Film Studies For Free

>‘Daddy’s dead. Noooo!’: Quentin Tarantino and Psychoanalysis Beyond the Paternal principle

filmstudiesforfree — Wed, 11 May 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Image from Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you links to audio recordings from a symposium on Quentin Tarantino and psychoanalysis “beyond the paternal principle”, hosted by The London Graduate School and the London Society for the New Lacanian School. It took place on 4th April, at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London. The symposium engagingly described itself thus:

‘Daddy’s dead. Noooo!’ (Tarantino, from Dusk Till Dawn)

Tarantino’s movies frequently turn on the abjection of a paternal figure (Marcellus Wallace, Jacob Fuller, Bill, Stuntman Mike), who loses his place and authority to become a redundant figure of consumption and expenditure. Tarantino’s movies themselves, in their restless play of reflexive images and references, are always seeking to produce the maximum in cinematic affect irrespective of the aesthetic unities of generic form, symbolic consistency, realism. This symposium explores the suggestion that Tarantino’s movies best symptomatise a tendency in Hollywood generally where cinema is no longer a vehicle of (anti)Oedipal desire, but a febrile, speculative generator of thrills, pleasures and anxieties swarming along an accelerating death drive which is itself death proof. In Tarantino’s film of the same name, for example, the impotence of itinerant ex-stuntman Mike is the condition of a romance between two iconic automobiles, vehicles not of male potency but an altogether Other jouissance.

INTRODUCTION: Véronique Voruz (the London Society of the New Lacanian School)[AUDIO HERE] Right click to save

TARANTINO’s GIRLS: Gérard Wajcman (writer, psychoanalyst, curator and art critic. He teaches at the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University and is a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis) read by Scott Wilson [AUDIO HERE]

POST-PHALLIC LIBIDINAL ECONOMIES: Hager Weslati (London Graduate School, Kingston University) [AUDIO HERE]

SCREEN, DRIVE, ROMANCE: Fred Botting (London Graduate School, Kingston University, co- author of the Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001)) [AUDIO HERE]

PSYCHE, THAT INGLOURIOUS BASTERD: Scott Wilson (London Graduate School, Kingston University, co- author of the Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001)) [AUDIO HERE]

TOUGH LOVE: Marie-Hélène Brousse (practising psychoanalyst in Paris, a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis) [AUDIO HERE]

>The Obscurity of the Obvious: On the Films of Otto Preminger

filmstudiesforfree — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:45:00 +0000

Pass the Salt from Christian Keathley on Vimeo.

Video essay on a scene from Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder. (Also see Keathley’s ‘Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema’, World Picture Journal, 2, 2008)

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

Richard Brody on Preminger’s Hurry Sundown (1967)

Auteurism got film studies into the academy, but it was 1970s “semiotic” theory (with its amalgam of structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism) that secured film studies a position as a discrete discipline. With this critical shift, however, the obvious became obscure: for in effect, the semiotic approach rendered in need of interpretation many films that appeared transparent. But while films by directors like Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli seemed tailor-made for this method—with their implicit interrogation of the social relations of post-war life in America (bourgeois, patriarchal, heterosexual, capitalist)—Preminger’s films aren’t, due to their both narrative and stylistic approach. While Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli mounted their critique of American capitalist society indirectly, through their carefully designed mise-en-scène that communicated visually things that couldn’t then be addressed directly, Preminger took the opposite approach: addressing controversial social issues (sexual affairs, drug abuse, homosexuality) head- on, so that any “symptomatic” interpretation was rendered superfluous. The social issues under interrogation in Preminger’s films were not subtextual—they were the manifest content. Indeed, to point out that there is a subtext of incest in Anatomy of a Murder, Bonjour Tristesse, and Bunny Lake Is Missing is merely to state the obvious. As a result, since the early 1970s, Preminger has been a severely under-examined filmmaker. [Excerpt from Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008]

Film Studies For Free was so inspired by Christian Keathley‘s video essay on Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder, part of an impressive body of scholarship on this director’s films by this US based academic, that it immediately set to work on assembling an accompanying collection of direct links to other high quality and openly accessible studies of this filmmaker’s oeuvre, as well as to one or two other interesting discussions of other directors’ work which mention Preminger’s films.

