After a year stuck in journals, I've found some real corkers. Let's start at the beginning, with the prize (this year awarded jointly) for my favourite essay titles:

"Crying over the Melodramatic Penis: Melodrama and Male Nudity in Films of the 90s"

"Videographies of Navigating Geobodies"

Spectators are reminded there is a contest running in the foyer, for anyone who thinks they know what the latter title actually referrs to.

Lets not forget their propensity for making words up. This year I was particularly fond of
"Folkloric" and "telegrammatic", but nothing could challenge the hegemony of this year's winner "being-looked-at-ness".

The best essay of the year is definitely "Murder's tongue: identity, death and the city in film noir"

As well as being utterly incomprehensible, it wins extra bonus points for:

• A title following the familiar pattern: "Arty pretention: W, X and Y in Z"
• Starting with an otherwise irrelevant Hamlet quote
• every single line being underlined by an enthusiastic biro fiend

I give you some quotes:

"an initial contention is that different types of commercial films mobilise legible, empirically quantifyable consturctions of physical brutality and death. by this view the loosely held terrain of film noir - in both old and new versions - is haunted by a spectral semiotics or textual ecology of mayhem understood as separate from idioms develiped for horror, gangster, Western or combat narratives, with a proviso for obvious instances of generic overlap and hybridization[...]"

Translation: Film Noir has its own style of showing violence which is different from other films, although sometimes it is the same. Particularly fond of "combat narratives, which I think is what the rest of us call "war movies".

"That is, regardless of the lack of a shared vocabulary for describing modalities of violence, there exists a heuristic horizon of expectation around how this category generates, ramifies and resolves its lethal dramas - thus we believe we know it when we see it. What is it that we see, who does what to whom, where and under what circumstances?"

Translation: the best thing about this sentence is that it apparently seeks to qualify and further explain the previous one...loving the "riddle me riddle me" rhythm of that tautological nightmare at the end.

"Perpetrators may be known at the very outset, or revealed in a following scene, or figure only marginally, or not at all in the ensuing action."

Translation: his coat was red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach and ruby and olive and violet and fawn and lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve and cream and crimson and silver and rose and azure and lemon and russet and grey and purple and white and pink and orange and blue. In other words, colourful.

Alternately: different films are different.

"At risk of oversimplifying a rich spectrum of critical initiatives, the display of violence was cast as an ancillary figure in a textual system whose primary loci of signification were maooed according to formal, narratalogical, or metaphorical coordinates"

Translation: is offered in the next sentence by the author, making one wonder why he didn't just say this in the first place: "thus why characters commit criminal acts, what they think they know about their predicaments and what remains unspoken, superceded analysis of how or where criminal infractions occur". Particularly moved by his worry that he might "oversimplify".

But this was only the winner in a very fierce contest. What of Critical Approaches to World Cinema?

"It is important, however, to note that Anserson employed the term "imagined" and not "imaginary". "imaginary signifies absence, or nothingness, while "imagined" foregrounds a nice balance between the real and not the real."

Also notable because it refutes the term "World Cinema" and "Third Cinema" in the first paragraph, and is thereafter forced to say "Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America" every single time instead. And what of fierce contender "Situating World Cinema as a Theoretical Problem":

"What we will attempt to do below, therefore, is not so much to provide an answer to the question "what is world cinema?" but to trace the processes by which it has been discussed and conceptualised, to examine how these conceptualisations work and where they come from, to account for their embedded contradictions and tensions, and perhaps, most importantly, to underscore the situatedness of each discourse in its specific context, including that of our own"

The worst argument award is still a matter of fierce debate - the panel despute whether our own Reservoir Dogs as Menstruation Metaphor counts. Nevertheless, when that is resolved, it will have to face stiff competition with "Power Rangers as Metaphor for Transnational Film Production".

The final award is for "worst book", an easy victory for "Terry Nation" - a book which spends chapter after chapter drawing academic attention to statements such as "the Doctor and the companion separate and get into trouble", or "Doctor Who has a mystery which is solved at the end". Particularly notable for spending ten pages writing about how cliffhangers work, all the while referring to them as "suspended enigmas". Best quote:

"We believe that the work credited to Nation as creator and/or writer fails to fit some of the traditional criteria of 'quality'. It is largely in familiar generic forms, was made on a comparativelyt low budgets, and is addressed to a mass audience. As Bernadette Casey et al (2002:209)"

We now turn to the VOTER'S CHOICE awards. In the comments, nominate the worst essay titles, quotes, words and books you've waded through!