Assistant Professor
Global Arctic moving images cultures; film manifestos; process and handmade films; national and transnational identity in global cinemas; re-imagining Hollywood cinemas; and Situationist practice and moving image activism
E-mail: mackenzs@queensu.ca
Phone: 6135336000 ext. 78165
Office: Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts room 204
Office hours: TBA
Education
Ph.D. in Communications, McGill University
About
After completing his PhD in Communications at McGill University, Professor Mackenzie went to Scotland to undertake a post-doctoral fellowship on minor national cinemas at the University of Glasgow. Before coming to Queen's, he taught at universities in the UK (University of Glasgow,University of East Anglia, University of St Andrews) and then Canada (York, University of Toronto).
His 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 practice and moving image activism. His published books and articles reflect these interests. He recently co-edited, with Anna Westerståhl Stenport, Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), which is the first book to address the vast diversity of Northern circumpolar 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 a groundbreaking account of Arctic cinemas from 1898 to the present.
Professor MacKenzie also recently published Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (University of California Press in 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 and here.
He is also working on a book with Janine Marchessault entitled Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age. 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. The aim of Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age is to trace out the neglected history of handmade and hand processed film in historical and contemporary contexts, and from a global, transnational perspective.
Full profile available on Film and Media webpage.
Teaching
In 2015-16, Professor MacKenzie is teaching following course:
LLCU 326: Film in New Europe