And below you have it. That is all.

Deborah Allinson, ‘Novelty title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema’, Screening the Past, 20, 2006

David Bordwell, ‘Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism’, The Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985

Michael Buchler, ‘“Laura” and the essential ninth: were they only a dream?’, Em Pauta, Porto Alegre, v. 17, n. 29, julho a dezembro, 2006

Mary Ann Doane, ‘Scale and the Negotiation of “Real” and “Unreal” Space in the Cinema’,NTU Studies in Language and Literature, 1, Number 20 (December 2008), 1-38

Chris Fujiwara, ‘Otto Preminger’, Senses of Cinema, 2002

Noah Isenberg, ‘Script Doktor’, Bookforum, Jan/Feb 2008

Oscar Jubis, ‘From Suspicion to Trust: Biegler and Manion in Anatomy of a Murder’, FilmLeaf, June 2009

Christian Keathley, ‘Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema’, World Picture Journal, 2, 2008

Christian Keathley, ‘A Whirlpool of Things [on critical commentary and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool]‘, In Media Res, May 14 , 2007

Pat McGilligan/Arthur Laurents, ‘Arthur Laurents: Emotional Reality’, Pat McGilligan (ed.), Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

Ronny Loewy, ‘Pure Flight or Exodus: Otto Preminger’s film about Israel’, First published in: Filmgeschichte. Newsletter der Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Nr. 13, Juni 1999

Miguel Marías, ‘The Head and Eyes of Otto Preminger, or The Thinking Gaze’, Undercurrent, Issue 3, 2006

Jakob Isak Nielsen, ‘Camera Movement Revisited’, 16:9, 2, 2009

Jakob Isak Nielsen, ‘The Shape of a Western- Visual Design in Winchester ’73 and The Man from Laramie‘, P.O.V. No. 24, December 2007

Martha P. Nochimson, ‘Betty Grable Finally Dances… (That Lady in Ermine, Otto Preminger, 1948), Senses of Cinema, 5, 2000

John Orr, ‘Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema’, Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006

David Ray Papke, ‘From Flat to Round: Changing Portrayals of the Judge in American Popular Culture’, Journal of the Legal Profession, Vol. 31, 2006-2007

Luca Prono, ‘Whatever Happened to Nelson Algren ?: Otto Preminger’s Adaptation Of The Man with the Golden Arm’, Links and Letters 6, 1999

Dahlia Schweitzer, ‘Who is missing in Bunny Lake?‘, Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010

Valerie Stulman, ‘Femme/s, Film/s, Noir/e: Revisions’, Thinking Gender Papers, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UC Los Angeles, January 2007

Boris Trbic, ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’, Senses of Cinema, 8, 2000

>New Bright Lights Film Journal

filmstudiesforfree — Sun, 08 May 2011 12:46:00 +0000

Image from My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (Wai Ka-Fai with Johnny To, 2002).

Read The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011) By Lesley Chow

Film Studies For Free heard, via David Hudson, of a brand new, and excellent, issue of online Bright Lights Film Journal. Just feast your eyes on the below, directly-linked-to contents.

As an old advertising campaign used to say, “I never knew there was so much in it…” Except that FSFF always did know this about BLFJ, a truly brilliant repository of incredibly lively, scrupulously edited, and highly informative online film writing….

From the Editor

ARTICLES

Tarantino’s Transformations: Inglourious Basterds’ Dizzying Array of Sources ,By JD Markel. In which Tarantino reshapes Shakespeare, World War II movies, Leni Riefenstahl, Spaghetti Westerns, and more, under the deft guidance of that Italian master Ovid

The Tomb of Thingness and Self-Doubt: Against the Cult of Infinity, By Andrew Grossman “One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics. I am speaking of the infinite.” — Jorge Luis Borges

Culture and the Individual Talent? Three Filmmakers on Male Mid-Life Crisis, By John Engle“A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries.” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Our Orgasms, Ourselves: Meditations on Movie Sex, By Marilyn Papayanis “How can it be that the act that socially and historically has defined masculinity and to which, to a significant extent, male self-esteem is ultimately linked is not reliably rewarding to women?” — Rachel P. Maines

The Film Criticism of Alexis De Tocqueville: Or, When Heroes Yearn as Clouds Drift, By Andrew Grossman “These characters, alone or twinned, slumber in the blanket of the Natural Cliché and sit and wait, just as we long for a tinge of disgust, hysteria, or irreverence to dismantle stoic facades inherited from some icy cinematic factory.”

