In a time when we spend so many waking hours looking at screens, it’s important to remember that the images we are surrounded by are not merely reflections of the world, but part of its very substance.

The paradox at the heart of any film writing is the impossibility of capturing images in words… The Journal holds space for this contradiction, with the understanding that the experience of moving images and the context of static words can work together to say something new about the material conditions they both emerged from.

Excerpted from Vince Warne’s Introduction to MFJ 82 “Real Life” (Fall 2025).