Issue 10: TEN is here 🔟
Plus: exclusive newsletter features on desktop film screenshots and 10 years after Left Behind (2014), and our latest call for submissions!
Issue 10: TEN + Launch Party
10/10 would read again 😘 Our 10th issue is now live!
We went literal with our theme and published 10 pieces inspired by the number 🔟 Featuring iconic neon signs in cinema (element #10!), analyzing the first 10 minutes of 10 Gwyneth Paltrow movies, 10 formative films watched for an undergrad film degree, our devoted columnists trying 10 reality TV-inspired drinks, and more… And scroll down for two exclusive newsletter pieces inspired by the number 10.
Cover illustration by the amazing Aidan Jeans, who created a panel for every past issue of In The Mood—from our non-themed first issues, to our Sex & Love issue, our Twins issue, and beyond… xoxo to our readers, contributors, and team for being part of our journey 💋
Check out the full issue:
We’re also hosting a launch party in Toronto tomorrow, Thursday, July 25th! Join us for an evening of readings, games, and cake:
Feature: 10 Frames Saved to My Desktop
by Jake Pitre
We are in the age of the screenshot. Inherently ephemeral, we peruse the digital landscape and take these snapshots of our experience, whether for a later intended use, or simply because we felt compelled. I like this—I want to keep it. The screenshot is at once a way to remember, even as they risk being lost forever to desktop clutter.
Digital clutter is not necessarily trash. For years, I have taken screenshots of the movies I watch on my laptop. You probably do, too, if you’re reading this. Now, most streaming platforms don’t allow subscribers to take them without a technical workaround (if you try, you’ll just see an empty, black image). This doesn’t stop me. I have a collection of hundreds, taking up space on my hard drive. But I won't part with them. Among them are some of the most unforgettable moments in film, or at least in my own film-watching history, sometimes obvious and sometimes not, and occasionally I like to click randomly through them and relive what made me decide to capture it in that moment.
I have gone through them all—well over 300, by my estimate—and chosen 10 standouts to share with you, what I may have been thinking when I took it, and why it continues to resonate.
Snapped at 1:43 AM on November 20, 2021: The Garment Jungle (Vincent Sherman, 1957)
Stirring in its simplicity, the pair (Lee J. Cobb and Gia Scala) not quite perfectly symmetrical but reflecting how both skewed but alike these two characters are in this moment, at odds in a labour dispute in this intense, morally righteous pro-union noir. I think of it often.
Snapped at 1:51 AM on February 7, 2021: The Empty Man (David Prior, 2020)
There are many stunning, scary, and singular images in The Empty Man, a bonafide modern cult object, but I personally love this unassuming shot, awash in a sauna-turquoise steam, moments before the “Empty Man” horrifically strikes, which shows how David Prior has a command over his visual language and style beyond the genre-specific and into the purely cinematic.
Snapped at 11:00 PM on February 3, 2022: Roadhouse (Rowdy Herrington, 1989)
Cinematic pleasure is a fickle thing, but sometimes it’s as straightforward as being shown something that is somehow visually familiar but also seen from a different perspective, or shifted to a degree that instills an ineffable feeling inside. And so, amid the machismo of Roadhouse, a different canvas can emerge, playing with geometry, desire, and movement, caught in the instant. I was taken a bit off guard, and so—snap.
Snapped at 1:55 AM on June 14, 2020: 5 Against the House (Phil Karlson, 1955)
You could say a shot like this sums up the Golden Age of Hollywood. A man, a woman, sex, business. A composition that brings all this together so simply and evocatively, frames within (leggy) frames, what else is there to say?
Snapped at 11:06 PM on April 9, 2021: Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (Shunya Itō, 1972)
The Female Prisoner Scorpion movies are full of memorable images, but this one is an obvious standout from the series’ second film, Jailhouse 41. Scorpion, played by Meiko Kaji, is hog-tied in prison, on the cold, hard concrete floor, and the warden and his guards enter, looming above her. The camera, looking up at them, is simultaneously being looked at by Scorpion, somehow an anticipation of the cruelty she will be subjected to, but also a reminder that she will certainly get her revenge. The look says it all, but the camera goes beyond.
Snapped at 1:37 AM on June 22, 2023: Father of the Bride (Vincente Minnelli, 1950)
Sometimes, all it takes to catch my eye is to see a beautiful demonstration of good blocking. Six characters are stuffed around the small dining room, and the table off-center, each one arranged just so, and the eye is able to wander freely from one to the next to take in the scene. It’s this kind of thing, from a rather boilerplate Minnelli dramedy, that makes me yearn for the time when filmmakers did this kind of thing all the time, as a matter of basic craft.
Snapped at 12:10 AM on July 10, 2022: The Story of Woo Viet (Ann Hui, 1981)
Who doesn’t adore a good crossfade? These can be clever juxtapositions, or also, like this one, ways of essentially underlining a feeling, showing us two perspectives of the same moment, hopeless love in a hopeless place, complicating it (does she foresee tragedy?) but also emphasizing its emotional heft.
Snapped at 2:29 PM on March 14, 2022: Crime Wave (André De Toth, 1953)
Hands.
Snapped at 10:01 PM on October 10, 2023: Angel Dust (Gakuryū Ishii, 1994)
A great thing about the screenshot, well beyond previous generations’ ability to pause and rewind, is being able to capture something that exists for less than a millisecond within the frame. This is one of my favourite examples, from a scene that lasts several seconds, and you take in what you’re looking at, going around and around, but only at this very instant do you get a good look at it. Unsettling.
Snapped at 1:48 AM on January 4, 2021: Bloodsport (Newt Arnold, 1988)
The beauty of the impossible body against the backdrop of the immensity of landscape. Bliss.
Jake Pitre is a PhD candidate in Film & Moving Image Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
Film Diary: 10 Years After Left Behind (Vic Armstrong, 2014)
by Rasiqra Revulva
The God my mother talked about would never do something like this.
When Elisa Who-I-Still-Loved zealously pressed her dog-eared trade paperback of Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind into my breastbone, she apologized in advance for the “barfworthy” early scene I’d best describe as an Evangelical indirect-kiss-slash-meet-cute by way of a Tim Hortons chocolate dip.
Skimming the pages while we waited for her bus, I drifted through memories of meals we had shared—though, had we shared them? Could I really gauge what it was we were sharing, unknowable as she was becoming to me?
I thought of playing Truth or Dare at our first sleepover three years ago when Elisa warned us all she was ready to deploy the GROSSEST DARE EVER, which turned out to be reaching into the mostly-empty pizza box and chowing down on a random discarded crust. I thought of her teaching me to make quesadillas and chocobananos after school for her three younger siblings, her voice shooting higher than her pencilled brows as they exaggeratedly mimed dipping their licked fingers in the saucepan.
Beautiful Elisa, both butterfly and net, perpetually outmaneuvering the web of family. How she laughed at my fear of our mothers, whose eyes I rarely met beyond a sideways glare (knowing, as I did, the demon that they saw in me).
Five years later, on the patio of the Upper James East Side Mario’s, I saw her for the last time. So much was familiar: her friscalating curls; her flautist wrists; the fellow she flushed and fidgeted across from, whose name I can’t remember, and whose secrets I still keep.
We plowed through six baskets of unlimited breadsticks between our two tables, and half as many endless Caesar salads. After all, who was counting?
Jesus?
Rasiqra Revulva is a Hybrid/Experimental editor at The Ex-Puritan Literary Magazine.
Submissions OPEN for Issue 11: PERIOD PIECE
We’re now accepting submissions for Issue 11: PERIOD PIECE until August 31st. Check out our submission guidelines here:
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