Helping Humanity: We All Get Stressed Out, By D. J. M. Saunders But have you stopped behaving strangely?

Short Takes: Mise-en-Scène: Dorothy’s Pigtails, or Integrating Imperfection into Meaning By Matthew Sewell “George Lucas, engaged in an endless quest for perfect, seamless fantasy, hopes to erase any trace of the tricks necessary to build it. Oz instead understands that the evidence of artifice can itself bear meaning: in this case, that our wildest, most wish-fulfilling fantasies will still reflect our limitations.”

A Propaganda Opportunity Shot Down: The Changing Image of the FBI Agent in G-Men (1935) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), By John Hall “Putting aside whatever doubts the FBI had about its image in these films, the two films represent one of the many fascinating permutations of the gangster film in the studio era, with the heroic FBI agent acting in a manner befitting an upstanding American, yet able to shift gears and punch out a gangster.”

Sirk or Brecht? Or Both?: Determining the Guiding Influence in Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, By Peter Tyson “Is Fassbinder a Sirkian who, despite distancing techniques and irony, achieves audience identification and emotional catharsis? Or is he a hard-nosed Brechtian who distances us clinically from his characters so that we can calmly criticise their shortcomings?”

Notions of Gender in Hindi Cinema: The Passive Indian Woman in the Global Discourse of Consumption, By Prakash Kona “During the so-called ‘repressive’ ages sex was a joy, because it was practiced in secret and it made a mockery of all of the obligations and duties that the repressive power imposed. Instead, in tolerant societies, as the one we live in is declared to be, sex produces neuroses because the freedom granted is false and above all, it is granted from above and not won from below.” — Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006)

EXPLOITATION

Strangers with Candy: The Highway Safety Foundation and The Child Molester (1964), By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas “The issues surrounding The Child Molester have become only more ambiguous: despite its cheesy retro aesthetics, it allows no room for nostalgic reflection at how far attitudes have progressed or how much things have changed.”

MOVIES

Dream Girls: On Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica and Cathering Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty, By Jacob Mikanowski “When you fall in love with someone who is asleep, are you attracted to her spirit, some ineffable essence in her being? Or are you skating on the edge between voyeurism and necrophilia?”

(God)Father and Son: The Enigma of Michael Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather, By Joseph Aisenberg “There’s something curiously remote and cool at the center of it, something slightly out of focus that makes this melodrama rather ambiguous and hard to assemble.”

Slash and Burn: Revisiting William Friedkin’s The Hunted (2003), By Ian Murphy “Putting the pain back into violence is Friedkin’s real achievement in The Hunted, and indeed his unfashionable, irony-free approach helps explain why the film never found its audience in a decade where torture porn induced new depths of numbness in viewers.”

Who Took the Folk Out of Music? Everybody, It Seems, By Norman Ball “How does Tibet’s cultural destruction differ, in essence, from Time-Warner’s choreographed glamorization of bitches and ho’s in inner-city America, or death metal’s hold over disenfranchised Midwestern youth?”

TELEVISION

“You Had Me at “Farrier”! Matt Thompson and Adam Reed Supply Cheap Thrills for the Socially Challenged in Archer, By Alan Vanneman Like a straight, poorly drawn, less fluid Ambiguously Gay Duo

STARS

Norman, Is That You? The Long Wait of Norman Foster, By Jake Hinkson “Sadly, this oversight neglects Foster’s contributions to both film noir and world cinema, and it dismisses a life nearly as fascinating as that of Welles.”

