Early January of last year, four guys and a girl met in the East Village to celebrate the 25th birthday of one Erik Syngle. The chosen venue was a trendy tapas joint, which on that frozen Saturday evening was bursting at the seams with the usual assortment of black-clad denizens wise enough to arrive early or pay their way to a table. Faced with a long, prostrating wait in a chilly antechamber, we decided to sacrifice potential privilege and adjourn to the more welcoming environs of the Dallas BBQ two blocks away. In that sterile, white-tiled room, over “Texas-sized” margaritas dispensed from something that looked like a washing machine, aside plates piled high with cornbread, chicken, and ribs, reverse shot was born.

75 years ago, young Americans might have dreamt of running off to Hollywood to make it as a star “in the pictures”; 40 years ago a generation was growing up fantasizing about being movie directors, but it turned out that these children of the Nineties dreamed of starting their own critical film journal. We began, like many a great undertaking before, by trying to tackle the most imperative, monumental question first, the one choice that would float or capsize our enterprise before it was even launched: What should we call ourselves? The entire course of that fateful meal, was marked by a series of increasingly outlandish title suggestions—Limelight, Grand Illusion, and others too embarrassing to repeat were bandied about amidst much laughter and fervent argumentation. The aforementioned girl, an architect and designer by trade, sat quietly through the mayhem, smiling at the sheer spectacle of us all. At a certain point, probably bored by someone’s continued insistence on the merits of Cine-fuck, she asked “Well, what about reverse shot?” Kate Larsen, our print designer, deserves everlasting credit for plucking that spectral inevitability from the air and snapping us to our senses.

Rather than starting off last year with a plan, mission statement, or set of issues, we decided to put our energies and shared love of cinema into making reverse shot and see what would happen, rather than spending too much time worrying about what it should be (which explains the lack of editorial on this exact issue in our debut one year ago). After a year of doing this, we’re only just starting to see how right Kate’s choice was—it encapsulated everything we wanted to do before we were even able to articulate it. As our ensemble of writers filled out and expanded, our print and online readership grew, and word generally spread, our modest little magazine started to gain a sense of itself and its mission. Too often modern film writing, or art criticism of any kind, focuses solely on cute wordplay, the odd turn-of-phrase, obscure hyper-literate references that irritate more than illuminate, and an unspoken one-upmanship between irony-drenched “journalists” that tries to elevate the writing, yet too often denigrates the idea of criticism itself. Criticism should come not with a frosted dirty-olive martini glass, but with its heart on its sleeve, and a passion for its subject. We love good writing, but we love good films even more.

Black-and-white, good vs. bad, right vs. wrong criticism just can no longer possibly help to buttress a medium that has become so wound up in an a triangular capitalistic stranglehold that now defines the art form. Production, distribution, reception are all now leaps of faith with potentially dire consequences for those involved at every point. Disparate perspectives—from those in critical, professional, and artistic circles—must coalesce in order for something valid to emerge. Perhaps this is our “reverse” shot: new-school academics, up-and-coming filmmakers, and aesthetically-attuned specialty distributors understanding one another, reconciling the opposing strands of contemporary cinema. A utopian filmic community? No, but neither is it the incestuous, amoral “everyone’s in bed with everyone else!” downfall that a certain caterwauling New York critic bemoans virtually every week. It’s naive to think of these sectors as being completely separate from one another, and impossible to see the outcome of such a position as leading to anything greater than cranky hermeticism.

Movies must live and breathe; those initially ignored, now languishing on Blockbuster shelves across the country and sitting in Netflix queues from New York to Kansas City, may be at this moment finding their relevancy. Recent Reverse Shot symposium articles on films such as Let There Be Light, 1941, Testament, and Pennies from Heaven attest to that fact. The debate over “is film an art?” may have been won on the battlegrounds of theory a long time ago, but it never ceases to be fought in the trenches of spectatorship and criticism. We demand that film be discussed as an art at every level. We wish for those discussions to continue on, long past the point a film ends its commercial run. We hope you keep watching and we hope you keep reading.