Category Archives: Expanded Cinema

>Split Screen Studies

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The above is a FILMANALYTICAL, REQUIEM // 102 and FILM STUDIES FOR FREE video essay by Catherine Grant. It explores the use of split screens in some early sequences in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (Darren Aronofsky, 2000).
    The essay was made according to principles of Fair Use (or Fair Dealing), primarily with scholarly and critical aims, and was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License in November 2010.

Today, Film Studies For Free presents an entry of links to online studies of the cinematic split screen. Rather excitingly (for this blog, at least), the resources include the above video essay on this very topic … by FSFF‘s author. 

The essay is a contribution to the Requiem for a Dream // 102 Project, conceived by its inventor Nick Rombes, Associate Professor of English at the University of Detroit, Mercy, as a form of “collective, distributed film criticism”. Requiem // 102 is modelled loosely on Rombes’ ongoing 10/40/70 project, in which he “reads” three screen captures from a given film taken at the 10, 40, and 70 minute marks.

In this case, Nick has invited 102 contributors from across the film criticism spectrum to look at, or otherwise be inspired by, one frame from each minute of Darren Aronofsky’s 102 minute-long film Requiem for a Dream (2000), a movie that unsettled many audience members when it was first released in cinemas ten years ago.

To learn more about Requiem // 102, check out the 102 Project’s “About” page and/or follow it on Twitter. Chuck Tryon’s great first post on the film is here. For an accompanying written text for the above video essay on the frame capture from 02:09 of Requiem for a Dream, visit FSFF‘s little sister site, Filmanalytical.

Expanded Cinema and Video Art: Tate Video and Essays from REWIND (Cubitt, Atherton, Hatfield)

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Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception. A Tate Video – Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator’s construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on filmmaking, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you more choice links to valuable resources on the topics of ‘expanded cinema‘ and video art. Not only the wonderful Tate Video embedded above but also, courtesy of a great scholarly website — REWIND – Artists’ Film & Video in the 70s and 80s — the following essays:

  • ‘Greyscale Video and the Shift to Colour’ by Prof. Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne, Australia. View a pdf of the Essay in ‘Art Journal’, Fall 2006 edition here. A video essay version of the paper is viewable here.

  • ‘Projection: Vanishing and Becoming’ by Prof. Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne, Australia. In Grau, Oliver, Eds. MediaArtHistories, pages pp. 407-422. MIT Press. View a pdf of the Essay here.

  • ‘The Trouble with Video Art‘ by Kevin Atherton, Head of Media, National College of Art & Design, Dublin. View a pdf of the Essay here.

  • ‘Expanded Cinema – And the “Cinema of Attractions”‘ by Dr. Jackie Hatfield. (Published in Filmwaves, Issue 27/1/2005). View a pdf of the Essay here.

  • ‘The Subject in Expanded Cinema’ by Dr. Jackie Hatfield. (Published in Filmwaves, Issue 24/2/2004). View a pdf of the Essay here.

An addendum: if you live in London, or care about cinema in that city, Film Studies For Free urges you, please, to visit the website of the Picture Palace Campaign for the regeneration of the former art deco cinema, now bingo hall, soon to be (possibly) evangelical church, at 25 Church Road, SE19 (Crystal Palace). It was originally built in 1928 as a cinema and the beautiful interior was designed by the renowned cinema architect George Coles (see also here).

>Expanded Cinema and Video Art: Tate Video and Essays from REWIND (Cubitt, Atherton, Hatfield)

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Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception. A Tate Video – Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator’s construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on filmmaking, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you more choice links to valuable resources on the topics of ‘expanded cinema‘ and video art. Not only the wonderful Tate Video embedded above but also, courtesy of a great scholarly website — REWIND – Artists’ Film & Video in the 70s and 80s — the following essays:

  • ‘Greyscale Video and the Shift to Colour’ by Prof. Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne, Australia. View a pdf of the Essay in ‘Art Journal’, Fall 2006 edition here. A video essay version of the paper is viewable here.

  • ‘Projection: Vanishing and Becoming’ by Prof. Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne, Australia. In Grau, Oliver, Eds. MediaArtHistories, pages pp. 407-422. MIT Press. View a pdf of the Essay here.

  • ‘The Trouble with Video Art‘ by Kevin Atherton, Head of Media, National College of Art & Design, Dublin. View a pdf of the Essay here.

  • ‘Expanded Cinema – And the “Cinema of Attractions”‘ by Dr. Jackie Hatfield. (Published in Filmwaves, Issue 27/1/2005). View a pdf of the Essay here.