Deborah Kerr: An Actress in Search of an Author, By Penelope Andrew “The camera goes right through the skin. The camera brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies that have never worn off their splendor.” — Peter Viertel, Kerr’s husband

The King of Chutzpah: On the Singular Pleasures of Phil Silvers, By Christopher Sandford “Silvers raised the smart-aleck, rapid-fire monolog to high art.”

DIRECTORS

The Complete Exile: The Films of Carlos Atanes, By Rob Smart “These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”

Between Heaven and Hell: Martin Scorsese’s Middle Ground, By Joanne De Simone “Together with his unobstructed panorama of those mean streets, and his long relationship with religion, Scorsese’s character was shaped. It infused in him just the right amount of guilt to develop stories about the struggle between good and evil and that dangerous place in between — not bad enough for hell, not good enough for heaven.”

Mapping the Mind Between Movies: Intertextuality in the Work of Wong Kar-wai, By Michael Ward “Frustrated by their unrequited love, their inability to capture their objet petit a, Wong’s characters search desperately for appropriate supplements onto which they can displace their yearnings and desires.”

FILM FESTIVALS

The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011), By Lesley Chow, “This wonderfully flexible approach to movie-making explains why Wai and To’s films seem so alive to every implication unlike most current U.S. comedies, where directors carefully steer around obstacles and pretend not to notice flaws in the set-up.”

A Handful of Keepers: The 40th New Directors/New Films Festival (2011), By Megan Ratner “Kudos to the Vegas for showing not only the grimness of hustling, but also the ordinariness. As Clemente dresses, his middle-aged, matronly partner puts on her reading glasses to count the cash.”

Cinemas of Poetry and Violence: The 40th International Film Festival Rotterdam (2010) By Tijana Mamula, Rotterdam’s edge is intact despite increasing hints of commercialism

COLUMNS

Bright Sights: A Blonde in Love, The Lighthouse, The Clowns, Senso, Our Hospitality, William S. Burroughs: The Man Within By Gordon Thomas An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

INTERVIEW

Of Time and Place: An Interview with Writer Jon Raymond on Meek’s Cutoff and HBO’s Mildred Pierce By Matthew Sorrento “Any director who shoots a grindhouse film without exquisite, triumphant, dangerous, and naked women is doing a disservice to the genre and should move into a different field.”

BOOKS

Swedish Sensationfilms, Daniel Ekeroth, reviewed by Erich Kuersten

Lost Horizons Beneath the Hollywood Sign, by David Del Valle, reviewed by C. J. Kutner

Male Bisexuality in Current Cinema: Images of Growth, Rebellion and Survival, by Justin Vicari, reviewed by Robert von Dassanowsky

Back to the Future, by Andrew Shail and Robin Stoate, reviewed by Leah Anderst

>Unstable Platforms? Film/Moving Image Studies Papers from MIT7 Media in Transition

filmstudiesforfree — Sun, 08 May 2011 12:12:00 +0000

Teaser image, courtesy of Warner Brothers, from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 out on July 15 (David Yates, 2011). Read Debora Lui’s paper on Harry Potter: The Exhibition.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you links to film and moving image related papers from the conference proceedings of the seventh annual Media in Transition conference, which will take place next week, May 13-15, 2011, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Here’s the conference’s mission statement:

Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition”? The nearly limitless range of design options and communication choices available now and in the future is both exhilarating and challenging, inciting innovation and creativity but also false starts, incompatible systems, planned obsolescence. How are we coping with the instability of platforms?

FSFF particularly liked ““Make Any Room Your TV Room:” Media Mobility, Digital Delivery, and Family Harmony” by film and media studies scholar and blogger extraordinaire Chuck Tryon, film and television scholar and media studies blogger extraordinaire Michael Z. Newman‘s paper ‘The Television Image and the Image of the Television“, and “Who Told You You Were Special Edition? The Commercialization of the Aura” by Justin Mack.

There are other great papers online connected to the conference theme of unstable platforms and the experience of mediatic transitions that don’t treat moving image topics and you can access those here.

