About CineAction

CineAction

CineAction is a Toronto-based film magazine with a Marxist orientation, published three times a year by an editorial collective. Founded in 1985 by members of the film department at Toronto's York University, it published 98 issues in print between 1985 and 2016 before moving online, where it continues at cineaction.ca. It carries the ISSN 0826-9866 in print and 2562-2528 on the web.

Overview

CineAction (originally styled CineACTION!) occupies a distinctive position in film publishing: a collectively edited journal of politically engaged film criticism, rooted in Marxist cultural theory but written to be accessible beyond the academy. Its editorial collective originally included the influential critic Robin Wood, who taught film studies at York University and made his home in Toronto. The magazine poses a theme for each issue, producing sustained critical dossiers rather than consumer reviews.

History

CineAction began publishing in the spring of 1985 — as CineACTION!, with an exclamation mark that was dropped from the logo with the 23rd issue. It was founded by members of York University's film department, with an editorial collective that included Robin Wood, Richard Lippe, Florence Jacobowitz, and others. Wood was among the most influential film critics writing in English: his books on Hitchcock, Hawks, and horror cinema, and his 1979 Toronto International Film Festival horror retrospective (mounted with Richard Lippe), had established him as a major critical voice.

The collective's lead editorial in the first issue set out the magazine's mission: to "provide, within the field of film criticism, alternatives to what is generally available," steering a course between journalistic reviewing — "the expression of personal opinions, within an entertainment format" — and academic criticism "detached from contemporary social realities and frequently inaccessible to the uninitiated." The first issue offered articles on films including A Matter of Time, Tell Me a Riddle, Death Watch, and The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, with contributors including Wood, Lippe, Florence Jacobowitz, Maureen Judge, Lori Spring, and Bryan Bruce (the filmmaker Bruce LaBruce).

Subsequent issues published the work of Douglas Pye, V. F. Perkins, Scott Forsyth, Tony French, Tony Williams, Edward Gallafent, Brad Stevens, Deborah Thomas, Andrew Britton, and scores more. The magazine reached its 70th issue in early 2007. The first 98 issues appeared in print from 1985 to 2016; CineAction introduced its inaugural online issue — issue 99, "Politics & Cinema" — in October 2018, and has since celebrated its 100th issue.

Content

Each issue of CineAction is organized around a theme, and its thematic history reads as a map of politically engaged film criticism: comedy, sexuality in cinema, the films of Martin Scorsese, Canadian film, teen films, Vietnam, interpretation, documentary, rethinking authorship, questions of value, modernism, and the relationship between cinema and history. The journal publishes long-form essays, interviews, and critical dossiers that bring Marxist and left cultural theory to bear on popular and art cinema alike.

The 100th-issue editor's note, by Florence Jacobowitz and Richard Lippe, reflects on the magazine's identity as a journal of criticism now spanning more than three decades — from its 1985 founding through its digital reinvention.

Coverage & Audience

CineAction's readership is the international community of film scholars, critics, students, and cinephiles interested in politically engaged criticism. Though rooted in Toronto's York University film culture, its contributors and readers span the English-speaking film-studies world. As a small-circulation journal of record for Marxist film criticism, its influence is measured in citations, syllabi, and critical debate rather than mass readership.

Ownership

CineAction is published by the CineAction Collective, based in Toronto, Ontario. It operates as an independent, collectively edited journal — a structure it has maintained since its 1985 founding by York University film-department members.

Issue 100 and 101: The Online Journal at Work

The online issues show the collective's method applied to the present. Issue 100 (2020), "Cinema & History," carried Cody Lang on the ideology of Chris Marker, Jeremy Maron on the Holocaust films of Canadian survivor Jack Kuper, Florence Jacobowitz's memorial for Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018), and Michael T. Smith on Harry Caul as a peripheral character in Coppola's The Conversation. Issue 101 (2021), "Horror & Plague" — with an editor's note by Scott Forsyth — read the genre through the pandemic: Phil Hobbins-White on It Follows as pandemic allegory, Zac Ntim on Jordan Peele's social horror in Get Out, Trevor Mowchun's "PTSD Diary" of The Exorcist, Christina Elle Burke watching Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day with Georges Bataille, Marcus Prasad on Ari Aster's Hereditary, Mark Lager on Ennio Morricone's 1968 soundtracks, and Richard Lippe remembering the Mexican filmmaker Jaime Humberto Hermosillo (1942–2020).

The site's tables of contents for earlier issues show the same range: an interview on "The Survival of Mise-en-scène" with Bertrand Tavernier conducted by Jacobowitz, Lippe and Robin Wood; George Porcari on class consciousness in Chaplin's City Lights; Stephen Joseph Scott on what Hollywood communicates through Green Book; William Beard on masculinity in the noirs of Otto Preminger. The themes change; the close-reading politics do not.

Lippe's Ending Notes

When the print run closed in 2016, Richard Lippe wrote a valedictory that doubles as the magazine's clearest self-portrait. CineAction began, he explained, as a response to the rejection of film criticism during the heyday of theory's privilege in academic study: the magazine was meant to demonstrate the value of criticism through close reading of a film's style and content, conceived as a political forum that challenged the then-fashionable notion that ideology was monolithic — and therefore that political change was impossible. The other goal was a serious-minded magazine that was not arcane and elitist but accessible to the open-minded reader while retaining its integrity. It would range across Hollywood, art film, documentary and other formats.

Lippe also marked what the collective had lost: Robin Wood's participation, ongoing from the founding until 2009, the year of Wood's death. The magazine's Marxist-feminist identity — the through-line from the 1985 "alternatives" editorial to the online dossiers — was in large part Wood's bequest, carried on by the collective he helped form.

The Submission Desk

The journal remains a working collective, and its submissions page names the working editors: Florence Jacobowitz, Scott Forsyth (on a York University address) and Richard Lippe. Contributors are asked to date films on first mention and to include a short bio — the small disciplines of a journal that still edits like a print magazine even though it now publishes online. Themed issues continue to be posed, dossiers continue to be assembled, and the collective that York University's film department spawned in 1985 is still, four decades on, steering between journalistic reviewing and academic detachment.

Digital Presence

The magazine's website at cineaction.ca hosts its online issues, editor's notes, and archives, continuing the journal's publishing program in digital form since issue 99 (2018). The site preserves the magazine's thematic organization and collective editorial voice. Its history is documented in its Wikipedia entry and in film-studies references on authorship and film criticism.

The back-issue tables of contents — from issue 58's Hollywood high-school movies to issue 90's authorship dossier — make the site a navigable history of politically engaged film criticism since 1985, free to read, collectively edited since the York University founding, and organized entirely by the themes the collective posed. Few journals anywhere offer their complete critical history so openly.