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Nov 9, 2026
The Edges of Cinema
Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture
Summary
If you’re interested in experimental film, there’s a good chance that you’ve read the criticism of Erika Balsom. There’s also a good chance that you’re a fan of her work, since it offers an uncommonly sensitive and insightful account of how contemporary filmmakers are reimagining the world at a moment of crisis and opportunity.
A scholar, writer, and curator, Erika is Reader in Film and Media Studies at King's College London and the author of five books, including TEN SKIES (2021) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017). Her remarkable body of criticism has been published in venues such as Cinema Scope, New Left Review, 4Columns, and Artforum.
A selection of this criticism has just been published by Columbia University Press as The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture (2026). The book is a rich feast, exploring an idiosyncratic selection of films and a wide range of issues in contemporary film cultures: from the stakes of observation to the effects of digital technologies, from the slowness of “slow cinema” to the renaissance of repertory cinema, and much more beside.
In this episode of New Books in Film, Alix Beeston chats with Erika about The Edges of Cinema's case for the provocations and pleasures of experimental film, as well as the aims and ethos of Erika’s wider critical project. Alix and Erika also discuss their shared fascination with questions of feminist history and their investment in practicing—and championing—inventive, daring writing both in and beyond the academy.
Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She's the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford UP, 2018) and the co-editor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023).
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