Teaching Smart Cinema: DVD Add-ons and New Audience Pleasures, Pat Brereton

The Digitization of Memory at the National Film Board of Canada,
Morgan Charles

Promise and Problems: Independent Production in Periods of Change, Aymar Jean Christian

How New Media Change Our Experience of Stories, Teun Dubbelman

Making Selves/Making Citizens in the Age of YouTube, Megan Fulwiler and Kim Middleton

Virtual Bliss, Analog Horrors: Reading the Imperfect Digital Image in Film and the Video Game, Robert Furze

Hoarding the Ethereal: How We Have more Things but with Less Clutter, Gayle Gatchalian

Lessons from the Front: Rio’s War against Drug Trafficking, Participatory Culture and New Media Paradigms for Brazilian Soap Operas, Leandro Gejfinbein, Rejane Spitz

Stories with Choices: Artist´s Multimedia Narratives, Raivo Kelomees

Piracy, Circulation, and Cultural Control in Cyber-Age China, Jinying Li

From the Theater to the Gallery: Harry Potter Engagements within the Museum, Debora Lui

Who Told You You Were Special Edition? The Commercialization of the Aura
Justin Mack

New Platforms: More Choice – Less Freedom?: Mediated Narratives of Human History, Klaus Peter Muller

Conserving Digital Art for the Ages, Francis Marchese

The Television Image and the Image of the Television, Michael Newman

A Story about Random Memories and Fragmented History on Screens, Katharina Niemeyer

Remembering the Past in the Dynarchive: The State of Knowledge in Digital Archives, Julia Noordegraaf

Preserving Digital Narratives in an Age of Present-Mindedness: the View from Toronto, Kamilla Pietrzyk

Indiana Jones Fights the Communist Police: Text Adventures as a Transitional Media Form in the 1980’s Czechoslovakia, Jaroslav Svelch

“Make Any Room Your TV Room:” Media Mobility, Digital Delivery, and Family Harmony, Chuck Tryon

>Liquid Atmospherics: On the cinema of Wong Kar-wai

filmstudiesforfree — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:18:00 +0000

ENVOI (2011) from Elaine Castillo on Vimeo. The above video is a ficto-biographical essay-film taking two looped scenes from two Wong Kar-wai films (HAPPY TOGETHER and DAYS OF BEING WILD) as its point of departure, arrival (also: non-departure, non-arrival). On grief, migration, the romantic, hyper-specificity, sentimental time, queer space, Asian celebrity gossip, fantasies involving Maggie Cheung, covers and translations, the writing body, the filmmaking body, readability, speakability.

Almost devoid of irony, Wong’s films, like classic rock and roll, take seriously all the crushes, the posturing, and the stubborn capriciousness of young angst. They rejoice in manic expenditures of energy. They celebrate the momentary heartbreak of glimpsing a stranger who might be interesting to love. The best comparison is surely not with Godard, whose romantic streak has a bitter edge. In Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong may have its Truffaut, the director who in Tirez sur le pianiste and Jules et Jim concentrated on not-quite-grown- up characters brooding on eternally missed chances. In any case, Wong stands out from his peers by abandoning the kinetics of comedies and action movies in favor of more liquid atmospherics. He dissolves crisp emotions into vaporous moods. For all his sophistication, his unembarrassed effort to capture powerful, pleasantly adolescent feelings confirms his commitment to the Hong Kong popular tradition.
David Bordwell, ‘Avant-Pop Cinema Romance on Your Menu: Chungking Express’ in Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Second edition: e-book; Wisconsin: Irvington Way Institute Press Madison, 2011), pp. 178-179

Today, Film Studies For Free massively updates its existing entry on the cinema of Wong Kar-wai.

There are two compelling reasons for this: the first is there are lots more scholarly resources available, or discoverable, now on this filmmaker’s work that are worth listing, including some great items on video.

The second is that this is the first of two posts in celebration of the online publication, as a PDF, of a full colour, second edition of the peerless David Bordwell’s book Planet Hong Kong, an opus well worth its $15 pricetag, in FSFF‘s humble and, usually, frugal opinion.

FSFF doesn’t normally celebrate, or promote, pay-to-own resources. But, apart from the fact that this is a highly interesting development in online Film Studies publishing in its own right, no one has given so generously online, either of his already published work or of his ongoing scholarly work, as David Bordwell.

