Sequence (magazine)

Sequence (magazine)
Title	Sequence

Sequence (magazine) was a periodical that published criticism, reviews, and scholarly articles linking film, literature, and the visual arts. Founded in the mid‑20th century, it became a forum where contributors addressed cinema, theater, and cultural events through informed commentary and archival research. The magazine engaged with practitioners, institutions, festivals, and debates across North America and Europe, establishing connections with film societies, universities, and cultural journals.

History

Sequence emerged during a postwar expansion of film criticism that included networks such as the British Film Institute, Cahiers du Cinéma, Film Comment, and the Cinémathèque Française. Its founding editors drew on antecedents like Sight & Sound and The New Yorker review culture while responding to movements associated with the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, and the German Expressionist revival. Early issues featured responses to retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, programming at the Berlin International Film Festival, and scholarly debates sparked by symposia at institutions such as Harvard University and Sorbonne University.

Over successive decades Sequence covered major events including festival premieres at Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival, scholarship arising from conferences at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and restorations undertaken by the British Film Institute National Archive. Editors navigated shifts in publishing economics paralleling changes experienced by The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books, and the magazine engaged with distribution debates involving the Motion Picture Association of America and public television initiatives like BBC Two and PBS.

Editorial Profile and Contributors

The editorial profile combined academic rigor with magazine-style criticism, aligning with journals such as Screen and October (journal). Contributors included film historians, critics, and practitioners who were also affiliated with universities like University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, and University of Toronto. Notable writers who appeared alongside less familiar voices included scholars whose work intersected with figures such as André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Andrew Sarris, and Cahiers du Cinéma alumni. The masthead often listed guest editors tied to retrospectives at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and curators from the Tate Modern and Guggenheim Museum.

Regular contributors combined archival scholarship on personalities such as Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Satyajit Ray, Fritz Lang, Yasujiro Ozu, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Billy Wilder, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson, Kenji Mizoguchi, Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodóvar, Hayao Miyazaki, David Lynch, John Cassavetes, Pier Paolo Pasolini, D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Luchino Visconti, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Altman, Paul Mazursky, Jacques Tati, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Nicholas Ray, John Ford, Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp and others when discussing cross‑disciplinary influences.

Content and Features

Sequence published essays, critical reviews, interviews, and archival rediscoveries across cinema and allied arts, resembling content in The Criterion Collection liner essays and comparative pieces published in Film Quarterly. Feature sections frequently focused on single‑author retrospectives, technical restoration projects, and theory‑practice dialogues that referenced texts by Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Interviews bridged practitioners such as Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, and contemporary directors appearing at the Telluride Film Festival or Toronto International Film Festival.

Regular columns treated topics like archival restoration (paralleling work at the Library of Congress and National Film Board of Canada), exhibition design at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and Centre Pompidou, and soundtrack studies referencing composers including Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, and Bernard Herrmann. The magazine also ran curated filmographies and bibliographies that cited publishers like Faber and Faber, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press.

Distribution and Circulation

Sequence circulated among libraries, university departments, film societies, and independent bookstores, distributed in networks similar to JSTOR holdings and periodical exchanges used by Modern Language Association archives. Its subscriptions connected to academic programs at Columbia University, New York University, and University of Chicago, and it was available at festival booths for the Cannes Film Festival and Berlinale. Print runs fluctuated with funding models analogous to those of The New York Review of Books and cultural magazines supported by arts councils like the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Council England.

International distribution reached markets associated with publishing partners in London, Paris, Toronto, and Tokyo, and copies were held in special collections at the British Library, the Library of Congress, and major university libraries.

Reception and Impact

Critical reception placed Sequence among influential mid‑century and late‑century periodicals that shaped film criticism alongside Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight & Sound, and Film Comment. Academics cited Sequence essays in work addressing auteurs such as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, and Akira Kurosawa, and practitioners referenced its interviews in retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and National Gallery of Art. The magazine’s archival articles contributed to restoration campaigns by entities like the British Film Institute and the Cinematheque Francaise, and its critical positions influenced curricula at institutions including UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Digitization and Archives

Back issues of Sequence have been the focus of digitization efforts comparable to those undertaken by Project MUSE and university press archives. Collections are retained in microfilm and digital formats at repositories such as the British Library, the Library of Congress, and university special collections at Yale University and University of California, Los Angeles. Select essays and interviews have been cited in online retrospectives hosted by the Criterion Collection and reproduced in exhibition catalogues for museums including the Guggenheim Museum and Tate Modern.

Category:Film magazines