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Victoria Adukwei Bulley
VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and has held artistic residencies internationally in the US, Brazil and at the V&A Museum in London. A Complete Works and Instituto Sacatar fellow, her pamphlet Girl B (Akashic) forms part of the 2017 New-Generation African Poets series. She is a doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is the recipient of a Technē studentship for doctoral research in Creative Writing.

Articles Available Online


On Water

Essay

Issue No. 29

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Essay

Issue No. 29

& we say to her what have you done with our kin that you swallowed? & she says that was ages ago, you’ve drunk...

Interview

Issue No. 26

Interview with Saidiya Hartman

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Interview

Issue No. 26

The first time I encountered Saidiya Hartman, she was a voice in salt., an award-winning play by artist and...

In his 1992 essay ‘In Search of the Centaur’, the writer and critic Phillip Lopate described the essay-film as ‘a cinematic genre that barely exists’ He had a point: essay-films were scarce But Lopate made them seem even rarer than they were by his self-confessed fastidiousness as to what may rightly be called an essay-film, arguing that he finds the term, as others use it, too inclusive By his own admission, he sets the bar high, and recognises the difficulty of making ‘his idea of’ an essay-film But what is that?   All are agreed that the essay-film is a variant of documentary It uses original or existing footage, or both, in combination with a narrative voice that may be spoken or takes the shape of intertitles Cross-examination of the visual material by the voice and vice-versa is the distinguishing mark of the essay-film Like the written essay, it pursues a line of argument, a thought or idea; tests it, tries it on for size The essay-film interests itself in this process; is as much concerned with the manner of finding out as with the thing discovered – if anything is discovered Where the conventional documentary tilts at detachment or fashions its illusion, the essay-film has no business with impartiality: the spectator is made the film-maker’s familiar, and is given partial responsibility for fleshing out the interface between commentary and image   Lopate cannot conceive of an essay-film that does not deploy text in some form or other (written or spoken) Others ardently waive the genre’s debt to its literary senior These latter are adamant that the essay-film has outgrown its writerly heredity, that images may interrogate images as well as any words might The question with which Lopate closes his seminal essay is predicated on the adverse persuasion that text and picture must play equal part in the essay-film: ‘Will there ever be a way to join word and image together on screen so that they accurately reflect their initial participation in the arrival of a thought, instead of merely seeming mechanically linked, with one predominating over or fetched to illustrate the other?’   Lopate’s essay was by no means the last word

Contributor

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Contributor

October 2018

VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and...

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s ‘Heads of the Colored People’

Book Review

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Book Review

October 2018

Somewhere on the internet is a two-hour video of a lecture by the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, author of the short story...

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poetry

Issue No. 2

Letter to Jim Jarmusch [Broken Flowers]

Jon Thompson

poetry

Issue No. 2

What they’ll know of us in future years: the large interiors of our suburban homes were designed by others...

Essay

March 2019

Dreaming Reasonably: on Jenny George

Rachael Allen

Essay

March 2019

In Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror film The Descent, a group of women go spelunking and become trapped deep underground...

fiction

April 2012

They Told the Story from the Lighthouse

Chimene Suleyman

fiction

April 2012

I found Margate watching the sea. And I walked the streets thinking they had left it sometime in the...

 

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