What is more, Bordwell’s PHK chapter entitled ‘Avant-Pop Cinema’, with its lyrical and beautifully illustrated section on Wong’s work: ‘Romance on Your Menu: Chungking Express’, is worth the download price alone. If you need to save up to purchase Planet Hong Kong first, you can enjoy, in the meantime, several excellent posts at Observations on Film Art on Wong’s work, including ‘Ashes to Ashes (Redux)’ and ‘Years of being obscure’.

Video material:

Written material:

>Issues of KINEMA (Spring and Fall 2010)

filmstudiesforfree — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:11:00 +0000

Image from Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007). Read Alessandro’s Zir’s article on this film for Kinema (Spring 2010)

Film Studies For Free continues with its roundup of recent offerings from online film studies journal by catching up with the last two issues posted at Kinema: a Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media.

Lots of good stuff here, but FSFF particularly enjoyed Alessandro Zir’s essay on Paranoid Park, Antonio Sanna on the connections between the Alien series of films and Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, and Des O’Rawe’s study of Godard’s Film Socialisme.

Spring 2010

‘The Art of Creative Scriptural Extrapolation [on Celil B. De Mille's films]‘ by Anton Karl Kozlovic

‘Reproducing the Fin-de-siècle Gothic with Techno-Gothic Vampires’ by Antonio Sanna

‘Film, Arts and Culture as Community Outreach Tools’ by Victor S. O. Yu

‘Interview with Gary Tooze’ by Jan Uhdeby

‘Going to the Movies in Egypt’ by Mustafa Mahmoud Yousry

‘The Desire for History in Lars von Trier’s Europa and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step of the Stork’ by Angelos Koutsourakis

‘Non-Realism and Ontology in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park’ by Alessandro Zir

Fall 2010

‘The Fraternity of Metaphors: Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme‘ by Des O’Rawe’

‘Interview with Kevin Brownlow on the Making of Winstanley’ by Tony Tracy

‘Targeting Alien Filmmakers in 1930s Hollywood’ by J. Emmett Winn

‘Woody Allen as Impossible Cassandra’ by Alessandro Zir

‘The Language and Genealogy of Early Spy Cinema’ by Lukasz Boron

‘Interview with Singapore Filmmaker Boo Junfeng’ by Yvonne Ng

‘The New Vicissitudes of Auteur Cinema’ by Christina Stojanova

>New Issue of Screening the Past

filmstudiesforfree — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:36:00 +0000

Image from The Party (Blake Edwards, 1968). Read Charles Barr’s article on this film, reprinted in issue 30 of Screening the Past

Film Studies For Free rushes you news, via Adrian Martin, that not only has Screening the Past, that wonderful, A* rated, online journal of screen history, theory and criticism, posted its latest issue, but it has changed URL, and is in the process of upgrading its website.

All the new contents are listed below. FSFF hasn’t read everything yet, but is enjoying STP‘s tributes to Blake Edwards, as well as the Open Access reprint of Chris Berry’s wonderful essay China’s New “Women’s Cinema”.

First Release

Tribute to Blake Edwards

Classics and Re-runs

China’s New “Women’s Cinema”

Reviews

>30 Online Film Studies Books and PhD Theses from OhioLINK

filmstudiesforfree — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:27:00 +0000

Image from When Night is Falling (Patricia Rozema, 1995), a film discussed by Jamie L. Stuart

Film Studies For Free shakes itself out of an uncharacteristic, unseasonal, hot-weather related torpor to bring you one of its regular reports (and lists of links) from a University research repository. Today, it’s the turn of the utterly brilliant repository at the OhioLINK ETD Center, gathering theses and books (in bold below) by film studies scholars at Ohio State University, Bowling Green State University, Ohio University, and Case Western Reserve University.

As usual, these links will be added in due course to FSFF‘s permanent listings of Online Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Theses and Open Access Film E-books List.

