, ed. Film Manifestoes and Global Cinema Cultures (University of California Press, 2014): 1-9.

“What is a Manifesto Film?” in Scott MacKenzie, ed. Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (University of California Press, 2014): 625-628.

“‘An Arrow Not a Target’: Film Process and Processing at the Independent Imaging Retreat” in Mette Hjort, ed. The Education of the Filmmaker: Views From Around the World (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013): 169-184.

“And Now for Something Completely Dissident: The ‘Parodic Visual’ and ‘Archival Necrology’ of John Greyson,” in Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh, eds. The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013): 149-168.

“Introduction: The Perils of Pedagogy” (with Brenda Longfellow and Thomas Waugh), in Brenda Longfellow, Scott MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh, eds. The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013): 3-15.

“Le Mouton noir: Vidéographe and the Legacy of Société nouvelle” in Michael Baker, Thomas Waugh and Erza Winston, eds. Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010): 136-148.

“Société nouvelle: The Challenge for Change in the Alternative Public Sphere” in Michael Baker, Thomas Waugh and Erza Winston, eds. Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010) 325-336.

“On Watching and Turning Away: Ono’s Rape, cinéma direct Aesthetics and the Genealogy of cinéma brut” in Dominique Russell, ed. Rape in Art Cinema (Continuum, 2010): 159-170.

“From Cinema to History: Kracauer’s Shifting Philosophical Historiography” in Temenuga Trifonova, ed. European Film Theory (Routledge, 2008): 165-179.

“A Screen of One’s Own: Early Cinema in Québec and the Public Sphere, 1906-1928” in Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn, eds. Screening World Cinemas: A Screen Reader (Routledge, 2006): 51-71.

“Manifest Destinies: Dogma ‘95 and the Future of the Film Manifesto” in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds. Purity and Provocation: Dogma ‘95 (BFI, 2003): 47-58.

“Mimetic Nationhood: Ethnography and the National” in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds. Cinema and Nation (Routledge, 2000): 239-257.

Articles:

“Tracing the Lost Films of the Fifth Thule Expedition in Alaska” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), Alaska Journal of Anthropology 19.1/2 (2021): 160-171.

“An Alternative History of the Arctic: The Origins of Ethnographic Filmmaking, The Fifth Thule Expedition, and Indigenous Cinema” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), Visual Anthropology Review 36.1 (2020): 137-162.

“Visualizing Climate Change in The Arctic and Beyond: Participatory Media and The United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP), and Interactive Indigenous Arctic Media” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), Journal of Environmental Media 1.1 (2019): 79-99.

“Anthony Bourdain’s MacGuffin: Dialogical Politics, the Middle East, and Cooking Shows” Cinéphile 13.1 (2019): 4-10.

“Kjærlighet, Klasse og Rock’n’Roll: Seksualpolitikk og det brittiske klassesystemet i Lambert and Stamp” Z filmtidsskrift 138 (2017): 54-63.

“Sumé, Grønland og den sosialhistoriske rockumentaren” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), Z filmtidsskrift 138 (2017): 28-39.

“Action, Avatar, Ecology, and Empire: Databases, Digitality, Death, and Gaming in Werner Herzog’s Arctic” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Garrett Traylor), The Moving Image 16.2 (2017): 45-71.

“Contemporary Experimental Feminist Sámi Documentary: The First Person Politics of Liselotte Wajstedt and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 6.2 (2016): 169-182.

“Arnait Video Productions: Inuit Women’s Collective Filmmaking, Coalitional Politics, and a Globalized Arctic” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 93 (31.3) (2016): 153-163.

“‘I Believe in Ketchup!’: Girlhood, Punk, and Moodysson’s We are the Best!” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), Scadinavica 53.1 (2014): 73-88.

“All That’s Frozen Melts into Air: Arctic Cinemas at the End of the World” (w/ Anna Westerstahl Stenport), Public: Art/Culture/Ideas 48 (2013): 81-91.

“It’s Not Always That Black and White: Universalism, Feminism and the Monochromatic Worldview of Polytechnique“ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 22.1 (2013): 66-85.

“Digitality and Détournement: John Greyson’s BDS Videos and 14.3 Seconds” Cinéaction 86 (2012): 50-51.

“Barns, Brits and Birthrights: Phil Hoffman’s All Fall Down“ POV Magazine 76 (2009): 35-39.

“Atrocities at the Door: Peter Brook’s Tell Me Lies, Images of Terror and Brechtian Aesthetics“ Cinéaction 76 (2009): 54-62.

“‘Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible’, or, A Secret History of Film Manifestoes“ INCITE!: Journal of Experimental Media and Radical Aesthetics 1 (Fall 2008-Spring 2009): 41-44.

“The Horror, Piglet, the Horror: Found Footage, Mash-ups, AMVs, the avant-garde, and the Strange Case of Apocalypse Pooh“ Cinéaction72 (2007): 8-15.

• Translated into Czech as, “Ta hrůza! Prasátko, ta hrůza! Found Footage, Mash-Up, AMV, avantgarda a zvláštní případ Apokalypsy Pú“ 25fps 53 (2012).

“Soviet Expansionism: Fédor Ozep’s Transnational Cinema“ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 12.1 (2003): 93-104.

“Baise-moi, Feminist Cinemas and the Censorship Controversy” Screen 43.3 (2002): 315-324.

“Direct Dogma: Film Manifestos and the fin du siècle“ p.o.v.: A Danish Journal of Film Studies 10 (2000): 159-170.

• Translated in Portuguese as “Dogma direto: manifestos cinematográphicos e o fin de siècle” in Julio Bezerra and Rafael Bezerra, eds. Dogma 95 (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil, 2015): 38-48.

“Lists and Chain Letters: Ethnic Cleansing, Holocaust Allegories and the Limits of Representation“ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 9.2 (2000): 23-42.

“A Screen of One’s Own: Early Cinema in Québec and the Public Sphere, 1906-1928” Screen 41.2 (2000): 183-202.

“Closing Arias: Operatic Montage in the Closing Sequences of the Trilogies of Leone and Coppola“ p.o.v.: A Danish Journal of Film Studies 6 (1998): 109-124.

“Flowers in the Dustbin: Termite Culture and Detritus Cinema” Cinéaction 47 (1998): 24-29.

“The Missing Mythology: Barthes in Québec“ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 6.2 (1997): 65-74.

“A Line in the Snow: Visualizing Borders Imaginary and Real“ Public: Art/Culture/Ideas 14 (1996): 56-65.