  • ‘The Subject in Expanded Cinema’ by Dr. Jackie Hatfield. (Published in Filmwaves, Issue 24/2/2004). View a pdf of the Essay here.

An addendum: if you live in London, or care about cinema in that city, Film Studies For Free urges you, please, to visit the website of the Picture Palace Campaign for the regeneration of the former art deco cinema, now bingo hall, soon to be (possibly) evangelical church, at 25 Church Road, SE19 (Crystal Palace). It was originally built in 1928 as a cinema and the beautiful interior was designed by the renowned cinema architect George Coles (see also here).

Expanded Cinema and Unspoken Cinema: ‘Film practice as research’ links

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I have just placed a new link in Film Studies For Free’s blogroll to the useful Expanded Cinema weblog, an ‘online platform for experimental film, early video, and sound-based, durational work.’ All of the material is being curated by Joao Ribas from available media online, ’emphasizing an overlooked facet of the archival function of new media.’ Ribas has another good blog, commenting on art/film curatorial matters, among others, too: Notes and Queries. On Expanded Cinema, not all of the video embeds or links are permanently stored (one presumes, for technical reasons), but there’s still a lot of good stuff there and it’s well worth exploring.

I also posted a blog link to Unspoken Cinema (by HarryTuttle et al), a great resource for practitioners and scholars of what the blog-blurb calls

Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (C.C.C.): the kind that rejects conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere alone, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage, and the star system.

Phew. The legendary HarryTuttle is also the blog author of SCREENVILLE, which, among other great features, has lists of cinema webcasts and online video. I have added his custom video search page to FSFF‘s list of resources aimed at those engaged in Film or Screen Media ‘Practice as Research’ (or ‘Research by Practice’).

Film Practice as Research (basically, higher-education-based film and video practice that can give a ‘reflexive account of itself [its form, especially] as research’) is a lively, but still ’emerging’ research area, perhaps primarily in the UK. As the meagre sources of funding for artists’ (and non-commercial) film and video in this country have almost completely dried up in recent years, outside the academy, many more filmmakers than before have turned to teaching to (part-)fund their work, not only in practical filmmaking college departments and art schools, but also in Film and Media Studies University departments, too. In this latter context, the academic requirement to be ‘research active’ and ‘excellent’ (and measurably so…) has led to the growth in this discourse of ‘practice as research’. The Wikipedia page on this matter, that I’ve linked to, covers the sometimes controversial issues raised by these new ways of working, around the ‘articulation as research’ of practice-based work, as well as peer-review and dissemination, etc., quite well.

>Expanded Cinema and Unspoken Cinema: ‘Film practice as research’ links

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>I have just placed a new link in Film Studies For Free’s blogroll to the useful Expanded Cinema weblog, an ‘online platform for experimental film, early video, and sound-based, durational work.’ All of the material is being curated by Joao Ribas from available media online, ’emphasizing an overlooked facet of the archival function of new media.’ Ribas has another good blog, commenting on art/film curatorial matters, among others, too: Notes and Queries. On Expanded Cinema, not all of the video embeds or links are permanently stored (one presumes, for technical reasons), but there’s still a lot of good stuff there and it’s well worth exploring.

I also posted a blog link to Unspoken Cinema (by HarryTuttle et al), a great resource for practitioners and scholars of what the blog-blurb calls

Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (C.C.C.): the kind that rejects conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere alone, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage, and the star system.

Phew. The legendary HarryTuttle is also the blog author of SCREENVILLE, which, among other great features, has lists of cinema webcasts and online video. I have added his custom video search page to FSFF‘s list of resources aimed at those engaged in Film or Screen Media ‘Practice as Research’ (or ‘Research by Practice’).

Film Practice as Research (basically, higher-education-based film and video practice that can give a ‘reflexive account of itself [its form, especially] as research’) is a lively, but still ’emerging’ research area, perhaps primarily in the UK. As the meagre sources of funding for artists’ (and non-commercial) film and video in this country have almost completely dried up in recent years, outside the academy, many more filmmakers than before have turned to teaching to (part-)fund their work, not only in practical filmmaking college departments and art schools, but also in Film and Media Studies University departments, too. In this latter context, the academic requirement to be ‘research active’ and ‘excellent’ (and measurably so…) has led to the growth in this discourse of ‘practice as research’. The Wikipedia page on this matter, that I’ve linked to, covers the sometimes controversial issues raised by these new ways of working, around the ‘articulation as research’ of practice-based work, as well as peer-review and dissemination, etc., quite well.