Savas Arslan Hollywood alla Turca: A history of popular cinema in Turkey, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

Dyrk Ashton, Using Deleuze: The Cinema Books, Film Studies and Effect, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

Rihab Kassatly Bagnole, Imaging the Almeh : Transformation and Multiculturalization of the Eastern Dancer in Painting, Theatre, and Film, 1850-1950, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

Holly Lynn Baumgartner, Visualizing Levinas: Existence and Existents Through Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Vanilla Sky, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

Rebecca H. Bias, From golden age to silver screen: French Music-Hall Cinema from 1930-1950, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

Rose Mary Bremer, Screening gender and sexuality in contemporary Quebec film adaptation, PhD, Ohio State University, 2004

Marie Katheryn Connelly, The films of Martin Scorsese: A critical study, PhD, Ohio State University, 1991

Carolina Siqueira Conte, Bonds: A Theory Of Appropriation For Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice Realized In Film, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

Stefan Hall, “You’ve Seen the Movie, Now Play the Game”: Recoding the Cinematic in Digital Media and Virtual Culture, PhD, Ohio State University, 2011

Cheryl Lynn Hindrichs, Lyric narrative in late modernism: Virginia Woolf, H.D., Germaine Dulac, and Walter Benjamin, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006 (available from May 19, 2011)

Daniel O. Jones, The Soul That Thinks: Essays on Philosophy, Narrative and Symbol in the Cinema and Thought of Andrei Tarkovsky, PhD, Ohio University, 2007

Se Young Kim, A Sociohistorical Contextual Analysis of the Use of Violence in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy, MA thesis, Ohio State University, 2010

Joanna Klein, Making Pictures: The Pinter Screenplays (1985)

Yo-Hsin Cindy Liu, The Examination of the Appearance and Use of French Horn in Film Scores from 1977 to 2004, DMA Thesis, Ohio State University, 2005

Cileine I. de Lourenco, Negotiating Africanness in national identity: studies in Brazilian and Cuban cinema, PhD, Ohio State University, 1998

Judith Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question (1989)

Denis Mueller, John Dewey and Documentary Narrative, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2007

James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds), Understanding Narrative (1994)

Rob Prince, Say Hello to My Little Friend: De Palma’s Scarface, Cinema Spectatorship, and the Hip Hop Gangsta as Urban Superhero, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2009

Barbara L. Romanczuk, Screening Zola’s women, PhD, Ohio State University, 2002

John Edward Ryan, Ordinary people: The cinema of John Sayles, PhD, Case Western Reserve University, 1994

Thibaut Schilt, Marginal pleasure and auteurist cinema: the sexual politics of Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Breillat and François Ozon, Ohio State University, 2005

Lisa K. Stein, The Travel Narrative as Spin: Mitigating Charlie Chaplin’s Public Persona in My Trip Abroad and “A Comedian sees the World”, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

Jamie L. Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2006

Joan Marie Titus, Modernism, socialist realism, and identity in the early film music of Dmitry Shostakovich, 1929-1932, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

Maruta Zane Vitols, From the Personal to the Public: Juris Podnieks and Latvian Documentary Cinema, PhD, Ohio State University, 2008

Stacey A. Weber-Fève, There’s no place like home: homemaking, making home, and femininity in contemporary women’s filmmaking and the literature of the MÉTROPOL and the MAGHREB, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

Marilyn Yaquinto, Policing the World: American Mythologies and Hollywood’s Rogue Cop Character, PhD, Ohio State University, 2006

Yi-hui Huang, An Interpretivist Study of Knowledge Provided by Seamless Digital-Synthesized Photographs, PhD, Ohio State University, 2008

Rui Zhang, Feng Xiaogang and Chinese cinema after 1989, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005

>Great new Essays on Film and Video from Mediascape

filmstudiesforfree — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 10:10:00 +0000

The above video is a very short, but effective, introduction to issues affecting small nations as they produce cinema, using the example of the Nordic countries, by film scholar Mette Hjort. It is also a fascinating digital promotional tool for a University of Washington Press book series co-edited by her. See Hjort’s excellent essay on ‘small nation cinema studies’ in the new issue of Mediascape. And also see Tom Zaniello‘s excellent article there on emerging, new-media forms of documentary including the digital advert.

