“Exploring Film Seriality,” edited by Frank Krutnik and Kathleen Loock, has been published as a special issue of Film Studies journal. In it, six contributors examine diverse forms, processes, and contexts of film seriality from the 1910s to the contemporary period, outlining various approaches to a topic that is integral to cinema and other popular media: Ruth Mayer (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover) investigates the operative logic of mass-cultural seriality in the short films inspired by Winsor McCay’s newspaper comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend; Rob King (Columbia University) studies Robert Benchley’s “How to” short-film series with regard to the shifting media landscape and to the “populist seriality” that emerged as a key feature of the New Deal cultural climate; Frank Krutnik (University of Sussex) examines the status of the B-film series The Whistler (1944-1948) as transmedial adaptation and also locates it within a broader “pulp serialscape”; Scott Higgins (Wesleyan University) considers how the James Bond film series adapts and extends traditions established in earlier action-oriented film serials; focusing on the rise of the Hollywood sequel in the 1970s and 1980s, Kathleen Loock (Freie Universität Berlin) analyzes contemporary industrial and popular discourses on the sequel, sequelization, and film seriality; and Holly Chard (University of Brighton) discusses the shift in John Hughes’s production strategy in the 1990s from teen to family films, arguing that his serial production methods reveal a shrewd understanding of commercial strategies and shifting audience demands. 

Read more on the Film Studies website.