Film Studies For Free was really delighted to see that there’s a new issue out of online journal Mediascape. The Winter 2011 issue explores

the complex notions of the local and global as they intersect with media: industries and studies; cultures of production, distribution, exhibition and reception; as well as the text itself. Some of the questions this issue engages with include: In what ways does the global marketplace facilitate local products and productions? How do actors negotiate the politics of globalization in how they represent themselves in either the digitally enhanced or real worlds? How can digital media balance both the autonomy of local communities and the ongoing impact of corporate globalization? What role do academic scholars and students play in the globalization of media studies? [read more of this introduction here].

As with earlier issues of this high quality and strikingly original journal, there are a good number of items in audiovisual formats (including video essays, video exemplars, etc). Alongside Mette Hjort’s and Tom Zaniello’s articles, FSFF particularly appreciated Brian Hu‘s excellent video essay on the use of popular music in Wong Kar-wai’s films: truly wonderful, analytical viewing and listening! But there are many others pieces of great interest and these are all directly linked to below.

Thanks for a really great issue, Mediascape.

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>Audiovisualcy: Videographic Film Studies

filmstudiesforfree — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:17:00 +0000

Logo for Audiovisualcy at Vimeo

At the weekend, Film Studies For Free‘s author dreamt of a beautiful online archive, gathering together works in the burgeoning scholarly and critical genre of video essays about films and moving image studies.

A little feverish curatorial and neologistical work later, the marvellous dream became a reality. Audiovisualcy is that reality.

Audiovisualcy is a group page at Vimeo which gathers together in one handy and easy to find place, the numerous video essays about films, film studies and film theory already posted at that video hosting site by individual users. Twenty-eight videos [more than seventy, as of April 12], on all manner of films, are available for your perusal so far. More will be added as they are discovered or created.

If you join the group, you will automatically receive updates as new videos are posted, but you can also follow @AUDIOVISUALCY and get those at Twitter, too. If you know of any other relevant video essays at Vimeo or ones hosted on other sites, you can let the group know about them by emailing us here, and, if appropriate, these will be added and publicised.

If you are curious about the possibilities for Film Studies or for film criticism offered by this format, do please check out the links to the work of some of more prolific, and (beginning with Matt Zoller Seitz) talented, essayists, below.

Catherine Grant:

Matt Zoller Seitz:

Kevin B. Lee:

Steven Santos:

thefinecut.blogspot.com/

Jim Emerson:

blogs.suntimes.com/ scanners/ 2007/

Kartina Richardson:

mirrorfilm.org/

Jason Bellamy:

Ben Sampson:

Paul Malcolm:

archive.org/ details/ NotesTowardsAProjectOnKane

Eric Faden:

facstaff.bucknell.edu/ efaden/

Also see the following online journals which have regularly published video essays:

‘The Art of Creative Scriptural Extrapolation [on Celil B. De Mille's films]‘ by Anton Karl Kozlovic
‘Reproducing the Fin-de-siècle Gothic with Techno-Gothic Vampires’ by Antonio Sanna
‘Film, Arts and Culture as Community Outreach Tools’ by Victor S. O. Yu
‘Interview with Gary Tooze’ by Jan Uhdeby
‘Going to the Movies in Egypt’ by Mustafa Mahmoud Yousry
‘The Desire for History in Lars von Trier’s Europa and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step of the Stork’ by Angelos Koutsourakis
‘Non-Realism and Ontology in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park’ by Alessandro Zir

‘The Fraternity of Metaphors: Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme‘ by Des O’Rawe’
‘Interview with Kevin Brownlow on the Making of Winstanley’ by Tony Tracy
‘Targeting Alien Filmmakers in 1930s Hollywood’ by J. Emmett Winn
‘Woody Allen as Impossible Cassandra’ by Alessandro Zir
‘The Language and Genealogy of Early Spy Cinema’ by Lukasz Boron
‘Interview with Singapore Filmmaker Boo Junfeng’ by Yvonne Ng
‘The New Vicissitudes of Auteur Cinema’ by Christina Stojanova